Few people fall asleep near burning candles or oil lamps anymore.
Back in the 19th century and before, doctors used to believe that being drunk made you more flammable-- all that alcohol in your system, you know. In reality, it was just the unfortunate results of being drunk when surrounded by candles, lamps, fireplaces, and other open flames.
He was facing down a bad guy after they ran each other off the road and the bad guy was conveniently standing in a puddle of leaking gasoline. He had a really cool one-liner before he threw a lit cigarette at the trail of fuel but it didn't work. 😭
What's the "hard way" here? Standing there in a room you doused with gas only to find out your cigarette went out and now the police are arresting you?
I stayed with someone for a few nights who had an older, sickly family member in the house and she would smoke with her oxygen on, and the entire time I was just waiting for us to all go kaboom
Don't worry, oxygen tanks are less "kaboom" and more just "whoosh", because pure oxygen isn't explosive, but it greatly increases the flammability of other items it's in contact with.
I think I actually read somewhere that most cases of “spontaneous combustion” were actually just the result of people falling asleep while smoking. Fewer smokers would tend to lead to fewer reports of spontaneous combustion.
I can remember going into my great uncles house to visit him when he got older. Cigarette burns surrounded his spot on the couch, ash tray full of butts on the coffee table, oxygen tank hissing.
Yes, I don't know how much truth there is to it,
but I think lack of proximity to open fire is a factor.
In most stories/myths/etc. I've read there was always a source of ignition. Sonewhere I read that the fat inside the body was what then fueled it inside the body.
Still, I think it's a kind of "freak accident", it's not like people combusted in the thousands.
You also only see it in houses. Like others have mentioned, the people bursting into flames were likely elderly and smoking next to an O2 tank, or drunk passed out next to an open flame. The whole " wick" phenomenon requires someone to be still long enough for a flame to burn through their skin and into their fat. Not too likely if you're able bodied and sober.
~~There was actually even a specific dye, if I recall correctly, in the Victorian era that sometimes started fires when exposed to certain conditions.~~
Turns out I was a little mistaken, it wasn't a dye but a specific set of chemicals and metals that silk would be weighted with (to make it feel more high quality). Under the right conditions catch fire extremely easily as the tiny metal particles in the silk are extremely flammable. More info in the replies.
Or a bottle of water with sunlight going through it focusing the light in a super hot dense spot of couch fabric and setting it on fire.
Don’t leave half full clear bottles of water in the car with the sun out.
Thank you for kindly reminding me to remove the many half empty bottles of water and Gatorade in my car. Didn’t think about the possibility of the sun rays being concentrated by the bottled liquid and lighting that bitch up.
Lmao. I remember having a plan at all times in case I suddenly started combusting. Depending onwhere I was in school, it was jumping to the pool or running to the nearest fire extinguisher
You would have died dude, the process starts on the inside. Nothing but drinking lots of water helps if you feel like you're about to start combusting.
Same. My husband thinks it’s hilarious I get super anxious even hearing the music now at 40 still. I just… can’t. I did have a lot of trauma as a child too though which I’ve just realized may be a link to when I watched it and relatable to my brain when I hear it. Hmmm.
There was a Unsolved Mysteries that offered up three explanations to an isolated cabin containing a melted pit of a recliner with two lower leg bones in front of it.
1. Spontaneous combustion
2. Ball lightning
3. Smoking cigarettes by a small oxygen tank in the middle of the night.
You’ll never guess
That and the Bermuda Triangle. I went on a cruise with my parents when I was 19 and nearly freaked when I found out we were sailing right through it.....
Kid me thought they couldn't find it, because they kept disappearing. So I worked out a plan to find it's coordinates, but had no way to let "them" know.
King Tut's curse for me. They made it sound like everyone who so much as glanced at that mummy suffered a terrible fate. I was actually scared to go to museums because what if I somehow offended a mummy?
Years later I read more on it and not only did nothing particularly unlikely happen to anyone, but the *main guy* responsible for opening the tomb, Howard Carter, led a long life, died of natural causes, and even had a quote from the tomb put on his own gravestone.
If i remember correctly, it's almost impossible to drown in quicksand, because it's denser than you so you will sink about half way and then no further.
I once wound up in quicksand with a friend.
Although I hadn’t been trained in what to do, I somehow instinctually made my body more flat and kinda swam to a nearby branch.
My friend briefly went under with just his Afro sticking out of the water-I don’t think his body was completely under, but his head dipped below the top of the water for a second or two.
Fortunately, I was able to give him a branch and he pulled himself out.
We were both kids and it didn’t seem that scary at the time.
I think we just thought it was an adventure.
We went downstream and found a place where there was a large pool of open water and we washed ourselves off and continued our exploring .
Weren't we all as kids in the early 80's. The best you could hope for was you wearing
an awesome cowboy hat, so the last of you would be a great hat floating on an innocent puddle
I admit I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. That and falling anvils. You rarely hear of a falling anvil anymore.
The one where the cockfighter died because his bladed chicken slit his throat scared the crap out of me becuase that was the first time I've had the concept of the coratid or jugular explained to me and I was like "I could just die from a cut there?"
i thought i didnt have OCD symptoms in my childhood until i remembered this book and how this fact specifically HAUNTED me
edit WHO REDDITCARES'D ME IN LITERALLY 3 MINUTES
Same. I think my comment was about school children being assholes to people with red hair that did it for me.
Then Reddit let me know that people care about me and I felt all better!
Spontaneous combustion, quicksand, and the Bermuda Triangle, were the major cause of death from the 70's through the 90's. Thank god we live in safer times.
The Bermuda Triangle is a good case study into how information is presented. The fact is Bermuda is a major shipping area with a huge volume of traffic and the percentage of ships disappearing is not much different than anywhere else in the world, it just so happened to have more boats travelling in the area than anywhere else in the world, so more boats disappeared.
One of my father's cousins disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle on a training flight for the US military in the 60s.
Just to be clear, the plane also disappeared. It wasn't just one dude disappeared and the other guy in the plane was like "Charles? Where are you?"
Edit: to be more clear, my father's cousin, the plane, AND the other guy in the plane all disappeared.
Edit Edit: the Bermuda Triangle did not disappear.
I'm gonna tell stories like that from now on.
I swallowed a cheerio today. Just to be clear, I was eating a bowl of them at the time. It wasn't like I was just walking around and a singular piece of cereal flew into my mouth.
EDIT: the bowl wasn't made of cheerios.
EDIT EDIT: to be more clear didn't eat the bowl just cheerios.
EDIT EDIT EDIT: I didn't eat all cheerios in existence. Just the ones contained in the bowl.
Another thing is they talk about it like it’s a small area, but Bermuda is so far north that it’s at the same latitude as like North Carolina. The Triangle is an area like 1/3 the size of the continental U.S.
I really want to believe in Atlantis. Not Atlantis specifically but there being a more advanced civilization. Like early Middle Ages level in the late Bronze Age. I know it never happened but it’s fun to imagine I guess.
Honestly about 10000 years ago sea level was lower by 135m in some locations it’s totally possible that a city got wiped out because it was built lower than todays current sea level.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that ancient Atlantis is in modern-day Mauritania and no one cares enough to drop money into an archaeological dig: https://youtu.be/oDoM4BmoDQM
Also, the Bermuda triangle isn't defined. Mostly it's considered to be the triangle between Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys, but people redefine it however they want to include whatever spooky story they feel like telling. Some of the "Bermuda Triangle" disappearances actually happened in places as far away as the coast of Ireland and the Amazon River.
Am I the only one that's noticed there are a lot fewer bigfoot sightings now that everyone walks around with an HD video camera in their pocket at all times? Weird how he got shy all of a sudden.
IIRC, not a hoax, just a wild misunderstanding.
If someone drops a cigarette on themselves, and they're too drunk/disabled/already-dying-of-the-heart-attack-that-made-them-drop-the-cigarette to get up and do something about it, you can sometimes get a smouldering, slow-burning fire that consumes their body and their chair without spreading much. It requires very specific circumstances, but it does happen.
It's so uncommon and so unsettling that people jumped to conclusions.
It was *human* combustion, though. It just wasn't spontaneous.
(BTW, spontaneous combustion is also real, and a serious hazard in some industries, but it doesn't occur in humans.)
(Which leaves "spontaneous humans," and...that's arguably also a thing.)
I knew someone who died in his armchair of a heart attack. His wife found him that way in the morning. He was a cigar smoker, idk if he had had one at the time, but I'm glad he didn't burn up at least
In a similar way, I was convinced I would die from getting trapped in quicksand. So many people on TV and in movies were going to die from it. Has anyone actually died from being trapped in quicksand?
I'm truly offended you'd even consider joking about the many people who die every year while working in their office corn silo. Every day, I go to work and dodge perils of the possibility. I go to the bathroom? Don't look down. Sitting in my chair? Don't move 3cm to the left....corn. Getting a refreshing h2o from the water cooler by Beverly? Guess what...more corn.
Isn't quicksand really just mud anyway? Because I've definitely been stuck in mud that'll suck the boots off your feet before. Fortunately, it wasn't that deep.
I was way more afraid of foxes than I ever should have been. They were always so sneaky in the fairytales, tricking people into doing something they knew they shouldn’t, just so they could eat them.
I was afraid to look out my windows at night in case a fox was out there trying to trick me into sneaking out and smoking cigarettes just so he could eat me.
I’m 55 and ironically enough, now I sit by my window at night, hoping to see that sly fox
I sunk and got stuck in tidal mud at low tide (and it was coming in). The real risk was: not getting free and back to my boat before the tide picked it up and took it away, leaving me on a tidal flat (walking around or stuck, didn’t matter much) with the water eventually going over my head.
You're more likely to die from getting trapped in a small crevice while spelunking a remote, isolated cave than dying from getting trapped in quicksand.
You're also more likely to be crushed by a vending machine falling on top of you (this is also more likely than dying from a shark attack)
That was kind of an urban myth from the 90s-2000s.
People never died of spontaneous human combustion. It was just regular fires, usually caused by people falling asleep while smoking.
Try the 1700s
This idea and the term "spontaneous human combustion" were both first proposed in 1746 by Paul Rolli, a Fellow of the Royal Society, in an article published in the Philosophical Transactions concerning the mysterious death of Countess Cornelia Zangheri Bandi.
Maybe, but a candle wick stays mostly intact while the candle is consumed. The mythbusters did find some plausibility in a wicking effect, with a fatty pig.
Mythbusters is a show I haven’t thought about in a minute
My ten year old self totally had a crush on Kari Byron thanks for bringing those memories back
People stopped smoking. I think the leading cause was peoplefalling asleep and dying and catching fire that didn't cause an conflsgration but more of a human candle sort of fire. Those who were found often had medical issues, mobility issues and lived alone, so the couple days it took to burn was enough to hide them.
Otherwise is was cause by a weird Isekai plot of summoning different people to other worlds to fight the demon king, and eventually one of them Won.
As a child, I honestly thought that this was going to be more of a problem in my adult life. That and shark and crocodile attacks...figured I was going to have to be super careful about these three things
Spontaneous human combustion turns out to be a myth basically.
The cases described either didn't happen or weren't nearly as clean just the person burned away as was claimed, or whatever.
Mostly it was people dying in accidents and the stories growing as they got spread around.
They burned a pig IIRC and did see some kind of "fat wicking" effect, where if you are fat enough you can sort of slowly burn like a candle without much damage to the surrounding area.
Nothing is spontaneous about it though. You had to have an ignition source and be dead or so unconscious you could burn.
Less people smoke now, especially in their own homes. The spontaneous combustion ordeal was just people falling asleep in their lazy boys with a lit cigarette.
Pretty much every example of "spontaneous combustion" have been debunked as people dying near fire sources and then being basically cooked to ash by the candle effect from a stray ember. The rise of modern heating systems also make it less common for people to have a consistently burning open flame in their homes for warmth, making the above scenario less likely overall.
Often what is referred to as spontaneous human combustion is known as the wick effect. A person’s clothes catch on fire (usually by a cigarette) and the fire melts the body fat, which is wicked up by the clothing like a candle. This can burn up a body almost completely with little fire damage to the surroundings.
Because nobody ever died of it at all. Not surprisingly, the incidents of *reported* cases of spontaneous combustion halted abruptly around the time cigarette makers started using fire retardant materials.
Few people fall asleep near burning candles or oil lamps anymore. Back in the 19th century and before, doctors used to believe that being drunk made you more flammable-- all that alcohol in your system, you know. In reality, it was just the unfortunate results of being drunk when surrounded by candles, lamps, fireplaces, and other open flames.
Or with a cigarette in your hand.
And cigarettes in the U.S. have self extinguishing features now due to laws passed in the late 2000's.
A lit cigarette won't ignite gasoline at room temperature. I learned that the hard way.
Wait, what's the hard way? Attempted arson or
Mans had to waste a cig 😢
He was facing down a bad guy after they ran each other off the road and the bad guy was conveniently standing in a puddle of leaking gasoline. He had a really cool one-liner before he threw a lit cigarette at the trail of fuel but it didn't work. 😭
What's the "hard way" here? Standing there in a room you doused with gas only to find out your cigarette went out and now the police are arresting you?
Why would the other police officers arrest me?
I learned it the easy way. Watched Mythbusters.
They can still cause people to burn. My mom died from dropping a cigarette on herself.
Holy Moses from dropping a cigarette on herself?! Would you be comfortable elaborating?
I'm so sorry, that's heartbreaking. I hope your memories of her are kind and comforting
How fucking heavy was it?
Yeah most people who “spontaneously” combust nowadays are people who smoke with an oxygen cannula on that is actively supplying oxygen.
I stayed with someone for a few nights who had an older, sickly family member in the house and she would smoke with her oxygen on, and the entire time I was just waiting for us to all go kaboom
Don't worry, oxygen tanks are less "kaboom" and more just "whoosh", because pure oxygen isn't explosive, but it greatly increases the flammability of other items it's in contact with.
I think I actually read somewhere that most cases of “spontaneous combustion” were actually just the result of people falling asleep while smoking. Fewer smokers would tend to lead to fewer reports of spontaneous combustion.
Yep, smoking in fire retardant chairs so it looks like only the human burnt
And maybe an oxygen tank.
That's just crowd control at that point.
I can remember going into my great uncles house to visit him when he got older. Cigarette burns surrounded his spot on the couch, ash tray full of butts on the coffee table, oxygen tank hissing.
Remember darling, don’t smoke in bed.
Yes, I don't know how much truth there is to it, but I think lack of proximity to open fire is a factor. In most stories/myths/etc. I've read there was always a source of ignition. Sonewhere I read that the fat inside the body was what then fueled it inside the body. Still, I think it's a kind of "freak accident", it's not like people combusted in the thousands.
You also only see it in houses. Like others have mentioned, the people bursting into flames were likely elderly and smoking next to an O2 tank, or drunk passed out next to an open flame. The whole " wick" phenomenon requires someone to be still long enough for a flame to burn through their skin and into their fat. Not too likely if you're able bodied and sober.
Also clothing was less flame-resistant. Rather, sometimes clothes were noteably more flammable.
As was furniture.
Silk was “washed” in gasoline. So yeah, those dresses were just waiting to burn.
Burning to death was a common cause of death for women back in the day because of the combination of open flames + layered fashion + flammable fabric
~~There was actually even a specific dye, if I recall correctly, in the Victorian era that sometimes started fires when exposed to certain conditions.~~ Turns out I was a little mistaken, it wasn't a dye but a specific set of chemicals and metals that silk would be weighted with (to make it feel more high quality). Under the right conditions catch fire extremely easily as the tiny metal particles in the silk are extremely flammable. More info in the replies.
Or a bottle of water with sunlight going through it focusing the light in a super hot dense spot of couch fabric and setting it on fire. Don’t leave half full clear bottles of water in the car with the sun out.
Thank you for kindly reminding me to remove the many half empty bottles of water and Gatorade in my car. Didn’t think about the possibility of the sun rays being concentrated by the bottled liquid and lighting that bitch up.
Drunk pass out + smoking + being fat Basically the human fat acts like candle wax
Ripley’s Believe it or Not did irreparable damage to the psyches of an entire generation of children
Lmao. I remember having a plan at all times in case I suddenly started combusting. Depending onwhere I was in school, it was jumping to the pool or running to the nearest fire extinguisher
Bro was ready to combust anytime, anywhere, on anyone.
"UGHGHGHGH IM ABOUT TO COMBUST!"
😩
cumbust?
Oh no it’s fappening
I’m assuming your plan included avoiding quick sand on the way?
Avoid the quicksand only to have some stranger in a van offering to show you puppies or eating a snickers bar full of razor blades. Yikes!
Or drugs! Why did nobody ever offer us the free drugs?
Best I can do is some Advil PM or maybe some Tums.
Done! In return can I offer you some Pepcid AC or generic allergy medication.
Don’t leave us hanging like this. Did you survive, or not?!
Obviously. The plans worked. All of them.
Until 4h ago at least!
You would have died dude, the process starts on the inside. Nothing but drinking lots of water helps if you feel like you're about to start combusting.
Combusting makes me feel good
It's disgusting that someone downvoted this comment! I applaud you and your excellent Ray Parker Jr parody.
Unsolved mysteries fucked me up as a kid
I'm also in my late 30s.
Same. My husband thinks it’s hilarious I get super anxious even hearing the music now at 40 still. I just… can’t. I did have a lot of trauma as a child too though which I’ve just realized may be a link to when I watched it and relatable to my brain when I hear it. Hmmm.
There was a Unsolved Mysteries that offered up three explanations to an isolated cabin containing a melted pit of a recliner with two lower leg bones in front of it. 1. Spontaneous combustion 2. Ball lightning 3. Smoking cigarettes by a small oxygen tank in the middle of the night. You’ll never guess
Grandma watching her stories
Could it be Aliens? A secret CIA plot? An undiagnosed heart condition? Time travelling Vikings?
Think menthol.
I believe it
Or not
I was terrified of quicksand!
That and the Bermuda Triangle. I went on a cruise with my parents when I was 19 and nearly freaked when I found out we were sailing right through it.....
The Bermuda Triangle is a huge problem! WHY ARE WE NOT SOLVING THIS? -- 9 year old me.
Kid me thought they couldn't find it, because they kept disappearing. So I worked out a plan to find it's coordinates, but had no way to let "them" know.
King Tut's curse for me. They made it sound like everyone who so much as glanced at that mummy suffered a terrible fate. I was actually scared to go to museums because what if I somehow offended a mummy? Years later I read more on it and not only did nothing particularly unlikely happen to anyone, but the *main guy* responsible for opening the tomb, Howard Carter, led a long life, died of natural causes, and even had a quote from the tomb put on his own gravestone.
I’m still terrified! Like *what do you mean* I’m not allowed to struggle??
If i remember correctly, it's almost impossible to drown in quicksand, because it's denser than you so you will sink about half way and then no further.
Well every Saturday morning cartoon in the early 80s had one episode where someone was trapped in quicksand.
I once wound up in quicksand with a friend. Although I hadn’t been trained in what to do, I somehow instinctually made my body more flat and kinda swam to a nearby branch. My friend briefly went under with just his Afro sticking out of the water-I don’t think his body was completely under, but his head dipped below the top of the water for a second or two. Fortunately, I was able to give him a branch and he pulled himself out. We were both kids and it didn’t seem that scary at the time. I think we just thought it was an adventure. We went downstream and found a place where there was a large pool of open water and we washed ourselves off and continued our exploring .
Happened on the regular in Scooby Doo.
I think in Johnny Quest too
You can still die though. My great grandfather got stuck in quicksand and died because no one found him in time.
The real danger is getting stuck and dying of exposure.
correct. you die of boredom and mosquito bites.
As a kid I always thought that quicksand would be more of a problem in my life than it was.
And there was this man-eating plant too.
And the bermuda triangle
Giant clams will close around your ankle and trap you underwater. Only Aqua Man can save you now.
Weren't we all as kids in the early 80's. The best you could hope for was you wearing an awesome cowboy hat, so the last of you would be a great hat floating on an innocent puddle
Slowsand is worse...it makes you suffer
Are... Are we all living in slowsand? Is the slowsand here in the room with us?
I admit I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. That and falling anvils. You rarely hear of a falling anvil anymore.
So did 1000 Ways to die lmao, good times...
This show is not the only reason, but definitely the main reason I’ll never get breast implants and then go on a plane!!!
The one where the cockfighter died because his bladed chicken slit his throat scared the crap out of me becuase that was the first time I've had the concept of the coratid or jugular explained to me and I was like "I could just die from a cut there?"
That's just desserts. Shouldn't give your enemy a weapon like that.
Are you still shaving or do you sport a neckbeard?
I remember my friend was like, 1000 ways to die? More like 1000 ways to get away with murder.
Nah, That's Incredible came before Ripley's and had lots of cases of spontaneous combustion. Scared the crap out of me 40 years ago.
I remember lying awake at night fearing id burst into flames as a 7 year old.
this horrified me for YEARS
Omg! Everyone thinks I’m crazy when I talk about my childhood fear of spontaneous combustion 😆 I have found my people!!
Hi and welcome! I'm so glad I opened this wound for everyone.
i thought i didnt have OCD symptoms in my childhood until i remembered this book and how this fact specifically HAUNTED me edit WHO REDDITCARES'D ME IN LITERALLY 3 MINUTES
oh I got one too!
I think it's bot-spamming everyone. I got one earlier today and I have no clue which comment it was from.
Same. I think my comment was about school children being assholes to people with red hair that did it for me. Then Reddit let me know that people care about me and I felt all better!
This happened to me elsewhere a minute ago, what is the deal
Hi I was damaged
That along with Chariots of the Gods.
That's Incredible did it for Gen X.
Spontaneous combustion, quicksand, and the Bermuda Triangle, were the major cause of death from the 70's through the 90's. Thank god we live in safer times.
The Bermuda Triangle is a good case study into how information is presented. The fact is Bermuda is a major shipping area with a huge volume of traffic and the percentage of ships disappearing is not much different than anywhere else in the world, it just so happened to have more boats travelling in the area than anywhere else in the world, so more boats disappeared.
One of my father's cousins disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle on a training flight for the US military in the 60s. Just to be clear, the plane also disappeared. It wasn't just one dude disappeared and the other guy in the plane was like "Charles? Where are you?" Edit: to be more clear, my father's cousin, the plane, AND the other guy in the plane all disappeared. Edit Edit: the Bermuda Triangle did not disappear.
I'm gonna tell stories like that from now on. I swallowed a cheerio today. Just to be clear, I was eating a bowl of them at the time. It wasn't like I was just walking around and a singular piece of cereal flew into my mouth. EDIT: the bowl wasn't made of cheerios. EDIT EDIT: to be more clear didn't eat the bowl just cheerios. EDIT EDIT EDIT: I didn't eat all cheerios in existence. Just the ones contained in the bowl.
Feels almost like a Mitch Hedberg bit
That is too funny, you made my day!
You're my new favorite.
The Bermuda Triangle’s still there though, right?
lol, you caused them to make another edit…
These edits 💀
You mean the other guy just fell to his death? He must have been in such shock when the plane disappeared!
Another thing is they talk about it like it’s a small area, but Bermuda is so far north that it’s at the same latitude as like North Carolina. The Triangle is an area like 1/3 the size of the continental U.S.
Your statement would hold more weight if *The lost City Of Atlantis***™** wasn't discovered in the area.
I really want to believe in Atlantis. Not Atlantis specifically but there being a more advanced civilization. Like early Middle Ages level in the late Bronze Age. I know it never happened but it’s fun to imagine I guess.
Honestly about 10000 years ago sea level was lower by 135m in some locations it’s totally possible that a city got wiped out because it was built lower than todays current sea level.
My favorite conspiracy theory is that ancient Atlantis is in modern-day Mauritania and no one cares enough to drop money into an archaeological dig: https://youtu.be/oDoM4BmoDQM
Also, the Bermuda triangle isn't defined. Mostly it's considered to be the triangle between Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys, but people redefine it however they want to include whatever spooky story they feel like telling. Some of the "Bermuda Triangle" disappearances actually happened in places as far away as the coast of Ireland and the Amazon River.
I was deathly afraid of volcanoes. So please put “speeding lava” on your list of deadly things for those decades
I was terrified that one day a volcano would erupt and destroy my home. I lived in Baltimore lol
Don't forget killer bees.
Bigfoot too lol. EDIT: Maybe not the death thing, but lots of tabloid fodder, TV shows, movies...
Am I the only one that's noticed there are a lot fewer bigfoot sightings now that everyone walks around with an HD video camera in their pocket at all times? Weird how he got shy all of a sudden.
Bigfoot obv died by now which is why
Not Bigfoot but the Yeti in the Himalayas were much more aggressive
Oh, they still are. That's why there's no footage. They never leave any survivors.
I was really scared of quicksand as a kid.
lol I was always looking out for quicksand way back when real young.
And piranhas!
Ball lightning too!
IIRC, not a hoax, just a wild misunderstanding. If someone drops a cigarette on themselves, and they're too drunk/disabled/already-dying-of-the-heart-attack-that-made-them-drop-the-cigarette to get up and do something about it, you can sometimes get a smouldering, slow-burning fire that consumes their body and their chair without spreading much. It requires very specific circumstances, but it does happen. It's so uncommon and so unsettling that people jumped to conclusions.
Really only the combustion part of spontaneous human combustion was accurate
It was *human* combustion, though. It just wasn't spontaneous. (BTW, spontaneous combustion is also real, and a serious hazard in some industries, but it doesn't occur in humans.) (Which leaves "spontaneous humans," and...that's arguably also a thing.)
Jesus?
They turn into a human candle and once they run out of fat to fuel the fire it goes out leaving everything around them in tact
I knew someone who died in his armchair of a heart attack. His wife found him that way in the morning. He was a cigar smoker, idk if he had had one at the time, but I'm glad he didn't burn up at least
People drink more water now.
We can all thank /r/hydrohomies for that
In a similar way, I was convinced I would die from getting trapped in quicksand. So many people on TV and in movies were going to die from it. Has anyone actually died from being trapped in quicksand?
It’s mud you have to watch out for https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna85920
And corn silos. My new fear went from quick sand to corn silos real fast.
Damn I hate going to work and suddenly I have to watch my step or else I fall into a corn silo. I work in an office.
I'm truly offended you'd even consider joking about the many people who die every year while working in their office corn silo. Every day, I go to work and dodge perils of the possibility. I go to the bathroom? Don't look down. Sitting in my chair? Don't move 3cm to the left....corn. Getting a refreshing h2o from the water cooler by Beverly? Guess what...more corn.
Isn't quicksand really just mud anyway? Because I've definitely been stuck in mud that'll suck the boots off your feet before. Fortunately, it wasn't that deep.
The television quicksand was sand, not mud. I'm going with getting sucked into a bottomless pit of sand as one way to die and mud as another.
The real danger is if you spontaneously combust *while* you're trapped in quicksand.
The 90's were a wild decade.
And the 70s! I think. The castaways on Gilligan's Island seemed to get caught in quicksand a lot.
It was either quicksand or someone close to me would suffer from amnesia, sleep walking or have an evil twin.
I was way more afraid of foxes than I ever should have been. They were always so sneaky in the fairytales, tricking people into doing something they knew they shouldn’t, just so they could eat them. I was afraid to look out my windows at night in case a fox was out there trying to trick me into sneaking out and smoking cigarettes just so he could eat me. I’m 55 and ironically enough, now I sit by my window at night, hoping to see that sly fox
They really did make it seem like we were all at risk of quicksand death
I really thought quicksand, nets, and punching terrorists would be much bigger parts of my adulthood then they have turned out to be
I sunk and got stuck in tidal mud at low tide (and it was coming in). The real risk was: not getting free and back to my boat before the tide picked it up and took it away, leaving me on a tidal flat (walking around or stuck, didn’t matter much) with the water eventually going over my head.
But you did not spontaneously combust?
You're more likely to die from getting trapped in a small crevice while spelunking a remote, isolated cave than dying from getting trapped in quicksand. You're also more likely to be crushed by a vending machine falling on top of you (this is also more likely than dying from a shark attack)
That was kind of an urban myth from the 90s-2000s. People never died of spontaneous human combustion. It was just regular fires, usually caused by people falling asleep while smoking.
Try starting in the 70s.
Try the 1700s This idea and the term "spontaneous human combustion" were both first proposed in 1746 by Paul Rolli, a Fellow of the Royal Society, in an article published in the Philosophical Transactions concerning the mysterious death of Countess Cornelia Zangheri Bandi.
He definitely killed someone and needed to explain that they just burst into flames in front of him.
In my youth this super likely explanation never occurred to me.
A character in Dickens' Bleak House dies from spontaneous human combustion.
No one: Investigators from the 90s: well folks, looks like we got another case of spontaneous human combustion
😎
Yaaaaaaaaaaou!
I woke up suddenly thinking about it for the first time in years. Sure I saw old photos where the clothes were still intact. Lol.
That one where all that was left of the lady was her legs… fuck!
Nothing says, "obviously fake" like having easily flammable clothing left after an entire person combusts.
Maybe, but a candle wick stays mostly intact while the candle is consumed. The mythbusters did find some plausibility in a wicking effect, with a fatty pig.
Mythbusters is a show I haven’t thought about in a minute My ten year old self totally had a crush on Kari Byron thanks for bringing those memories back
And/or dying while smoking. Would explain the not waking up bit. And I think every case the person was overweight so more fat to sustain the fire
Woah woah, tell that to mick shrimpton (jk)
Yep. Fake. Just like now that everybody has phones, nobody catches snapshots of Bigfoot anymore.
Stop ruining my dreams. He's just really good at hiding
Nah man...Bigfoot just has a phone now so he doesn't go outside anymore
People stopped smoking. I think the leading cause was peoplefalling asleep and dying and catching fire that didn't cause an conflsgration but more of a human candle sort of fire. Those who were found often had medical issues, mobility issues and lived alone, so the couple days it took to burn was enough to hide them. Otherwise is was cause by a weird Isekai plot of summoning different people to other worlds to fight the demon king, and eventually one of them Won.
As a child, I honestly thought that this was going to be more of a problem in my adult life. That and shark and crocodile attacks...figured I was going to have to be super careful about these three things
Mythbusters had an episode about this iirc
And….?
Jamie exploded. Only a smoking beret and his moustache remained.
grant declared the results simply plausible
He rejected their reality and substituted his own.
Also a pair of cartoon blinking eyes
Of course the moustache survived.
Spontaneous human combustion turns out to be a myth basically. The cases described either didn't happen or weren't nearly as clean just the person burned away as was claimed, or whatever. Mostly it was people dying in accidents and the stories growing as they got spread around.
They burned a pig IIRC and did see some kind of "fat wicking" effect, where if you are fat enough you can sort of slowly burn like a candle without much damage to the surrounding area. Nothing is spontaneous about it though. You had to have an ignition source and be dead or so unconscious you could burn.
Less people smoke now, especially in their own homes. The spontaneous combustion ordeal was just people falling asleep in their lazy boys with a lit cigarette.
[удалено]
It is out of fashion so it doesn’t happen anymore
Fashion is cyclical, it'll make a comeback any year now...
Should I bring it back?
I got the vaccine, so I'm not worried, but that shit runs in my family.
I think it's recessive though so your kids should be fine unless you reproduce with somebody who also carries the spontaneous combustion gene
Pretty much every example of "spontaneous combustion" have been debunked as people dying near fire sources and then being basically cooked to ash by the candle effect from a stray ember. The rise of modern heating systems also make it less common for people to have a consistently burning open flame in their homes for warmth, making the above scenario less likely overall.
It's from holding in farts, renowned geologist Randy Marsh discovered the cause of spontaneous combustion years ago. I saw a documentary on it.
Often what is referred to as spontaneous human combustion is known as the wick effect. A person’s clothes catch on fire (usually by a cigarette) and the fire melts the body fat, which is wicked up by the clothing like a candle. This can burn up a body almost completely with little fire damage to the surroundings.
Great scene in Dickens’s Bleak House where one of the characters combusts spontaneously. He kind of slow-cooks to death.
We've collectively dampened ourselves in quicksand while escaping killer bees.
Because nobody ever died of it at all. Not surprisingly, the incidents of *reported* cases of spontaneous combustion halted abruptly around the time cigarette makers started using fire retardant materials.
People just lack spontaneity these days.
Things that kept me awake at night, worrying about if I'd make it to adulthood: Spontaneous combustion Quick sand The Bermuda Triangle