Episode 5 - Spontaneous Human Combustion & The Bermuda Triangle

So tonight, I want to take you back, back to the early '90s.

[gentle music] A time when playing outside with your friends, camping in the garden, skip-its and swingball ruled the world.

When corner shops sold penny sweets scooped up with bare hands into paper bags, and somehow children were still allowed to buy cigarettes for their parents with a handwritten note.

And during that time, ghost stories spread around the playground like wildfire.

Bloody Mary haunted the school toilets, and nobody wanted to look into a mirror alone.

Although honestly, the most terrifying thing in our school toilets was probably that awful Izal toilet paper.

[screams] If you know, you know.

Mm-hmm.

No absorption in that whatsoever.

Ugh, the trauma.

But around the age of eight or nine, I discovered the book that changed everything for me, Reader's Digest Mysteries of the Unexplained.

It sat up high inside our parents' old in-built 1930s cupboard beside the glasses, and one day I asked to read it, and I suppose Mom and Dad thought I was old enough.

That was their first mistake, because I opened the page about spontaneous human combustion.

It was once believed that human beings could simply burst into flames, burning with such fierce heat that their bodies were reduced almost entirely to ash, while the room around them remained strangely untouched.

In many of these cases, furniture survived, carpets remained intact, nearby objects were barely scorched, and often one foot, a hand, or part of a leg remained behind.

Everything else, gone.

The book described spontaneous human combustion as, "A well-documented phenomenon in which a human body ignites and burns without known contact from an external source of fire." And to my young brain, that was it.

I became convinced it could happen to any of us.

I'd lie awake in bed wondering if I might suddenly burst into flames in the middle of the night, or if someone in my family might combust while we slept.

I was terrified.

One of the earliest cases mentioned dated back to Paris in 1673.

A woman described as a heavy drinker went to sleep on a straw mattress.

The following morning, only her skull and the ends of her fingers remained.

Everything else had turned to ash.

But the image that truly haunted me came years later, the case of Dr. John Irving Bentley in 1966.

So tonight, I want to take you back, back to the early '90s.

[gentle music] A time when playing outside with your friends, camping in the garden, skip-its and swingball ruled the world.

When corner shops sold penny sweets scooped up with bare hands into paper bags, and somehow children were still allowed to buy cigarettes for their parents with a handwritten note.

And during that time, ghost stories spread around the playground like wildfire.

Bloody Mary haunted the school toilets, and nobody wanted to look into a mirror alone.

Although honestly, the most terrifying thing in our school toilets was probably that awful Izal toilet paper.

[screams] If you know, you know.

Mm-hmm.

No absorption in that whatsoever.

Ugh, the trauma.

But around the age of eight or nine, I discovered the book that changed everything for me, Reader's Digest Mysteries of the Unexplained.

It sat up high inside our parents' old in-built 1930s cupboard beside the glasses, and one day I asked to read it, and I suppose Mom and Dad thought I was old enough.

That was their first mistake, because I opened the page about spontaneous human combustion.

It was once believed that human beings could simply burst into flames, burning with such fierce heat that their bodies were reduced almost entirely to ash, while the room around them remained strangely untouched.

In many of these cases, furniture survived, carpets remained intact, nearby objects were barely scorched, and often one foot, a hand, or part of a leg remained behind.

Everything else, gone.

The book described spontaneous human combustion as, "A well-documented phenomenon in which a human body ignites and burns without known contact from an external source of fire." And to my young brain, that was it.

I became convinced it could happen to any of us.

I'd lie awake in bed wondering if I might suddenly burst into flames in the middle of the night, or if someone in my family might combust while we slept.

I was terrified.

One of the earliest cases mentioned dated back to Paris in 1673.

A woman described as a heavy drinker went to sleep on a straw mattress.

The following morning, only her skull and the ends of her fingers remained.

Everything else had turned to ash.

But the image that truly haunted me came years later, the case of Dr. John Irving Bentley in 1966.