You never hear much about 'spontaneous combustion ' anymore, where people just burst into flames while sitting in their chair

I read a lot about this around 1970. Then recently saw a show which covered those old cases as well as newer ones. In every instance they were able to piece together an actual cause even a reason for localized ashes. They didn't come up with a single case that implied spontaneous internal combustion like a pile of oily rags could create.

Truthfully I thought long and hard about this and back then people used really combustible liquids as medicine and that's why I believe a lot of them burned from the inside out. While smoking a cigarette . For instance in 1932 Ebenezer McBurney Byers jaw fell off he had cancer and was taking Radithor, a radioactive patent medicine containing radium. They use to drink all kinds of dangerous stuff

Therer never was any such thing as "spontaneous conbustion" of people - or any animal - but there were plenty of deaths as you describe, caused by smokers dropping lighted cigarettes.

Other cases were of people setting their clothes alight in cooking or fireplace accidents. There might have been still others in times gone by, caused by candles.

I very much doubt the body was reduced to ashes, either. A fire intense enough to completely consume a body would not leave the chair intact. Even a proper cremator does not reduce it to the grey dust we may know as the "ashes" we scatter.

Published photos would have been of the scene with the body removed.

In Charles Dickens' 1853 novel Bleak House, the character Mr. Krook famously dies by what Dickens describes as spontaneous combustion. I did a talk on it to the class as a school project when I was ten (I was perhaps a slightly strange child).

I'm not convinced that I buy the idea that people just "spontaneously combust".

You know what else there's fewer of??? Open flames... we no longer heat most of our homes with coal or gas fires. Maybe that's had some effect on the number of people who might have otherwise burst into flames.

the only time i seen it was in Fringe

Also the bermuda triangle
Everyone got lost in that and now nothing

LESS smoking, FEWER smokers.

Don’t fart and smoke in tight places

My late ex fiancee believed they were people who were touched by demons. Myself, I think they were people that had too much sodium in their bodies and eventually reacted, going up like magician's flash paper.