During the winter of 1965, my folks decided to spend the Christmas season in sunny Florida. Of course this was exciting since I gained special permission to vacate my classes at Hamilton Catholic in Ohio early so that I could enjoy this special time with friends and family.

After spending nearly four and a half days on the road traveling through Kentucky, Tennesse and Georgia, we finally made it to the Sunshine State. Along the way, we encountered acre upon acre of orange groves glistening like orange jewels in the Florida sunlight. We also passed many a garish billboard proclaiming the exotic sights and sounds to be discovered in this tropical paradise.

As we had just finished visiting a friend of the family named Terry Farmer in Bradenton, our old Mercury began its trek across the Sunshine Skyway in route to neighboring St. Petersburg. To help pass the time, I had been reading a recently purchased book by Frank Edwards titled "Stranger Than Science". An anthology of bizarre yet true stories, the book fascinated me with its dramatic yet factual style of writing that Mr. Edwards was famous for. Actually Mr. Edwards had once been a staple of the Mutual Radio Network holding his own as a professional broadcaster.

One of the stories that captured my attention was one titled "Incredible Cremations" about the phenomena now known as spontaneous human combustion. In it, the author wrote about the strange death of Mary Reeser, a grand-motherly woman in her late sixties who died under mysterious circumstances on the evening of July 1, 1951.

Her ashen remains were discovered by a Mrs. P.M. Carpenter who lived in the same building as the victim at 1200 Cherry Street, Northeast, in St. Petersburg, Florida. When she went for her usual routine of having coffee with Mrs. Reeser on the following morning, she received no reply when she knocked on the door. Thinking it strange since her friend was known to be a light sleeper, she grasped the doorknob and found it to be scalding hot to the touch. Flagging down some nearby house painters, the door was broken open and to their horror the ashen remains of Mrs. Reeser were found in a heap amidst the coils of her armchair. While her skull had been shrunk to the size of a baseball by the intense heat, nothing else in the apartment was scorched. This has long been considered to be one of the most unexplained deaths in American history due to the fact that no explanation was ever found for the cause of such a conflagration.

Immersed in the story, I noted with excitement that the incident had occurred in the very same city that we were now entering: St. Petersburg. Shouting at my dad from the back seat, I queried "Dad! Dad! Did you know that a lady was burned up mysteriously in an apartment at 1200 Cherry Street in St. Petersburg, Florida back in 1951?" My father gazed sternly into the rear view mirror and replied, "So what? Lots of fires happen all the time." I went on to explain that this had not been an ordinary fire but something perhaps "unearthly" had caused Mrs. Reeser to die.

Nonetheless I wouldn't give up. "Dad, do you think we could go see this place? After all, we're almost in the city now?" Again, my father who was not given to flights of fancy turned sharply towards me, obviously not amused while my sister and brother were sound asleep next to me. "Do you know how big St. Petersburg is? It's a very large city with lots of buildings and thousands of people. If you think we're going to go find something so ridiculous as a mysterious cremation that happened fourteen years ago, you're all wet!"

Needless to say, my zealous attempts to stimulate my pop into going on a foray into the unknown were swiftly dispelled by his mood at the moment. After all, my parents were anxious to locate some old family friends named Stehlie who had recenlty moved to St. Pete's from another unnamed town. As we drove past row after row of palm fronds dotting the clean-swept residential streets, I noticed that suddenly we were coincidentally in the area of Northeast St. Petersburg . I riffled through the pages of my book once more looking up the address of the site where the cremation had taken place: 1200 Cherry Street.   Next Page