Fire was one of man's first friends. He learned to use it at the entrance to his caves to defend himself from his enemies. Later he tamed fire and forced it to help him do is wok. But from time to time it still serves notice that man has not fully mastered it--that fire has secrets still withheld from him.

Sometimes these secrets are exhibited in the form of ghastly pranks that make headlines before they are filed away, unexplained.

On the morning of Monday, July 2, 1951, Mrs. P.M. Carpenter of 1200 Cherry Street, Northeast, in St. Petersburg, Florida, went to the door of the room occupied by Mrs. Mary H. Reeser, 67, whom she had last seen the night before. As the landlady approached Mrs. Reeser's door it was a few minutes past eight--time for their morning coffee--and she also wanted to deliver a telegram which the Western Union boy ad been uable to deliver because Mrs. Reeser did not answer his knock.

That was odd, Mrs. Carpenter thought, for Mrs. Reeser was a light sleeper. Was something wrong?

Definitely, yes!

Mrs. Carpenter took hold of the doorknob to Mrs. Reeser's room and jerked her hand away with a cry of pain. The brass dorknob was so hot it had burned her hand!…Frightened, she ran outside and called for help. Some house painters working nearby dropped their work and hurried to her. Together they forced the door to Mrs. Reeser's room, and walked into a gruesome mystery that has never been solved.

Although the windows were open, the apartment was unbearably hot. Near the front window were the charred remains of a big armchair, and the equally charred remains of Mrs. Reeser. There was little left of either.

Police were called. They in turn called in the fire department experts and then pathologists were brought to the scene of the mystery. Their intensive and prolonged investigation developed strange facts, some of which do not coincide with scientific understanding fire.

It was ascertained that Mrs. Reeser had last been seen alive about nine o'clock on the preceding evening when her son, Dr. Richard Reeser, her landlady, Mrs. Carpenter, and another friend had told her goodnight as she sat in the big easy chair where she died. She had been wearing a rayon nightgown, cloth bedroom slippers, and a light housecoat.

When the painters and the landlady forced their way into her room on that fateful morning, Mrs. Reeser's one hundred and seventy pounds had been reduced to less than ten pounds of charred material by the same fierce heat which had destroyed the chair. Only her left foot, her shrunken skull, and a few vertebrae were unconsumed by the flames. Of the big chair, only the coil springs remained.

The room in which Mary Reeser died in this inferno showed little effects of the heat. The walls were covered with a sooty deposit from a point about four feet above the floor. The drapes wree thickly coated. A mirror on the wall about ten feet from the chair had cracked from the intense heat. Twelve feet from the fire, two tall candles had melted and congealed in pink puddles on a dressing table, their wicks lying limply across the metal holders. The effects of the heat were numerous and plain above that four-foot mark, but below it the fire had left only two marks. Directly beneath the chair there was a small burned spot on the rug. Beside the chair a plastic electric wall outlet had melted, blowing a fuse which stopped the victim's electric clock at twenty minutes past four.

The authorities were baffled by the strange death of Mary Reeser.

Edward Davies, arson specialist for the National Board of Underwriters, made a thorough investigation and had to admit that he could only say that the victim had died from fire, with no idea what caused it.

Famed pathologist, Dr. Wilton Korgman of the University of Pennsylvania, fared no better. His report said: "Never have I seen a skull so shrunken nor a body so completely consumed by heat. This is contrary to normal experience and I regard it as the most amazing thing I have ever seen."

Routine checks ruled out the possibility of lightning--there has been none in St. Petersburg that night. A cigarette, igniting her clothing? Experts pointed out that clothing could not have produced the 2500-degree heat which had been required for such drastic results. A short circuit? Again the answer was no, for the melting wall socket had blown the fuses after the fire had begun. Gasoline, perhaps? FBI pathologists checked; reported that there had been no fluids or chemicals to induce burning.

Unsolved, and apparently unsolvable, the strange case of Mary Reeser dropped from the headlines. Over the nation a few editors recalled similar cases and mentioned them briefly but by and large the matter was forgotten.

The bedeviled authorities of St. Petersburg felt constrained to make some official statement on which to close the bizarre incident. Months after the tragedy, the Chief of Police and the Chief of Detectives signed a statement attributing the fiery death of Mary Reeser to falling asleep with a cigarette in her hand, igniting her clothing.

That convenient hypothesis had already been ruled out by the experts, but it served to close the case, awkwardly but legally. If the experts were baffled, then there was no reason to expect the police officers to do any better.

The strange death of Mary Reeser is but one of many similar cases.

All of them are mystifying. None of them has ever been explained. *Note: Today this phenomenon is known as "Spontaneous Human Combustion". Previous Page