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Spontaneous Human Combustion:
The case of Robert Francis Bailey
Early in the morning of 13 September 1967, some people walking to work in Lambeth, South London, noticed a bright light inside a derelict house at 49 Auckland Street.
At 5:19 AM, one of them telephoned the emergency services. At 5:24, the Lambeth Fire Brigade arrived with Brigade Commander John Stacey.
The crew entered the building and discovered the bright light was the burning body of a local alcoholic, Robert Bailey, who had sought shelter in the abandoned house overnight. Strangely, though, neither the fabric of the house itself, nor its internal fittings was damaged. The only thing on fire was Bailey himself.
"When we entered the building," said Stacey, "he was lying on the bottom of the stairs half-turned onto his left side and his knees were drawn up as though he was trying to bend the pain from his stomach."
Stacey said, 'There was about a four inch slit in his stomach and the flame was emanating from that four-inch slit like a blow-torch. It was a blue flame.'
Thinking the man might possibly still be alive, Stacey and his men emptied several fire extinguishers over the body, putting out the flame but with difficulty.
"The flame was actually coming from the body itself," said Stacey, "from inside the body. He was burning literally from the inside out. And it was definitely under pressure. And it was impinging on the timber flooring below the body, so much so that the heat from the flame was charred into the woodwork."
One especially bizarre feature of the case was that Bailey, while still alive and apparently convulsed in agony, had bitten deeply into the solid mahogany newel post of the stairs. His body remained with its teeth locked into the wood and had to be prised open by the firemen.
Bailey's clothing was undamaged except in the area of his abdomen. The area around him was largely undamaged except for the wooden planking immediately under his abdomen where a hole had been burnt. Combustible material only inches away was unburnt.
An inquest sat under coroner Dr Gavin Thurston, who initially wished to list the death as "asphyxia due to inhalation of fire fumes". However a second hearing found that Bailey's death was due to "unknown causes".
Subsequent investigation by fire and police disclosed no source of ignition. The mains supply of gas and electricity had been cut off in the house and no matches were found.
Even if the unfortunate Bailey had fallen asleep and dropped a cigarette on himself, the kind of burning seen at first hand and extinguished by the fireman on the scene cannot be accounted for by the 'wick effect'. It was a rapid, acute burning episode, highly localised in the victim's abdomen, producing a flame 'like a blow torch' that an experienced professional fire fighter found difficult to extinguish immediately.
Importantly, too, the firemen were on the scene within 5 minutes of being called, and the body they found had no fire damage apart from the small area in the abdomen, showing that it had only recently begun to burn. The flame was a "bright" blue flame -- bright enough to attract the attention of passers-by in the street. This, too, is not characteristic of a 'wick-effect' fire.
Source: Fire Brigade Commander John Stacey, interviewed by Larry Arnold and quoted in Ablaze! P 202.
Something to think about.
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