What Happened To Mary Reeser- Spontaneous Human Combustion?

Truth sometimes appear stranger than fiction. The story of Mary Reeser’s death still remains very difficult to understand.

Mary who lived in in St. Petersburg, Florida, was found by her neighbor in the morning of July 2nd, 1951. She was found not as a human but as a pile of ash. Her body had been cremated, but strikingly everything around her remained almost untouched by the “fire” that was supposed to have done the damage. Only her left foot and backbone were the identifiable parts of her.

The FBI stated she was set on fire by the cigarette she was holding before she fell asleep, but fire of such intensity should have burnt the whole house and not only Mary.

Some folks came up with the theory of spontaneous human combustion, a phenomenon where the human body explodes into flames without any external source of ignition, this has remained inconclusive.

It has been 71 years, yet what happened to Reeser has not been determined.

What Happened To Mary Reeser- Spontaneous Human Combustion?

Mary Hardy Reeser (March 8, 1884 – July 2, 1951) of St. Petersburg, Florida, was a woman whose fiery death was surrounded by mystery, and even controversially reported at the time to be a case of spontaneous human combustion (SHC). She was often referred to as the "cinder lady" in newspaper accounts of the day.

At roughly 8 a.m. on July 2, 1951, Reeser's landlady, Pansy Carpenter, arrived at Reeser's apartment at 1200 Cherry St. NE, St. Petersburg, Florida, with a telegram. Trying the door, she found the metal doorknob to be uncomfortably warm to the touch and called the police. Reeser's remains, which were largely ashes, were found among the remnants of a chair in which she had been sitting

All that remained of Reeser, who contemporaneously became known as the "cinder lady", were part of her left foot (that was wearing a slipper), her backbone, and her skull.  Plastic household objects at a distance from the seat of the fire were softened and had lost their shapes. Reeser's skull had survived and was found among the ashes, but shrunken "to the size of a teacup", a description disputed by a fire researcher who was in Bradenton for a conference at the time and managed to view the scene.

On July 7, 1951, St. Petersburg police chief J. R. Reichert sent a box of evidence from the scene to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He included glass fragments found in the ashes, six "small objects thought to be teeth", a section of the carpet, and the surviving shoe. Reichert included a note saying: "We request any information or theories that could explain how a human body could be so destroyed and the fire confined to such a small area and so little damage done to the structure of the building and the furniture in the room not even scorched or damaged by smoke

The FBI eventually declared that Reeser had been incinerated by the wick effect. As she was a known user of sleeping pills, they hypothesized that she had fallen unconscious while smoking and set fire to her nightclothes. "Once the body starts to burn," the FBI wrote in its report, "there is enough fat and other inflammable substances to permit varying amounts of destruction to take place. Sometimes this destruction by burning will proceed to a degree which results in almost complete combustion of the body."

When interviewed by a local paper, Reeser's daughter-in-law said: "the cigarette dropped to her lap. Her fat was the fuel that kept her burning. The floor was cement, and the chair was by itself. There was nothing around her to burn". Continue reading