Alternate Perceptions Magazine, November 2025
Burning Man
By Nomar Slevik
On a cold January morning in 1943, Deer Isle residents were shocked to hear about the death of Allen M. Small. He was fifty-two years old, lived alone, and his charred remains didn’t make any sense.
His body had been almost completely burned yet the house showed no other signs of a fire. The only remnants, besides the body, was a patch of scorched carpet that had been beneath him. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary with his stove, the lids closed, and nearby, his tobacco pipe sat untouched. Of course, it was a winter in Maine, so it’s safe to assume he had a fire going for warmth but nothing in the information I researched would account for the man catching himself on fire.
Because of the peculiar circumstances, his death was considered by some to be an example of spontaneous human combustion (SHC). Whether people believed it or not, the case has since stood as one of Maine’s few contributions to that dark corner of lore, a body consumed by fire while the house around it remained intact.
Small’s story fits a pattern. When you look back at historic accounts of SHC, what strikes you is how often the bodies are found alone, consumed to a shocking degree, while the furniture, walls, and surrounding space appear mostly unharmed. The most famous of these accounts dates back to 1731, when Countess Cornelia Bandi of Cesena, Italy, was discovered one morning reduced to ash. Her room was intact, her bed barely touched, yet the body itself had been nearly obliterated. A local clergyman, Joseph Bianchini, documented the scene, and his report spread across Europe. Skeptics have since pointed out that the Countess was in the habit of rubbing herself with camphorated brandy to ease pain, an oil-soaked ritual that placed her in a tinderbox of her own making, especially in an era when candles burned on every bedside table. But the image of her death… legs and hands preserved, torso burned to cinders, became a template for SHC.
Interestingly, Charles Dickens made use of that template when he killed off Mr. Krook in his 1853 novel Bleak House. Krook is discovered as a heap of ashes, with “a small burnt patch of flooring” and a greasy residue nearby. Dickens knew what he was doing. He had researched cases, and when critics accused him of indulging in nonsense, he fired back that there were “about thirty cases on record” that he believed credible. He cited Bianchini’s account of Countess Bandi and other medical reports from eighteenth-century France. Dickens wouldn’t be swayed. He insisted that spontaneous human combustion was not fiction.
Theories, of course, have always followed these deaths. Some point to static electricity. Everyone has felt a spark leap from fingertip to doorknob on a dry day, but advocates of SHC have suggested that such a discharge could ignite a body from within. “While it would be possible for ignition to occur from static electrical sparks, it is very improbable,” one researcher noted, pointing out the obvious flaw: if static electricity could ignite humans, why not cats or dogs, whose fur often crackles with it?
Others have tried to explain SHC through intestinal gas. While methane is flammable, human flatulence has very little if at all. That said, people have managed to ignite their gas as a party trick, but this requires an open flame right at the moment of release. That hardly explains a body sitting quietly in a chair, erupting into a fireball. As one skeptic put it, “Spontaneous human combustion is never a result of passing gas, otherwise people (and animals) would be bursting into flames almost constantly”.
The more exotic theories only deepen the divide between believers and skeptics. In the 1990s, author Larry Arnold proposed the existence of a new subatomic particle, the “pyrotron,” that could trigger nuclear-like reactions in human cells, sparking fire from within. Others have invoked “maser induction,” geomagnetic fluctuations, or even yogic energy called kundalini. None of these ideas have ever been demonstrated, let alone tested. They serve only to keep the mystery alive.
Science, on the other hand, has offered explanations grounded in fire behavior. The most important of these is the so-called “wick effect.” In this model, a person’s clothing acts like the wick of a candle. Once ignited by some sort of source (a cigarette, a spark from a stove, or some other small flame) the clothing draws in the body’s melted fat, sustaining a low, localized fire. The fat serves as the fuel, the clothing as the wick. The fire burns slowly, sometimes for hours, consuming much of the body but producing relatively little heat in the surrounding environment. That explains why furniture and walls nearby often remain untouched.
Experiments back this up. The BBC had enlisted forensic scientist, John DeHaan, to conducted a test. He had wrapped a pig carcass in a blanket doused with gasoline. He showed how the gasoline burned off quickly after lighting it, while the fat of the pig melted slowly. As a result, the fat coated the blanket and carpet, allowing the fire to smolder for hours. It reduced the carcass to ash while the rest of the room was left untouched. Grisly sure, but the result was no mystery, just physics and biology.
Later, more controlled studies were conducted. A 2000 master’s thesis at the University of Tennessee tested the combustibility of actual human tissue. One experiment involved an amputated leg from an elderly woman. Ignited with the help of a cotton wick, the sample burned for forty-five minutes, fueled by its fat. The effective heat of combustion was calculated at 17 kilojoules per gram, far less than gasoline, but enough to consume flesh without igniting nearby furniture. In another experiment, bones from individuals with osteoporosis were burned alongside healthy bones. Findings showed, “The osteoporotic bones incinerated more quickly, crumbling into fragments while their denser counterparts remained more intact.”
That science may sound clinical, but it maps uncannily onto the scene at Deer Isle: a winter fire in the stove, flammable clothing, isolation, and perhaps an unnoticed ember or spark. “Every death involving fire appears to have been started by components outside the human body,” one skeptical account reminds us. “In every single fatality, the victim could not move away from the flames… nor could they extinguish the flames themselves.”
So, what happened to Small? In my opinion, it’s the simplest answer: he was probably tending to his stove when a spark caught his clothing. He may not have noticed immediately. A sleeve, a pant leg, smoldering until it drew on the fat beneath. The fire would have been slow but relentless. By the time it consumed him, there was no one nearby to intervene.
I will concede, however, that there is something eerie about a body reduced to cinders while the room stands whole. Regardless of my opinion, there is no concrete answer and I think that’s why these cases, from the eighteenth century until now, have kept this macabre phenomenon alive. They appeal to the same dark curiosity that once made Dickens defend his fictional death by fire against skeptics. As one nineteenth-century critic put it, SHC is “a very silly and fabulous relation… at variance with known physical laws,” but it creates “wonder and terror at an unknown event”.
In the end, Allen Small’s death remains a mystery only if you want it to. Forensic science has laid out a plausible path from ember to smoldering flame to ash. Yet for some, the story of the Deer Isle man, claimed by a force that may not exist, is far more intriguing.
