While the internet has been an amplifier of many madcap conspiracy theories––spreading misinformation about the Covid vaccine, climate change, etc.––it, also, appears to have sounded the death knell for many of a previous generation’s most outlandish mysteries. 

The 1970s was a particularly fertile time for unexplained occurrences––Nessie; the Bermuda Triangle; the enduring popularity of Bob Monkhouse.  Growing up in the 1970s, and with little prospect of visiting either Loch Ness or the seas around Bermuda, a mystery that seemed to have the potential to strike rather closer to home was spontaneous human combustion.

I would like to blame Arthur C. Clarke for my unhealthy juvenile preoccupation with spontaneous human combustion but, the fact is, the episode of his TV series Mysterious Universe, which featured spontaneous human combustion––The Burning Question––was aired at a far later date, and went some way to debunking the phenomenon rather than sensationalising it.

Neither, can I claim an early reading of the death of Mr Krook in Dickens’ Bleak House for my interest.  It is only relatively recently that I have read the novel and, although it may be responsible for reigniting––some pun clearly intended––old memories, it was not the origin of them.

A more concrete source for a formative memory is the famous 1966 photograph of the remains of John Irving Bentley; his slippered foot and lower right leg emerging from the charred remains of his body, beside which his Zimmer frame stands a rather poignant and silent witness.  How I might ever have been exposed to this image as a child, I do not know, but it has resonated long after tales of Brer Rabbit and trips to Whipsnade Zoo from a similar period have faded away.

Statistically, scientifically, culturally, I can consign spontaneous human combustion into the small box in my overall life experience to which it belongs, but as a throwback to childhood its effect is strong and, while I don’t consciously watch my weight specifically to counteract the ‘wick effect’, I do regard my relative trimness as a healthy safeguard against providing a modern generation of online conspiracy theorists with the gruesome photograph of a new and inexplicably charred corpse to discuss.

© Bradley Dunbar

Bradley Dunbar remains ever observant of our mysterious world.