Mary Reeser was a normal 67-year-old widow living in Florida. She had moved there to be closer to her son.


 On July 2, 1951, she was found dead in a very strange way. Her body was burned almost completely to ashes while she was sitting in her rocking chair. Only her spine, skull, and left leg remained.


The left leg was not burned at all and still had a slipper on it. The skull was burned so much that it shrank to the size of a baseball.


The fire was extremely hot, as hot as a cremation oven, but strangely, only her body burned. The rest of the room and house showed no signs of fire damage. This is very unusual because burning a body to ashes normally takes 3 to 4 hours at about 1650 degrees Fahrenheit, and such heat would usually burn the whole room.


The police could not explain what happened, and even the FBI got involved. Their best guess was that Mary fell asleep while smoking, which caused the fire. But this did not explain the unburned leg or why the rest of the room was untouched by the fire.


Because of these strange details, the investigators kept the case open. They said they still had no clear idea of what caused Mary’s death, just like when they first arrived.


Even science could not explain this famous case of spontaneous human combustion.


Dr. Wilton M. Krogman, an expert on how fire affects the human body, said it was the most amazing thing he had ever seen. He said it scared him so much that if he had lived in the Middle Ages, he might have thought it was caused by magic.

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