![]() "What I remember vividly was a shot of the actor re-enactment of someone standing in a kitchen, and their back/shoulders caught fire and they ripped their clothing off in a frenzy," Cordell told VICE in an email. It was the example of Kay Fletcher- who claimed that in 1996, while having a peaceful morning at home, smoke and the smell of burnt flesh began to emanate from her body-that terrified Laine Cordell, an executive assistant who spent her sick days as a tween curled up with Unsolved Mysteries marathons. It’s kind of like quicksand-as a kid, I always thought quicksand was going to be more of a problem than it actually is." ![]() I even remember there’d be times that I’d feel my forehead to make sure I wasn’t feeling hot because I was afraid I would overheat and combust. "Up until I was about 14 or 15, I thought I was going to turn to ashes out of nowhere. With fire as her biggest fear, Lopez thought of spontaneous human combustion as a particularly terrible way to go, she said. I can still see it so clearly!" she told VICE in an email. "The ashes looked as though they belonged to somebody who was laying on the bed. Naissa Lopez, a communications director who recalled watching reruns of Unsolved Mysteries at night on Lifetime when she was around 10, had similar takeaways from the Mott scene. That bedroom scene is stuck in my memory forever." The bedding is red so in my mind it looked like blood, even though there wasn’t any blood in the shot, and then the way just that part of the room is burned but everything else is untouched is creepy. "In the episode, they show the bed where someone died from fire, and the room just looks so strange that it really sticks out. Though she started watching the show around 1990 at the age of 10 or 11 and loyally watched its reruns, the spontaneous combustion segment is easily the one that frightened her the most. "When anyone mentions Unsolved Mysteries, two things come to my mind: the theme song and spontaneous combustion," Brennan told VICE in an email. Detailing the experience of Kendal Mott, for example, Stack narrated a re-enactment of a man finding his father's charred remains in bed: "Fire had reduced his father to a scattering of ashes, a few splinters of bone, and a fragment of skull." Even compared to segments about murders and supernatural events, Unsolved Mysteries' spontaneous combustion segment left a fear-inducing and indelible mark on impressionable youths in the visual form of a burned bed, a walker next to a grisly piece of a leg, and a woman caught in a cloud of smoke.įor Jessica Brennan, the co-host of the California True Crime podcast, the images associated with the Mott example have stuck with her ever since. ![]() Through a series of re-enactments and interviews with alleged witnesses of spontaneous human combustion, a skeptic, and a supporter, the episode explored examples of-and made cases for and against-the idea that a human body could light itself on fire from the inside out. ![]() "Students of the paranormal call it spontaneous human combustion, or 'SHC,' when a perfectly normal person bursts into flame without warning and without apparent cause," Stack said. In one particularly memorable episode from its ninth season, which first aired in 1997 and also covered the murder of Tupac Shakur and the hunt for home invaders in Ohio, the deep-voiced host Robert Stack introduced the idea of spontaneous human combustion to the show's vast audience. Many of us with this particular horror can thank Unsolved Mysteries, the true crime documentary show that bounced around networks from 1987 to 2010, and which has found a new home on Netflix in a series reboot that launched yesterday.
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