MARY REESER
MARY REESER
1884-1951
Mary Reeser lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, US and is best known for her death. Her death was believed to have been from spontaneous human combustion.
At 8am on 2 July 1951, the landlady to Reesers’ property, Pansy Carpenter arrived at the apartment in St. Petersburg with a telegram for her. She knocked on the door but found the metal doorknob was warm. Concerned she called the police.
When the police entered her home, they discovered the remains of a chair that she had been sitting on, a large amount of ash and her leg and foot (still wearing a shoe) intact which you can view on Google Images. They also found her backbone and her skull. All the items that had been near Reeser at the time of her death, had melted or semi-melted.
The police sent a box of evidence to the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The box contained some teeth, a bit of the carpet and the shoe that survived. Investigators wanted to know how her body could have been destroyed so badly in a fire but the fire only remained a small area of her home and didn’t spread to the rest of the room or building.
The FBI believed that Reeser had fallen asleep after the use of sleeping pills and fell unconscious whilst she had been smoking. The smoke set fire to her pyjamas and then her body caught on fire. Reeser’s daughter-in-law told a reporter that the cigarette she had been smoking dropped onto her lap; her fat helped the fire to continue burning. The floor was cement and there was nothing near her or the chair which prevented the fire from spreading.
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