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The Spiritual Possession of Lurancy Vennum & The Spontaneous Human Combustion of Mary Reeser
10 Plays3 years ago
Happy post Thanksgiving week, weirdos! Felicia tells the mysterious story of the spiritual possession of Lurancy Vennum. She was allegedly taken over by the spirit of Mary Roff, but this is not a boring, overdone possession story! The facts are so spooky on this one, even Lauren might be a believer now. Lauren discusses the spontaneous human combustion of Mary Reeser. Another case of the facts just not adding up...
If you have requests for future episodes or just want to hang out follow us on Instagram @sinistersisterspodcast
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Transcript
Introduction to Sinister Sisters Podcast
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to the Sinister Sisters podcast. I'm Felicia. I'm Lauren. We're best friends. And we like spooky stuff. And mashed potatoes.
Thanksgiving Food Recommendations
00:00:26
Speaker
Happy Thanksgiving week, everyone. Yes. Before we started, Lauren had an excellent idea that I just, I couldn't, I was like, this is so good. Instead of doing movie recommendations, she wants to do Thanksgiving food recommendation.
00:00:42
Speaker
Which is because we realized I thought Felicia might have some wide knowledge of Thanksgiving horror movies. No. But apparently not. I said there's Thanksgiving and there's Pilgrim something and I've not seen either one. And I definitely thought that Uncle Peckerhead, that Felicia recommended that movie a long time ago, I thought it was Thanksgiving. It's not. No. Pecker does not mean turkey.
00:01:10
Speaker
It's probably much worse. Oh, man. Okay, give me your top three foods that make you so happy. Oh, man. It's hard to narrow it down to three, but I will say stuffing is probably my number one. Whoa, interesting choice. Because mashed potatoes would obviously be number one, but I eat mashed potatoes pretty frequently year round. Constantly.
00:01:38
Speaker
I get it. Yeah. So it feels less special. So I'll say stuffing. And then the other thing I know we have to talk about, maybe we've talked about on the podcast. No, we haven't. We've talked about it in life.
00:01:50
Speaker
But we both love green bean casserole, right? Yeah, we're the ones that make the green bean casserole at our separate Thanksgiving family events. Which is just so beautiful. It is beautiful. I first have to ask, because stuffing at my house is not really the main event. It's kind of just like, ah, if we decide to do that, we will. And it's usually from the box thing. Do you make a special stuffing?
00:02:14
Speaker
It kind of depends, so we haven't actually, so my grandparents notoriously cooked the turkey until pretty much they both died and they were both, I know. It was like, it got to the point that my grandfather
00:02:31
Speaker
would use my grandmother's wheelchair to push the turkey to the car because he couldn't carry it. Like they were rock stars and I just admire both of them for how much they would not give up. So anyway, they made real stuffing, like real, put the stuffing in the turkey, like real stuffing. Now it's sort of a whoever hosts it chooses how intense
00:02:59
Speaker
to be with the stuffing. I also have to say, I kind of forgot because time doesn't exist anymore. But last Thanksgiving, so I stayed in New York for the first time. And we I had Thanksgiving for the first time with my boyfriend's mom instead of my family.
Thanksgiving Traditions and Recipes
00:03:16
Speaker
And it was very interesting. The food was actually very, very different, which was very interesting. But then one time we were at the grocery store the same month of last year.
00:03:25
Speaker
And I spent so much money at the grocery store, they gave me a free turkey. And I was like, okay, I'm just gonna like figure out how to make this turkey because I've never made the turkey before. That's like my mom's job. That was the deal at the grocery store? Yeah, it was like if you spend $100 you got a turkey.
00:03:46
Speaker
You were like, could I just have $20 instead? I was like, sick. OK, well, I'm taking it. It was very exciting for Travis and me. We were thrilled. We were like, wow, it is a huge turkey.
00:03:57
Speaker
You were probably the only people that took a turkey that day. No way. Come on. Free turkey. It was exciting. I cooked it and I think it turned out pretty good. It was a little dry. I couldn't figure out it. Yeah, it was a little dry, but it was my first time. I'll do better next time. I'm very impressed. Tell me how you make your green bean casserole.
00:04:21
Speaker
Okay, so green bean casserole, we do it super simple. I feel like yours is different, but anyway, I do green beans, cream of mushroom soup, green beans, cream of mushroom soup, and then those like fried onion things on top.
00:04:42
Speaker
Yeah, mine's very different. Mine's very different. I was going to say, I think you do cheese. Yes. Well, we're a little more Southern than you. So it's probably mostly cheese. But we do, I do green beans, onion, like chopped onion, which I always think I don't like, but when it's cooked in there, it actually really helps. And then bean sprouts. This is a different thing. Oh.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's actually pretty typical. It's in a lot of recipes and it's in the right aisle. Mine's completely different in yours. Bean sprouts, water chestnuts, boom, cream of mushroom soup, cheese all day. That's very different. I've never heard water chestnuts. The water chestnuts are so good. One day we should each make a green bean casserole and trade them.
00:05:35
Speaker
I love that. You would really like the cheese, I think. I think I would like yours better, honestly, now that I'm hearing it. The cheese out there this year, they're a surprise then. I'll spice it up. Spice it up. Okay, is there any other food you want to give a shout out to? Pumpkin pie. Oh, yeah, for sure, absolutely. Whip cream all over it. Oh, yeah. That's nice.
00:05:59
Speaker
Absolutely. And then I also like my family. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Are we not done? Are we not still talking about food? No, please keep talking. You didn't get to share yours. I was going to say should we put an explicit on this episode because of how sexual the whipped cream was.
00:06:14
Speaker
probably. So I was gonna say so my favorites are definitely green bean casserole. I'm staying mashed potatoes because I don't eat them enough in my life. And then I my family started doing this new thing, like a few years ago. And we do it now at Thanksgiving and at Christmas, where because we know we're gonna have a big meal, right? So like,
00:06:35
Speaker
In the early part of the day, we kind of do like a hodgepodge appetizer situation, where we kind of put some stuff out, some cheese and a little meat, some little charcuterie, if you will, and some other, you know, whatever, whatever we want. And that has been thrilling for me.
00:06:54
Speaker
That has been very good for me. And then you can pick at it while you're cooking throughout the day. I mean, that's the way to do it. Yeah, new traditions. I have been known to ruin my Thanksgiving dinner by going too hard on the apps,
Spiritual Possession in Watsika, Illinois
00:07:08
Speaker
virtually. Oh, it's so good though. Because we make like a layer dip that's like, you know, pre-fried beans, sour cream, guacamole cheese. Oh, my mom loves that. Yeah, we do it similar. All of it. The whole thing. And I'm like, damn, I still got turkey.
00:07:24
Speaker
You know what? We don't have it every year, but I just got some at Churro Joe's and Travis and I just cooked it one night. You don't want to know what our diet is. It's just terrible. Bit of copita. Do you know what that is? It's like a little pastries with spinach and cheese in it. Dang. That's good too. I'm hungry. I was just going to say, we're both hungry. We have to move on. We spent enough time on this. I think people love it. People love it.
00:07:53
Speaker
Okay, time to jump in. Here I go. So today, I'm talking about a story that is a possession story, but not in the ways that we've heard them before. It's not a demonic possession. It's a spiritual possession. What? What? So this takes place in Watsika, Illinois. And
00:08:17
Speaker
It takes place in like the late 1800s. So it's around two families that kind of come together. So I'm going to give a little story about someone named Mary Roth first, and then I'm going to move on to our main event. So Mary Roth basically was a young girl that from a very young age had
00:08:39
Speaker
What seemed to be seizures, some sort of fits going on, would go into these kind of trances, would say that she saw things, basically probably has some, what I would assume were some pretty heavy mental health issues at a time that did not recognize that. Yeah, so she had a lot of issues and at some point was put into asylum for a little bit.
00:09:08
Speaker
She also engaged in self-harm, which is upsetting. One time in the middle of the night, this is a little dark, so just letting you know. One night, she left her house with a kitchen knife and cut her arm open.
00:09:22
Speaker
until she passed out, basically. And thankfully, her family found her and brought her back in. But things like this were not uncommon. And so basically, she ended up dying around the age of 19. And the exact circumstances of her death are not clear, but probably had something to do with all the ailments that she was suffering from.
00:09:48
Speaker
Put that on the back burner. A few years later...
00:09:52
Speaker
A girl named Mary, and this is confusing, because her first name is also Mary, but I'm going to go by... Well, actually, this is confusing too, because everything else I looked at called her Lourancy Venom. But on Wikipedia, it does say that her actual name is Mary Lourancy Venom, but I do wonder if they just knew the two Mary's things was very confusing. That could be. I'm going to go with Lourancy. Her last name is Venom?
00:10:20
Speaker
Yes. It's V-E-N-N-U-M, but it is a very cool last name. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. So, Lorancy Venom was born in 1864 near Watsika, Illinois. And when she was about 13 or 14 years old, she started having some epileptic fits. Very similar to those that Mary Roth had suffered a few years previously.
00:10:50
Speaker
And in her fits, she would sometimes be unconscious. Like she would basically pass out and they wouldn't be able to wake up for a long time. When she would wake up, she said that she had gone to heaven. She had seen angels. Basically what today people would probably assume is she was having some sort of hallucinations. And this is kind of, I'm trying to be a little more on the skeptical side.
00:11:14
Speaker
as we start the story because then it gets really weird later. That might make you believe. Okay. All right. So she's having these fits. Her family is taking her to doctors. No one could find really anything wrong with her.
00:11:30
Speaker
were told to put her in an insane asylum. They said that would be the only place for her and they didn't want to do it because she was one of three children and her brother and sister had died before her of different causes and so her family was very committed to taking care of her because she was really all they had left. Oh man, can you imagine the pressure though on that kid too? No, I know it's terrible.
00:11:59
Speaker
So after they were told to put her into an asylum they didn't want to, their neighbor who was named Asa B. Roff convinced the parents not to commit her because they said that something very similar had happened to their daughter a few years ago.
00:12:21
Speaker
And so they basically thought, and throughout, after Mary Roth had died, her parents really got into spiritualism, and they really believed that their daughter was seeing spirits, ghosts, angels, whatever you want to call it. They believed that it was not medical, that it was a spiritual situation. Well, I mean, I guess that's nice that they backed her up.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yes, yeah, absolutely. And not only was she having these fits as well, but she was starting to hear voices. And this is, I mean, obviously, once again today, we would maybe think that was schizophrenia or something, but the way in which they came to her was very spooky. When she was 13 years old, this is when this started, she would go to bed at night, and she would hear like a bunch of different voices.
00:13:14
Speaker
And then she would go wake up her parents and say there were people talking in my room. And I was terrifying. Yeah. And she said that she could feel their breath on her face, which is very upsetting. The scariest part about having kids, honestly, them saying something like that to you. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So or even I mean, the way I used to terrify my mother by sneaking into my parents' room
00:13:42
Speaker
and trying to quietly wake her up and be like, mom, mom, she like freak out. And I was like, I had a nightmare. That's a part of parenthood that I am not prepared for in any way. No, I'll just sleep through it. Yeah, right. I'll just sleep through it.
00:14:05
Speaker
So something else that Lorancy was doing was as these episodes got worse and worse, sometimes she would introduce herself as other people.
00:14:18
Speaker
such as an old man or a little boy. And so when Asa Roth had heard about this, she'd came over, she'd convinced them not to take her to the asylum. When she came to the house, what should happen? But LaRancey introduces herself as Mary Roth, the daughter that had died years before.
00:14:43
Speaker
Yes. That's scary. And immediately, so some of the other Roth family comes over and LaRancey, now Mary, recognizes all of them, talks about their lives, calls her sister by the nickname that only she called her, things that this like 14-year-old would not really know about. I hate stuff like this. I'm always like, there's no way of explaining it.
00:15:11
Speaker
I know there's no way to explain it. And it was so convincing that basically, LaRancey, now Mary, started begging the Venom family to let her go back home.
00:15:26
Speaker
to go home with, go home with the Roth family and live with them like she had before. And I'm assuming that first the Venom family is like, what? Yeah, but they had experienced so much of this and all of them are so, you know, convinced of this that they decided to let her go for a little while, not forever, but for a little while. And so, Lorancy, they're walking across wherever they have to walk across to get back to the Roth home.
00:15:56
Speaker
And while they're walking, she goes up to a house and said, this is my house. And they said, oh, no, we don't live there anymore. We moved out of that house years ago. But they had moved out of that house before Lorancy would have any memory of it and after Mary died.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yeah, so it's like she had memories that like, that it's like, it's just building on building on. And so they finally get her home, they start, you know, living together, and treating her, you know, like, their daughter. And this goes on so upset to
00:16:35
Speaker
I know and it goes on, goes on for a while. And so now I'm going to talk about, so this ended up being studied. So in 1878, a physician and spiritualist named E. Winchester Stevens, he came and examined Lorenzie Venom.
00:16:55
Speaker
And he actually wrote a book called The Wotseki Wonder. And it's pretty much the only document that really that really goes through this entire case. And he saw a lot of it firsthand. And he says it was the most remarkable case of spirit return and manifestation ever recorded in history. Wow. And he I mean, all the stuff that he talks about that I've mentioned, a lot of it he saw firsthand and you know, couldn't believe it.
00:17:25
Speaker
So basically, she was there with the Roth family for a couple of months. And then eventually, Loransi basically said that Mary has gotten what she needed from being here with you. And it's time for her to go. And they said there would be times in which Loransi would kind of come back and be like, and they would be like, where's Mary? And she said, oh, she's visiting heaven right now.
00:17:55
Speaker
She's visiting the angels right now.
00:17:57
Speaker
And then she would possess her again. And then at a certain point, she said, Mary's time here is done. She's ready to go. She got what she needed, whatever that was, helping her family grieve, whatever it may have been. And the next day, she was gone, and that was it. Whoa, just like a stop. Yeah. And then, I mean, the weirdest part about this, to me, is that Lorancy kind of had a normal life afterwards.
00:18:27
Speaker
Like she kind of, she didn't have this level of possession that was like a long time. She got married. But one thing that is on the Wikipedia page that I think is super wild is that Steven's, the physician spiritualist guy, he said that years later after Venom got married, Mary Roff, she inhabited Venom one more time.
00:18:56
Speaker
while she was giving childbirth, which yes, yes, stay with me, it's wild. And apparently then when Lorancy came back, she had had a painless childbirth. Like she didn't remember, she didn't experience any of it. That's, I guess, nice of her. I was like, that is a good friend. Yes, but weirdly specific. Yeah, absolutely.
00:19:22
Speaker
weirdly specific. I guess it's nice too that she, I mean, she chose to come down from heaven, experience childbirth and then go back up. Yeah, I don't know. But obviously there are people that think that this is not, that this was all kind of a hoax, but there's just bits and pieces of it. And it's hard to know because we're really in like, you know, we're in the late 1800s in Illinois, like who really knows what was going on. But in general, this seems to have been a pretty small town of like 5,000 people.
00:19:52
Speaker
And not a lot happened here. This is a very significant event in this town's history. It was also a very like church going place as well. So something like this coming up was surprising and scandalous and scandalous. And it seems like a lot of people really believed it. So and also I always think this about psychics and mediums and all of that were like nowadays, there's so many things they could
00:20:21
Speaker
find out about you pretty quickly. The internet exists. All those really big psychic,
Creative Projects and Spontaneous Combustion
00:20:28
Speaker
whatever. The psychic on Broadway, we found out so much of it is like, yeah, so much of it is social media and Facebook and everything else. But in the 1870s, it's not like she was probably hearing anything about the girl down the street or whatever.
00:20:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's very strange. I do feel like I butchered the story somewhat. So we'll say that Ashley Flowers of Crime Junkie has an episode on this back from I think May or something on her other podcast Supernatural.
00:20:58
Speaker
And it's very, very good. And there's really only that and one other podcast that is called Dark Histories that has some good, lengthy stuff about this case. There's not a lot on it, which is interesting. There is the book of P.D.A. Page. There's a few articles that have kind of completely different information in it. And then there's the actual journal you can read of the documentation from 1878. But other than that, there's not a ton on it.
00:21:25
Speaker
But it's a very interesting case. Very cool. And I just like there's something nice about it being spirits coming down to do things instead of like a demonic possession, which I feel like is what we're used to hearing. Yeah. And oh, and this was something else, too, that, you know, these girls did seem to experience good and bad spirits, but like worked to only let the good ones take over.
00:21:54
Speaker
which I think is very interesting and I think describes that the fits were then trying to basically like, you know, keep out the bad ones. Right. So that's that. Oof. I liked that one. That was spooky and kind of nice. Hopefully that means heaven exists, right? I hope so. I don't know. Hard to say.
00:22:21
Speaker
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00:22:52
Speaker
So I am doing something very different. I am talking about the spontaneous human combustion of Mary Reeser. So I'm going to talk about her case specifically, but then I'll like get in a little bit into like human combustion in general. So it's, it's really interesting. So it all started with Mary on July 2nd, 1951. And this was in St. Petersburg, Florida.
00:23:21
Speaker
Everything weird happens in Florida. So Mary Hardy, Reser's son came over to her apartment just to pay her a visit and she told him she had taken two second all tablets, which is basically a mild sedative. I guess it's just because she couldn't sleep and it's frequently used on patients to calm them before surgery.
00:23:42
Speaker
He said she was planning on maybe taking two more before bed, but her son was a doctor. It seems like she didn't really have a prescription for them, but I feel like if it was actually a bad idea, her doctor's son would have said something.
00:23:59
Speaker
So she fell asleep in her chair. And unfortunately, what seemed to be a house fire killed her that night. So her landlord started smelling smoke at about 5 a.m. But then, you know, I guess kind of thought it was like either somebody cooking or not a big deal, nothing to investigate and didn't in the landlord didn't smell it again until 8 a.m.
00:24:27
Speaker
when she was going to deliver a telegram to Mary, which I don't know why telegrams. I feel like I did not really understand they were still being used in the 1950s, but I guess it makes sense. Yeah, me neither. Right. Didn't we have phones? Apparently not. I don't know. Maybe you couldn't call like very far. I don't know. Yes. I assume I know we don't know anything is the truth. Yeah. So she the landlord discovered soot in the hallway that led to the apartment.
00:24:58
Speaker
And when she went to touch the door handle, it was too hot for her to grab. So she kind of like enlisted these nearby house painters to help her go inside. They go inside and they find the totally cremated remains of Mary Reeser.
00:25:15
Speaker
It's so freaky to me. Her skull had reportedly shrunk to the size of a cup. There were parts of her spine in the remains, but the very small skull, parts of her spine, and then the weirdest part is that her left foot was totally unburned, slippers still on, skin still on.
00:25:44
Speaker
And the rest of her remains were ash. What is that about? I have no idea. It's a real mystery. So according to cremation experts, for her body to be totally cremated like this, it would have had to burn at 3,000 degrees for three to four hours. But somehow, other than the chair that she sat in, everything surrounding her and the rest of the apartment was unaffected by the fire.
00:26:14
Speaker
So somehow there was a fire that was 3000 degrees for three to four hours that did not touch the rest of the apartment. Just very odd. So the walls that were near the fire were not damaged. There were no signs of cracked paint or scorching. The upper walls were blackened from soot and smoke, but the lower half of the walls was totally normal. There were light switches that were melted, but the outlets below were intact and working.
00:26:43
Speaker
So and there were also candles on a nearby window that had melted, but the wicks still stood upright. And then there was a stack of newspapers nearby that were also undamaged. And the other thing that would easily catch fire. Yes. All flammable things. And the weirdest part, obviously, is that her neighbors were totally unaware of this fire. Like she was in an apartment building and nobody next door to her noticed anything.
00:27:13
Speaker
So firefighters came they were called and they came but they found the heat so intense that they quote couldn't stand it but also there were no signs of smoldering so there was no like they could not find like the start of the fire like the source of the heat.
00:27:30
Speaker
super freaky. So Detective Chief Cass Burgas is the one that was like on the scene and he just found it to be totally perplexing. And then they kind of like called in the specialist who was Dr. Wilton M. Kroghman. And he was a professor of physical anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. So he was quote, amazed and baffled because he would not quote,
00:27:57
Speaker
conceive of such a complete cremation without more burning of the apartment itself.
00:28:03
Speaker
Same. Right. Like, I don't understand it either, Dr. Krogeman. But he stated that in his 30 plus fire investigations, he had never seen a skull shrink like Mary's. So normally skulls, I mean, I'm acting like I knew this ahead of time, but I guess normally skulls become swollen or expand due to heat. I mean, it makes sense. So he'd never seen a skull shrink like that, which is very weird.
00:28:33
Speaker
So investigators sent samples of the chair, the debris in the area, the rug and smoke to an FBI lab for chemical analysis, but they didn't find any traces of combustibles. Weirdly, they found melted fat in the rug, which also feels
00:28:53
Speaker
I'll get into more about how that can be part of human combustion. Obviously, people were speculating about what the cause of the fire could have been. A local mattress company pointed out that the regular chair stuffing would not cause such a fire. The material would just smolder for a long time. It wouldn't be able to light her on fire the way it had.
00:29:22
Speaker
And so also lightning or electrical failure were also ruled out. So the only thing that are kind of what the end conclusion was, at least by the FBI and the police were that Mary was reportedly seen the night before smoking a cigarette in the chair. So I guess either by her son or maybe she was just known to smoke a cigarette in that chair. And so the FBI and the police
00:29:49
Speaker
believe that the fire most likely was started by her falling asleep, smoking the cigarette. It could have landed on her nightgown and started the fire that way. Apparently, this is something that does happen. It's called the wick effect. It basically is like your clothes act as the wick that sets your body on fire.
00:30:11
Speaker
The FBI statement was, once the body became ignited, almost complete destruction occurred from its own fatty tissues. Just sad. It's just a sad way of saying it, I feel like. But at the time, Mary weighed about 170 pounds, and it seems like this is plausible. I mean, people think this could have happened, but it's not very definitive. I mean, I'm like, don't blame my fatty tissue. Yeah.
00:30:41
Speaker
Leave that out of this. Leave that out of how I just completely lit on fire. So there are some other theories to how the fire was started. Detective Chief Cass Bergus received a letter addressed to the chief of detectives. This is a real quote, so get ready. The letter said, a ball of fire came through an open window and hitter. I seen it happen.
00:31:05
Speaker
No, you didn't. You didn't see that happen. I seen it happen is something that I don't think you can't trust anyone who says that. I've seen it happen. Exactly. And then the second theory is that maybe the fire was started on purpose. People speculated that it could have been caused by like different basically like different chemicals like thermite bombs, kerosene.
00:31:30
Speaker
magnesium and phosphorus and napalm, but according to the coroner on the case, all of these would have left a smell and no smells were detected at the scene. So the theory that we are talking about today is that perhaps she was the victim of spontaneous human combustion. So allegedly there have been around 200 cases of spontaneous combustion. Maybe 201.
00:31:57
Speaker
We're going to hear it today. Do you want to tell it now? No, go ahead. I'll tell it later. So the earliest case of human combustion dates back to 1470 in Milan, Italy, way back when. And this was Polonius Varsityus, Varsityus, I think. And he died by bursting the flames after a night of drinking. And his death was reported.
00:32:25
Speaker
in 1641, so why it took 200 years to document this death, I'm not sure, but a Danish mathematician and doctor named Thomas Bartholian. Bartholian? I'm not sure. Bartholian reported it 200 years later, basically. So then in 1745 in Sisina, Italy,
00:32:52
Speaker
Countess Cornelia Bandy was found burnt to a pile of ashes with only her legs intact. So this is kind of like a common thing is in human combustion is like all of you turning to ash except for some part of the body. I mean, that's very strange. Very weird. And then like, you know, bouncing way forward in time. There's also a case in 1982.
00:33:17
Speaker
in London, England, where Jean Safin's family claimed that they saw her just immediately burst into flames in her home, which is something that I would never want to see. Me neither. Then there's also a case in 2010 in Ireland, a coroner claimed spontaneous human combustion was the cause of Michael Faraday's death, who was found in his home with none of his surroundings badly damaged, very similar to Mary.
00:33:46
Speaker
There are some thoughts on to how human combustion works. So basically it involves, this is crazy, it involves internal fluids turning into gas. So it's basically like internal fluids turn into gas and then the melted fat of the body further burns organs and bones.
00:34:08
Speaker
So that is kind of where the weird fat that they found in Mary's rug comes back in. But some scientists consider the possibility of human combustion to be questionable, considering the body is made of 70% water, which is something that I kind of felt too. I was like, how can that be when we're very liquidy? But there are parts of the body that are flammable, like body fat, and then also we have methane gas in our bodies.
00:34:39
Speaker
There are proven theories as to why the body would catch fire so quickly. All these things I guess are like kind of ways that it could happen like static electricity, bacteria, stress, obesity, alcohol consumption. And some people believe that human cells may even reach a heightened state of vulnerability to ignite. It's all really wild.
00:35:03
Speaker
But in 2012, there was an issue of New Scientist magazine where biologist Brian J. Ford stated that a large concentration of acetate in the body also may contribute to spontaneous combustion and acetate buildup could result
00:35:20
Speaker
from alcohol intake or variations in your diet or diabetes. So really I think this is telling us that we shouldn't change our diets because then we might spontaneously combust. You just gotta stick to the mashed potatoes. You gotta stick to the mashed potatoes. But there are like some common things as I said with I think it was Michael Faraday's where it's like there are these similar running truths between
00:35:47
Speaker
sort of scenes of spontaneous human combustion, which are the surroundings not being damaged, that there's really no visible source of the fire, and as I said that the body parts are still intact. And all of these are true of Mary's case. And the other thing that's super spooky to me about
00:36:07
Speaker
Mary's case and in general with a lot of these cases is that there aren't any signs of the person trying to escape. So like, even if they did, yeah, even if they did like catch fire, you would think like she would be like, further away from her chair or like, I don't know near the sink or like, you know, like moving not just like, allowing herself to burn. So
00:36:33
Speaker
There really is no definitive answer to what happened to Mary, and I'll end it on a quote by that specialist, Dr. Krogman, just because I think it's just a good way to end it. But he said, they say, truth is stranger than fiction, and this case apparently proves it. I've never heard of anything like it. So who's to say, really? But I feel like it's pretty fishy.
00:37:00
Speaker
I don't know. I think I, so I looked up a bunch of stuff about spontaneous combustion once. Did you really? I'll tell you why. Um, but yeah, it happens enough that it is very suspicious that it's like, why, why is this keep happening? So basically a couple of years ago, I was on the beach and I was wearing sunscreen, whatever.
00:37:23
Speaker
And kind of on like my like where my butt meets my thigh. The next day there was a like a maybe the size of like
00:37:37
Speaker
two or three quarters, there was basically like a big scab on me. Oh my gosh. And I was like, what is that? Like it almost looked like either I had got like really badly scraped there and it healed into a scab or like a burn or something. Like it was very strange. And I was like, how could I have not felt this happen? Like this doesn't make any sense to me.
00:38:07
Speaker
So then I hop on the Google train start trying to figure out why I would have this unexplained thing I had been out in the sun all day I was trying to figure out something about that. Sun poisoning or something.
00:38:23
Speaker
Maybe like I looked into sun poisoning. It didn't look like that. I looked completely different and I was like it finally I got to some page that started talking about spontaneous combustion and not in the not even just in the big way of it where someone turns to ashes but in small parts of the body and
00:38:43
Speaker
like a site specific small combustion. So I'm not saying that's what happened to me. Travis thinks I'm crazy for even thinking that. But it was the only thing on the internet I could find to explain this thing on my body that made no sense to me. And I saw a scar from it. I
Episode Wrap-up and Thanksgiving Wishes
00:38:59
Speaker
have a scar from it. It's like still there. That is so weird. Yeah.
00:39:04
Speaker
And I swear I really looked up sun poisoning and did not seem to be that. I mean, I'm mostly shocked that you didn't feel it while it was like forming. No, not at all. Not at all. That's so weird. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Well, you heard it here, folks. Felicia was... Might have spontaneously combusted just where her butt meets her thigh.
00:39:24
Speaker
I was waiting, I thought maybe in my research or maybe in you now just talking that somehow it could be looped back into aliens, but I don't know. No, not that I saw, but anything's possible. Anything's possible. They just came in and lasered somebody. They went and turned into ash. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I just got lasered.
00:39:47
Speaker
Well, thank you all so much for listening. We hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving week. Yes. And we hope you have some sweet, sweet nightmares. Bye.