What with all the arson going around these days, I thought it might be nice to remind everyone that St. Pete also happens to be the site for one of the country’s more noted cases of spontaneous human combustion. No, seriously. For those of you who haven’t read Bleak House in the past five minutes, spontaneous human combustion refers to the very X-files phenomenon in which the human body bursts into flames without any apparent ignition source. That pretty much sounds like a party to me, and would totally end up with you having Prof. Charles Xavier on speed dial were it not for the fact rendering the body fireproof does not seem to be one of the additional features of this whole deal. Bummer.

It was certainly a bummer in 1951 for Mary Reeser, who, after a long day of doing whatever the hell it was that she did, decided to put on her acetate sleeping gown, pop a couple sleeping pills, light up a smoke and pack it in for the night. Somehow, however, some utterly mysterious set of circumstances led to her slowly charring all night until she was discovered by her landlord, done burnded to a crisp. The room was relatively unharmed, which was a little weird considering that its occupant now resembled an ember wearing slippers. Who knows what could have caused this? Surely someone who watches a lot of CSI can help. Now someone hand me that bottle of ether and a cigarette, I’m going to need to be nice and relaxed if I’m going to figure out where that gas smell is coming from.

Speaking of the X-Files it’s pretty awesome that the FBI has an entire page devoted to this incident on their FOIA site. It’s doubly awesome that they erroneously say it happened in Miami. How weird is that link, by the way? It’s like totally outside the site’s regular directory structure. It’s like a one off or something, created for the one nutjob who actually busted out a FOIA request for FBI records dealing with spontaneous human combustion. The truth is out there, it’s just really difficult to navigate to.