One of my jobs as a cop was to dust for fingerprints at the scene of a burglary. It was called the SP-11 car. I worked solo, and I carried a kit full of fine-haired brushes, adhesive-tape, and black, white, & metallic dusting powder.

One night I went to this home to investigate a burglary. It was a townhouse with broken and loose cement steps, an unkempt garden with five-feet high stalks of weeds & grass, and no porch light. The man who answered the door was middle-aged & wearing a torn and dirty T-shirt and shorts. He let me into his home, but he wouldn’t turn on any lights. The house was dark and I had to use my flashlight to see where I was going. The first thing my flashlight lit up was a maze of newspapers stacked in columns, 7 to 8 feet high in the front room. Pillars of The New York Times pressed to the ceiling. A hoarder! The man led me through the narrow path between his paper-towers of old news to the one room that had a light on—the kitchen in the back of the house. On the kitchen table was evidence of the burglary: opened tin cans of post-WW2 rations. The man explained that the cans of food had been sitting in the cardboard since the 1950s (why? don’t ask). “Look at this!” the man shouted as he stuck a half-eaten can of sardines under my nose. It was revolting. The tiny fish bodies had conglomerated into a white slime of putrid snot. I gagged, and imagined the burglar writhing in agonizing abdominal pain of botulism.

Next, he asked me to follow him upstairs to take a look at the ransacked bedroom. As I’m walking up the darkened staircase, I hear crunching under my feet. I pointed my flashlight down to see what I had been stepping on and I saw scattered all over the stairs the tiny skeletons of long-time dead mice. Yikes! That was it for me. I’m thinking I don’t wanna see the rest of this filthy house! “OK. I’ve seen enough,” I said, and turned around to leave. “Wait,” the man said. “I wanna show you the basement.”

Ah, yes, “the basement”. The bowels of the earth. The dungeon. The Pit. The torture chamber. Spider-webs. The place where monsters hide in shadows. This should be interesting, and I couldn’t resist to look at “the basement.”

The basement was the second room with a light. What I saw was a dentist office, fully equipped with the reclining chair, the drills, the spittoon, the x-ray machine, and dozens of little metal dental tools laid out neatly on trays as though waiting for the next patient.

“My dad used to be a dentist,” he said. “But he’s dead now.” Well, that might explain why the equipment and tools looked old and rusty.

Remember the film Marathon Man when the villain Lawrence Olivier tortures Dustin Hoffman with a dental drill? Well, I remembered. And that was my cue to say goodbye. “Aren’t you gonna dust for prints?” asked the man.

“No!”

One winter evening, a woman was entering her apartment building when she noticed something burning in the bushes. It was a small fire. A few flames flickered like birthday candles on the branches of a two-foot high bush. The woman thought it was garbage and went over to take a closer look. But to her horror she saw the body of a man. Well, it looked like a man, it definitely had a human shape. The body was curled up in a fetus-position and burnt as black as charcoal, and all the clothes were incinerated, except what was left of his pants and shoes, blackened and baked.

When the police arrived, the officer went through his singed pockets to find identification. There was nothing. No fingerprints; maybe dental records would tell us who he was. He was unknown. We couldn’t find any witnesses, except for the woman who discovered his body. I was driving the sergeant, and when we drove away and left the sector car to wait for the detectives and the ambulance, I thought: How could somebody be set on fire in the middle of a suburban street, at 5 PM in the evening, two blocks away from a busy subway station, with rush hour pedestrian traffic walking up & down the street, and yet, not one person noticed a human torch jumping up and down, frailing his arms, screaming, in the middle of the street?

I never did find out who was the burnt-to-a-crisp man. Or, if somebody set him on fire. Or, whether or not he did it to himself. Or, if this was a case of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC). That mystery would be left for the detectives to solve

Spontaneous Human Combustion is a strange phenomenon. It’s never been proven as a natural occurrence, but many theories have tried to explain SHC’s existence and how it may occur. The two most common explanations for apparent SHC are the non-spontaneous “wick effect” fire, and the rare discharge called static flash fires. Although mathematically it can be shown the human body contains enough energy stored in the form of fat and other tissues to consume it completely, in normal circumstances bodies can’t sustain a flame on their own.

But still, stories of people suddenly bursting into flames have been told for the past 348 years. The first recorded case was in 1662 (However, I have also read the first reported case may also have been in 1763, when a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of Spontaneous Human Combustion cases) and since then over 200 cases have been documented.