The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  Despite the family’s unremitting efforts to stir her, the unfortunate schoolgirl did not wake for 11,730 days.

  Carolina’s father was a fisherman who earned too little to afford the luxury of a doctor. Instead he and his wife sought the advice of a midwife and of friends in the local fishing community. The counsel these lay-people offered was useful, to a point. But while Mrs Olsson was able to keep her beloved daughter alive by forcing sugared milk and water down her throat, the problem of bringing her back to consciousness was clearly beyond her and everyone else.

  Eventually the impoverished neighbours clubbed together to pay for a visit - and, they hoped, a cure - from the elderly local doctor. He diagnosed, correctly, that the patient was in coma. Nothing, from shaking and shouting, to smelling salts and pins jabbed painfully into the backs of her hands, would rouse her. The doctor presented Mrs Olsson with a bottle of tonic to keep up the sleeping girl’s strength, refused his fee and retreated.

  But this kindly man continued to do what he could for his sleep-enslaved patient. He dropped by to see her whenever his rounds allowed and always left a gift of essentially useless medicine or of his wife’s nourishing broth on the kitchen table. Hoping that medical minds superior to his might be able to suggest a cure, he wrote to the editor of Scandinavia’s principal medical journal, describing the case. The response was almost immediate. Carolina, who now had been comatose for almost a year, began to receive a parade of learned visitors, the majority of whom were anxious not only to acquire information, but to cure. After failing to wake the girl a number of physicians tried to explain the coma away by labelling it the result of mental retardation following the fall on the ice. One even accused her of faking her condition. None of the visitors succeeded in waking Carolina - but they were able to extend the frontiers of medical knowledge by publishing several remarkable and never-explained observations about her coma:

  At no time did her hair need to be cut. It simply remained the same length. Likewise, the fingernails and toenails never grew.

  The family reported, for the clinical record, that Carolina had sat up several times during the prolonged ordeal. On every occasion her parents were momentarily convinced she had recovered - but her eyes remained shut, and when she spoke it was only to mumble prayers she had learned by rote in childhood.

  Awake: a newspaper photograph of Carolina Olsson, taken in 1908 after she emerged from a 32-year coma.

  In 1904, the 28th year of Carolina’s nightmarish sleep, her devoted mother - exhausted by relentless nursing and cleaning - dropped dead. Female neighbours took on the task of feeding and washing the 42-year-old victim.

  It seemed to everyone that the coma would last forever. But then, on the evening of 3 April 1908, Carolina snapped into complete wakefulness at last - and began crying out for her mother. Her father and two of his sons hurried awestruck into the room. They told Carolina that her mother was dead - as were her other two brothers, who had drowned while fishing in the ocean. Carolina, who was finding it difficult to recognise these old grizzled men, burst into tears, thinking they were playing a cruel joke.

  But if she was suspicious, they were astonished. Although she was thin and initially awkward on her feet, she appeared (as a panel of physicians subsequently reported) ‘astonishingly youthful’. And unlike many coma victims, her speech, memory and reasoning ability seemed miraculously unaffected. Carolina Olsson’s recovery from her 32-year sleep intrigued the world, with so many newspapermen arriving from throughout Europe, England and America that she was obliged, with her family, to close up the cottage and go into hiding.

  At the government’s request Carolina underwent psychiatric testing at a Stockholm hospital - where she was found to be in full possession of all the academic knowledge she had acquired up to the time she fell asleep. She was particularly gifted at solving mathematical problems, just as she had been at school decades before. And she was ‘bright and cheerful’ in her responses to the doctors’ questions.

  Only one topic of conversation seemed to trouble her. When a psychiatrist asked whether she could recall any dreams from her time in the coma, her expression became morose and she declined to answer. Politely pressed she replied, ‘Yes, I did have dreams.’ Then turned her head aside, signalling that she would say no more.

  Although Carolina had woken at age 46 she appeared - according to both newspaper and clinical accounts - to be no older than 25. How she emerged from the long sleep with her looks and intelligence unaffected remains a mystery to this day. Known to all as a lively and good-humoured woman, she died in 1950, aged 89.

  The Coma that Lasted 37 Years

  On 6 August 1941 schoolgirl Elaine Esposito of Tarpon Springs, Florida, was anaesthetised for an appendectomy.

  She fell into a coma that lasted 37 years and 111 days and died without waking. Elaine took her last breath eight days before her 44th birthday. Her coma, which encompassed states between deep sleep and open-eyed unconsciousness, was the longest in clinical history.

  * * *

  Hell from Within

  The Flames that Killed

  Jacqueline

  * * *

  In the winter of 1985, pretty English teenager Jacqueline Fitzsimons burst inexplicably into flames in a school corridor. Because the fire seemingly had destroyed her body from inside, doctors could do little - and she later died. Jacqueline’s demise marked another chapter in one of the deepest enigmas facing the medical profession. Although the rare but deadly syndrome SHC (Spontaneous Human Combustion) has been described in virtually every written language for thousands of years, medical scientists are still no closer to identifying its cause. But what investigators do know is that the affliction has a chillingly paranormal aspect. Eerie coincidences sometimes trail in its wake, with the names of unrelated victims creating strange echoes…

  JACQUELINE (JACQUI) FITZSIMONS WAS 17 YEARS OLD and a student at Halton technical college in Cheshire, England. According to her teachers she was a happy and patently healthy young woman, popular and hardworking.

  On 8 January 1985 Jacqui was chatting with classmates in a school corridor when she complained to a friend, Karen Glenholmes, that she felt sick and had a ‘burning feeling’ in her back. Karen told BBC News, ‘There was a smouldering smell and she started screaming for help, saying she was burning all over. There was no mark on her outer clothing - but when we ripped it away we saw that the clothes underneath were on fire.’

  The flames spread so quickly that Jacqui suffered shocking burns before teachers and students, some with wet towels, were able to stifle the outbreak. An ambulance rushed her to hospital, where doctors found that 18 per cent of her skin had been burned away. Even her hair was reduced to a blackened stubble. After 15 days in intensive care the teenager died.

  For the inquest county authorities recreated the bizarre tragedy in a laboratory, with a dummy wearing similar clothes to Jacqui’s. Bert Gillies, the county fire prevention officer, told the court, ‘There may be an everyday explanation - but we feel that spontaneous human combustion is a possibility that should be considered.’

  Spontaneous human combustion was very much in the British public’s mind at the time. Eleven months before Jacqueline Fitzsimons died, a similarly inexplicable flesh-fire had consumed a Devon woman, Christine Middlehurst [see panel page 255].

  Illustration from an 1853 edition of Bleak House, in which Charles Dickens describes spontaneous human combustion.

  Newspapers reminded their readers that the ‘human bonfire syndrome’ had been known ‘from 300 BC to Victorian times’, with Charles Dickens even including it in his 1853 novel Bleak House. In the 20th century English victims had included a 68-year-old English widow, Euphemia Johnson, who had combusted while taking afternoon tea. All that remained of her was a pile of charred bones inside her inexplicably un-burned clothes. In 1938, Phyllis Newcombe, 22, had become a screaming ball of fire during a British dance championship. She died before reaching hospital.

  One of the
most horrifying SHC cases concerned a Florida widow, Mrs Mary Reeser, 67. The last time she was seen alive was on 1 July 1951 when her son, Dr Richard Reeser, visited her for dinner. Also in the building was her landlady Mrs Pansy Carpenter. ‘At about 5 am,’ Mrs Carpenter later recalled, ‘I was wakened by the smell of smoke. Assuming it was a water pump that had been overheating I got up, turned it off and went back to sleep.’

  At 8 am the doorbell rang, waking Mrs Carpenter again. It was a delivery boy with a telegraph message for Mrs Reeser. The landlady signed for it, then knocked at the door of her tenant’s apartment. There was no answer. The smouldering smell from behind the door was so pungent she realised it was what had woken her hours earlier. Something was terribly wrong. She reached for the doorknob. It was painfully hot. She ran outside to find help. Two painters who had been working nearby followed the landlady into the building and forced open Mrs Reeser’s door. A blast of intense heat struck them.

  Obviously there had been a bad fire in here. But where was it? Everything in the apartment seemed normal. Except…except for the horror in one small corner, in which stood the remains of Mary Reeser’s easy chair - and what was left of Mary Reeser herself. In life she had weighed 77 kilograms. But - as forensic analysis would confirm - here on the floor lay less than 4.5 kilograms of charred human material.

  Mary Reeser, sitting in a circle of flame, had been burned into virtual nothingness. All that remained of her was the skull, shrunk to the size of a baseball, a fragment of liver fused to a piece of vertebra, and her left foot, intact and still wearing a slipper.

  Firemen and police investigated. Except for Mrs Reeser’s devastated corner, everything else in the apartment seemed - at a quick first glance - to have remained untouched by the fire. But closer inspection told a different story. Although 98 per cent of the furniture and hangings remained intact (seemingly miraculous in such savage heat) the walls, above a metre, were covered with dark greasy soot. All the hard-plastic light fittings had melted, along with two candles on the mantelpiece and a plastic-framed wall-clock which had stopped at 4.20 am. And a deep jagged crack had appeared on the face of a wall-mirror.

  At the inquest, a puzzled expert testified that it was ‘theoretically impossible’ for furniture and hangings to have survived the temperatures that had almost wholly cremated Mrs Reeser. The coroner pressed police and arson investigators to suggest a possible cause of the fire - but everything, from petrol through accelerants to a lightning strike, was ruled out. None could have generated such ferocious heat.

  Public interest in the mystery was so extreme that the Chief of Police finally tried to assuage it by issuing a statement. Mrs Mary Reeser, the press release said, had started the fire herself, by falling asleep while holding a lit cigarette. Cynics remarked that it must have been an astonishing cigarette: potent enough to reduce a human body to one-seventeenth its size.

  Professor’s Probe

  This attempt to sweep the mystery under a charred carpet inspired the FBI to act at last. The bureau had long been worried by cases (albeit uncommon) of Spontaneous Human Combustion. Several weeks after the Reeser inquest it commissioned a special investigation of the phenomenon. In charge was Dr Wilton Krogman, professor of physical anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Meltdown: the charred remains of an SHC victim.

  Krogman started from first principles. In a house fire, he reminded his graduate assistants, the body’s extremities (hands, arms, legs and feet) may be burned to ash - but the body itself, with its bones and organs, tends to be left behind. When Spontaneous Human Combustion happens, the rule is reversed: the body becomes ash, while the extremities commonly remain intact.

  Professor Krogman understood the parameters of the problem, but he came nowhere close to solving it. After six months of dedicated, and often ingenious, effort he reported, ‘I have experimented with every known method of destroying cadavers using heat. I asked myself again and again why Mrs Reeser could have been so thoroughly destroyed, even to the bones, yet leaving nearby objects unaffected. They say truth is often stranger than fiction, and this case proves it.’

  Spontaneous combustion usually kills. But one of the few people fortunate enough to survive was another academic, Professor James Hamilton, who held the chair of mathematics at the University of Tennessee.

  According to the Transactions of the Tennessee Medical Society Hamilton had recently arrived home from work when he felt a sharp pain, like a hornet-sting, in his left knee. ‘Looking down,’ the journal records, he ‘saw a bright blue flame spouting like a lighted gas jet from his trousered leg.’

  After slapping at the flame without result Hamilton had the presence of mind to cup his hands around it, to cut off the oxygen. Few others have thought so swiftly. SHC has killed people in cars, in their own sitting rooms, even on city streets.

  Fiery Flukes of Chance

  The coincidences connected with some SHC cases are almost as uncanny as the phenomenon itself. Consider the Carpenters:

  The landlady who discovered Mary Reeser’s body was Mrs Pansy M. Carpenter.

  In the celebrated combustion case which occurred in Virginia in 1938 the victim was a Mrs Carpenter.

  And during the 19th century, no one published more about spontaneous human combustion than the Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at University College, London. His name: Prof W.B. Carpenter.

  * * *

  Even eerier are the dates and places connected with two SHC victims named Rose Cary:

  On 2 July 1950 a Mrs Rose Cary burst into flames and died at her house in Shilling Street in suburban Baltimore, USA.

  On 3 July 1951 another Rose Cary (no relation) died in almost identical circumstances in Ontario, Canada. Her apartment was in Sheeling Place.

  The Blaze that Consumed Christine

  In 1984, in an event that intrigued the world, a Devon woman burst into flames in her living room. Christine Middlehurst became what police called ‘a human torch’. Except for greasy stains on the walls, the room was undamaged.

  ‘What happened is a complete mystery,’ a police spokesman said. Christine’s partner Martin Folan was equally puzzled. ‘One minute we were sitting talking - the next, fire started blazing out of her everywhere. I got terrible burns when I tried to beat out the flames.’

  Christine ran screaming down the front path. A neighbour, Elaine Fox, carried her inside and plunged her into a cold-water bath. ‘The skin just floated off her,’ Mrs Fox said.

  Christine Middlehurst lived - becoming one of the few known survivors of SHC.

  Three Dead, in a Triangle of Flame

  Perhaps the most remarkable of SHC cases - in which three men fatally combusted on the same day - is described by Michael Harrison in his book Fire from Heaven:

  On 7 April 1938, Captain John Greeley was steering the SS Ulrich to its home port of Liverpool. The ship had just passed the 50th parallel (north latitude) when crewmen noticed the vessel yawing and buckling, as if out of control. The second mate ran into the wheelhouse to check whether Greeley had been taken ill. And in a sense, he had. In the classic manner of all SHC events he had been reduced to a small pile of cinders. But the wooden wheel, the compass - and even the wooden deck on which his ashes lay - showed no sign of scorching.

  On the same day, at Upton-by-Chester in England, a lorry (truck) suddenly rolled to a standstill and overturned in a ditch. When police opened the driver’s cab door they found George Turner had been incinerated - again with no damage to the cab’s interior. A coroner later returned a verdict of accidental death, ‘by fire of unknown origin’.

  The third victim of that single, extraordinary day was Willem ten Bruk, an 18-year-old Dutchman, who was found near Nijmegen, burned to ash in his car’s driver’s seat. The car was undamaged. Author Harrison demonstrated that the three men had not only died on the same day, but at equal distances from each other, in a pattern that formed an equilateral triangle, each side almost 550 kilometres long.

&nb
sp; Comparably bizarre is a case chronicled by researchers Jenny Randles and Peter Hough in their book Spontaneous Human Combustion. Amy Kirby, age four, and her sister Alice, five, burst into flames at the same time (11 am) on the same day. The girls were living one and a half kilometres apart, each with one of her parents.

  Scientists might one day produce a physical explanation for SHC - and perhaps even propose ways to prevent it happening. But the uncanny coincidences that surround some SHC cases are an enigma in their own right: a sinisterly playful puzzle we may never solve.

  * * *

  Did James Leininger Live

  Before?

  Riddle of the ‘Reborns’

  * * *

  To many American viewers the TV news report sounded faintly ridiculous. A Los Angeles man claimed that his six-year-old son was the reincarnation of a naval fighter pilot who had died in World War II, 60 years earlier. The ABC network braved the sceptical flak, and continued over several nights of 2005 to present the evidence its reporters had verified. Other media picked up the story - and the child’s statements began to create national controversy. He was not only able to name the long-dead flier and to identify the aircraft carrier which had launched him on his fatal flight, but was reciting detail that only the US Navy and the dead man’s faraway family could have known. Before long, some commentators were asking whether the case of young James Leininger might offer the most convincing evidence of reincarnation ever chronicled…