Go to the thesaurus article about these synonyms and antonyms of burst into flames. See also burn. Learn more If you make fire or damage something with fire, you burn it. We use different words to describe things that start burning. If you make a fire in order to destroy something, you are burning something down. A burning building, vehicle, etc. If you burn yourself or part of your body , you damage your body by touching or getting too close to something that is very hot.
If you burn food , you cook it too much. Browse burn to the ground. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. Word of the Day have a heart of gold. Blog Outsets and onsets! For several centuries, people have debated whether human beings can spontaneously combust, or burst into flames without being ignited by an external source.
More recently, cases of SHC have been suspected when police and fire department officials have found burned corpses with unscathed furniture around them. For instance, an Irish coroner ruled that spontaneous combustion caused the death of year-old Michael Faherty, whose badly burned body was discovered near a fireplace in a room with virtually no fire damage.
Because the human body is composed mostly of water and its only highly flammable properties are fat tissue and methane gas, the possibility of SHC being an actual phenomenon seems remote. Many scientists dismiss the theory, arguing that an undetected flame source such as a match or cigarette is the real culprit in suspected cases. Typically, deceased victims are found close to a fire source, and evidence suggests that many of them accidentally set themselves on fire while smoking or trying to light a flame.
On the other hand, believers point to the fact that the human body has to reach a temperature of roughly 3, degrees in order to be reduced to ashes. Part of the good doctor's incinerated robe lay at the site and his walker was left propped against the blackened bathtub.
But the most eye-catching clue was a massive hole in his vinyl floor. Measuring 2 feet. The rest of the house remained intact [source: Endeavour ]. How could a man catch fire and then burn so completely without igniting everything around him? At first, Bentley's demise was identified as a careless mishap. The elderly gentleman loved to smoke his pipe and he had a habit of carrying matches in his robe pockets. Upon reviewing the scene, the coroner deduced that Bentley had fallen asleep while smoking in the bathroom and was burned alive after some of his clothing caught fire [source: Nickell ].
But there's another school of thought. Bentley's case and many others like it have been presented as examples of spontaneous human combustion SHC. Although he and other alleged victims of the phenomenon burned almost completely, their surroundings were left somewhat unscathed. So can humans spontaneously burst into flames? A lot of people think spontaneous human combustion is a real occurrence, but most scientists aren't convinced.
In this article, we will take a look at this strange debate, see what believers have to say about it and try to separate the scientific truth from the myths. Spontaneous combustion occurs when an object — in the case of spontaneous human combustion, a person — bursts into flames from a chemical reaction within, apparently without being ignited by an external heat source [source: National Parks Service ].
The Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin has been credited with penning the first written account of spontaneous human combustion. In , he described how a woman in Paris "went up in ashes and smoke" while she was sleeping. The straw mattress on which she slept was unmarred by the fire. In , a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of spontaneous combustion cases in his work "De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis" [source: Reville ].
The hundreds of alleged SHC accounts since that time have followed a similar pattern: The victim is almost completely consumed, usually inside his or her home. Coroners at the scene have sometimes noted a sweet, smoky smell in the room where the incident occurred [source: Endeavour ]. There's something peculiar about many of the photos that document suspected SHC victims.
Also, the room around the person may show minimal fire damage — though a greasy residue is sometimes left behind on furniture and walls [source: Nickell ]. Reports have also been made about spontaneous human combustion victims who didn't simply burst into flames. These individuals are said to have developed strange burns on their bodies with no obvious source.
And not every person who supposedly caught fire has died — some people say they've experienced SHC and then lived to tell the tale [source: Lewis ]. For an object to combust spontaneously, three things need to happen. First, the body must be heated to its ignition temperature — the point at which it will catch fire without being exposed to an external flame or spark. If the heat building up inside the object cannot escape, and if it's being exposed to a steady flow of oxygen that isn't rapid enough to cool it down, the stage will be set for spontaneous ignition [source: South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service ].
We know this can happen to certain inanimate objects that will be discussed later. But does the phenomenon occur in humans? The jury is still out. That said, a few explanations for how people could hypothetically experience spontaneous combustion have been forth over the last few centuries.
Charles Dickens blamed booze. In the s, the writer ignited great interest in SHC by using it to kill off a character in his novel "Bleak House. American prohibitionists helped spread this notion as they denounced the evils of alcoholism [source: Behr ]. Other ideas are more popular today.
One widespread belief says the fire is sparked when methane a flammable gas produced by gut bacteria builds up in the intestines and is ignited by enzymes proteins in the body that act as catalysts to induce and speed up chemical reactions [source: Reville ]. Yet this begs the question of why there are no reported instances of spontaneous combustion in cows, which produce far more methane than people [source: Radford ]. It's also been suggested that the fire begins because of static electricity building up inside the body or from an external geomagnetic force.
A self-proclaimed expert on spontaneous human combustion, Larry Arnold, has suggested that the phenomenon is the work of a new subatomic particle called a pyroton , which he says interacts with cells to create a mini-explosion. But as of August , there's no scientific evidence that proves the existence of this particle — or spontaneous human combustion itself [source: McCarthy ]. If spontaneous human combustion isn't real, then what's the explanation for the stories of people who have seemingly burned from within?
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