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Hey Prime members, you can binge episodes 41 through 48 of Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries right now and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. In the spring of 1986, an investigator parked his car in front of a small home in upstate New York where a deadly fire had broken out and killed his friend. The fire had long been extinguished, but the investigator was there now to try to figure out what had caused it.
When the investigator entered the house, his eyes widened in shock. He couldn't believe how extensive the damage was. When he made his way into the bedroom, where the fire had apparently started and where his friend had died, what he saw there sent a chill down his spine and confirmed that this was no ordinary fire.
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From Ballen Studios and Wondery, I'm Mr. Ballen and this is Mr. Ballen's Medical Mysteries. Even though we rarely think about it, it is truly a miracle how well our bodies work basically all of the time and without any real effort from us. But sometimes our perfect seeming systems do break down and when that happens we turn to modern medicine to both diagnose our issue and fix it for us. However, there are very rare cases of people's bodies breaking down where
where their symptoms are so bizarre, so mysterious, so dumbfounding that no one, including the best medical experts out there, can figure out what is wrong or how to go about treating them. And on this show, these rare medical cases will be our focus. Every week, we'll explore a new baffling medical mystery originating from the one place we all can't escape, our own bodies. ♪
If you liked today's story, please invite the follow button to go to a movie with you and offer to bring the snacks. But only pack room temperature Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. This week's story is called Ashes to Ashes. Kendall Mott kept his eyes locked on the road as he drove towards the home of his father, 58-year-old George Mott. It was 6 p.m. on March 26th, 1986, and the sun was hanging low in the sky over Crown Point, which is a small country town in upstate New York.
A few hours earlier, 32-year-old Kendall had received a phone call from his sister Kimberly. She had called their dad multiple times over the course of that day, but all she kept getting was his answering machine, so Kimberly was worried. Part of that worry came from the fact that their dad lived alone since he had divorced their mom a few years back. On top of that, his health was declining.
George was an ex-smoker and now he had some serious issues with his lungs. He used an oxygen mask and he just recovered from a bout of pneumonia that had sent him to the hospital for a few days. Kimberly was afraid their dad might have fallen or passed out or maybe even something worse. She knew it would be somewhat convenient for Kendall to stop by their dad's place on his way home from work, so she called him and begged him to go by and make sure their dad was okay. And of course Kendall had said yes.
But as Kendall drove through the woods down a lonely two-lane road, he really wasn't too worried. He had visited with their dad at his house two days earlier. George was taking his medications and was in good spirits considering all the issues he'd been dealing with. Kendall was sure there was a reasonable explanation for why George wasn't answering his phone.
Maybe George's friends picked him up and took him to a local diner called the Wagon Wheel, where Kendall knew they liked to hang out. If that was the case, then Kendall knew he wouldn't be gone for very long, and so Kendall planned to just wait inside the house until his dad came home, and then once he was back and he knew he was okay, Kendall would call Kimberly and everything would be fine.
And regardless of if there was a problem or not with his dad, Kendall was happy to pop by because he was close with his dad. His dad used to be a firefighter and he was very devoted to his profession. He spent long hours at the station away from the family. But since his retirement a few years ago, he was much more present in the lives of Kendall, Kimberly, and their children. And that really made Kendall happy.
A few minutes later, Kendall pulled off the main road and began making his way down a long driveway that wound between tall maple trees. George lived in a tiny one-bedroom house in a sparsely populated area about four miles west of town. It was very peaceful and quiet and green out there. The nearest neighbor lived about a half mile away. At the end of the driveway, Kendall parked his car a few feet away from his dad's house. He hopped out and then walked up to the front door.
But as he got closer, he noticed that the windows near the front door looked a little bit different. They had a dark tint to them, kind of like the windows on a limousine.
Kendall thought that was very strange and he figured he would investigate once he got inside. And so Kendall got up to the front door and he knocked, but his dad didn't come to the door. And so Kendall reached down and tried the doorknob and right away he felt two things. One, he felt the doorknob was already unlocked. And two, most importantly, he noticed the doorknob was hot to the touch.
And immediately a bolt of fear shot through Kendall because a hot doorknob could mean there was a fire raging inside the house.
And so Kendall immediately whipped open the door and looked inside, but there was no fire. In fact, the house was totally quiet and nearly pitch black. Kendall instinctively reached over and flipped the light switch, but the lights didn't turn on in the house. Even worse, there was this thick dark haze hanging in the air that was impossible to see through. It smelled a little like smoke, but it also had this strange sweet odor to it that made it much more unsettling.
Everything Kendall was experiencing just felt totally dangerous. Whatever was going on here, Kendall knew it had to be bad. Especially given the fact that his dad had lung issues. Breathing in whatever was in the air could not be good for him. So Kendall stepped into the front living room and yelled out for his dad. But there was no reply.
Kendall felt his way through the furniture in the living room towards the back of the house to the bedroom where his dad slept, but when he got there, again, he just couldn't see anything. Kendall was really starting to panic now. He was desperate to get his hands on a flashlight, but he didn't have one and he didn't have one in his car and so Kendall turned, sprinted outside, got into his car and sped over to the house next door to see if the neighbor had a flashlight.
Luckily, the neighbor was home and they did have a flashlight and so after explaining what was going on, the two of them raced back over to George's house with this flashlight. But when Kendall arrived back at his dad's front door, he stopped.
He was holding out hope that his dad was not home and that he was safe and that whatever was going on inside of his house had nothing to do with his dad. But Kendall also realized that now that they had this flashlight, when the neighbor went in there and shined it around, he might reveal something totally horrible to Kendall. And suddenly Kendall standing there right in front of the door, he just felt like he couldn't handle that. He couldn't go in and see whatever happened to his dad.
So, Kendall stayed outside as the neighbor clicked on his flashlight, pulled the collar of his t-shirt up over his nose and mouth, and stepped into the house. The next few minutes were agonizing for Kendall as he waited to hear what was hidden beneath the black haze inside his father's home. Finally, the neighbor emerged from the house, and from the grim expression on the man's face, Kendall could tell something horrible had happened.
Within the next hour, the house was filled with inspectors from the local police and fire departments and all of them were deeply confused by the scene laid out before them. It didn't take them long to determine that a fire had broken out inside of George's house, but the way the fire behaved just didn't make sense.
As the inspectors stepped through the front door and into the living room, they could see that there was a layer of black soot covering everything. But nothing in the room was actually burnt.
It was clear that it had gotten very hot inside of that house. Sitting on a table in the middle of the room were three pill bottles that had all melted together into one plastic clump. There was also a nail hammered into the wall and hanging from it was the metal handle of a fly swatter. But the flat plastic square that actually swats the flies, that part had melted off.
Inspectors found other plastic objects in the living room that were warped or liquefied, but there was plenty of other stuff inside the house that should have melted but for some reason didn't. There was a plastic model of an old sailing vessel that sat on the coffee table not far from the flyswatter and pill bottles, but it looked as good as new. There was also a stack of cassette tapes that sat next to the stereo that looked unaltered and ready to be played.
The right side of the living room opened out into a small kitchen. George had decorated the sides of the refrigerator with colorful wallpaper, and that paper showed zero signs of burning. But inside the refrigerator was a totally different story. The butter was completely melted, along with the plastic butter dish. In the meat drawer was an unopened package of hot dogs, and they were all cooked.
The inspectors struggled to comprehend what actually happened. How could a refrigerator turn into an oven on the inside while the outside of it was totally unaffected by the heat? And things got even weirder as the inspectors moved to the back of the house to George's bedroom. As they stepped inside, inspectors could see the TV on George's wooden dresser was caved in on the top where the plastic shell had melted down into itself.
But the dresser it was sitting on was good as new, aside from the layer of soot that covered it. In the corner of the bedroom was Georgia's oxygen machine. Not only was it undamaged by the heat, it was still running when the inspectors arrived. Resting on top of that machine was Georgia's plastic oxygen mask. Unlike the television, the mask had not melted.
This was made all the more strange because the mask and the machine were just inches from the bed, where clearly an intense fire had raged within the last day. Now the fire was out, leaving behind a scorched, tangled mess.
The wooden bed frame was charred in places, but it was still standing up. The mattress, however, was totally destroyed. The stuffing was all burnt up and the net of metal mattress springs were melted in a way that made them curve down into a V-shape under the bed. You could actually see through those springs and underneath the bed where a large hole had burned through the floorboards. But as the inspectors crouched down to take a closer look into that hole, they could see that something else had burned up in this strange fire.
Tangled in the mattress springs was a man's foot, burned off near the ankle. Near the headboard was a charred fragment of a human skull. Beyond that, they found tiny piles of fine black ash in the wreckage of the bed, as well as in the crawlspace beneath the floorboards. Those ashes, along with the foot and the skull fragment, were all that remained of Kendall's father, George Mott.
Before he died, George was a pretty big, sturdy guy, weighing in over 180 pounds. What was left of him now weighed about 3 pounds, easily fitting inside a shoebox. The confusion amongst the inspectors only continued to grow after finding George. George wasn't just burned, he essentially had been cremated.
Cremation is the process where a dead body is burned to ashes, and it requires an immensely hot fire that burns inside of a special oven. Yet somehow, here George was, reduced to ash by this bizarre fire that only affected small portions of the house. It just didn't add up. If the temperature in the bedroom was hot enough to cremate George, how on earth was the house even still standing?
But there was yet another mystery hanging over the scene. How did a fire as powerful as this one get ignited in the first place? The inspectors checked the electrical outlets, they checked the gas lines that ran in the crawlspace under George's bedroom, they completely dismantled the gas furnace that straddled the bedroom and the living room, and they could not find a single shred of physical evidence that might explain how George caught on fire.
A few days later, the New York State Police inspectors finally just gave up. They couldn't see any signs that foul play had occurred, so they filed a final report that simply stated that George's death was "accidental." Then they closed the book on the case.
But there was one inspector with the Essex County Fire Department who wasn't ready to give up so fast. That man's name was Tony Moret. Tony was 37 years old and had worked in the fire department since he was 16. He had known George Mott personally, they'd worked side by side as firemen, and Tony really liked George. So he was determined to find out what really happened to his friend.
On top of all the weird anomalies they found at the scene of the fire, Tony was puzzled by one more thing: he knew George was obsessed with fire safety. Tony just couldn't believe that George would be careless enough to accidentally set himself on fire.
But, after hundreds of hours exploring every possibility for what could have happened to George, he was getting really frustrated. Tony knew a lot about the science of fire, but none of those scientific rules seemed to apply to what he was observing inside of George's house.
Finally, one of Tony's colleagues gave him a tip about an organization down in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that might be able to help. They were called Parascience International, and they specialized in the study of strange phenomena that couldn't be explained by traditional science.
Tony was hesitant at first. When he thought of the paranormal, he thought of things like Bigfoot and UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster. To him, any organization that believed in those sorts of things was an organization he couldn't really take seriously. But he was desperate to find out what happened to George and his own investigation had reached a dead end, and so he didn't really have anything to lose by considering a different perspective, even if it was totally unorthodox.
So, in April of 1986, a few weeks after George's ashes were discovered, Tony took a deep breath, then picked up the phone and made the call to Parascience International. Mr. Ballin' Collection is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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When the phone rang 400 miles away in Harrisburg, it was answered by a man named Larry Arnold.
Larry was a 37-year-old school bus driver during the day, but in his off time, he devoted many hours to this group of parascience experts. For the last 10 years, Larry had worked with them to investigate many strange and unusual events. But Larry's greatest passion was studying fire phenomena that defied explanation. So, when Tony told Larry what he needed help with, Larry was immediately interested.
Larry listened intently as Tony flooded him with details about the strange case of George Mott. The body reduced to fine ash, the lack of damage to things near the body, the inexplicable pattern of melting and burning throughout the house. The more Larry heard, the more intrigued he became. And so, by the end of this call, Larry said he'd be happy to drive up to Crown Point, examine George's house, and see if he could make any sense of it.
And a few weeks later, that's just what Larry did. When he arrived in Crown Point, he met with Tony at George's home. It had been over a month since the fire, but George's family was still in shock and were totally undecided about what to do with the house, so the inside really wasn't all that different from the way the inspectors first found it. As soon as he stepped through the door and into the living room, Larry noticed that the shelves and the tabletops all had a strange glaze on them.
It wasn't just soot or ash that you could brush away with your hand. It was almost like baked on, like melted caramel. Right away, a picture began to form in Larry's mind of what could have happened the day George caught on fire. And so Larry headed straight to the back of the house and into George's bedroom.
George's remains had been removed, but Larry could still see the area that had burned and how it hadn't spread beyond the bed and the hole in the floorboards. Larry, like every other inspector who had been inside of George's home, couldn't find anything nearby that could have possibly ignited the blaze, but to Larry Arnold, that actually wasn't the least bit surprising. Tony and the other investigators had never seen anything as confounding as this case, but Larry had.
It was extremely rare, but in his research for Parascience International, Larry had uncovered about 200 recorded cases that were similar to George Mott's. For example, in the year 1725, a Parisian innkeeper found his wife had burned down to a pile of ashes in the middle of their kitchen floor. Nothing around her was damaged from this fire, not even the wooden cooking utensils that laid close to her charred remains.
In 1951, a landlady visited one of the tenants of her apartment building in St. Petersburg, Florida. When she grabbed the doorknob, she found it hot to the touch, and when she opened the door, she found the tenant's body had been incinerated into ashes except for her skull and one of her feet. Inches away from the body was a pile of newspapers that showed no signs of burning.
Another example: In 1970, an 89-year-old widow was found burnt down into a pile of ashes in her home in Dublin, Ireland. The only recognizable remains were her two feet, which were burnt off near the ankles. She had a vase with plastic flowers sitting on a table in the center of the room. The flowers had melted into a puddle, but everything else in the room appeared to be more or less untouched.
In nearly all of these similar cases, Larry noted the same common threats: There was often a strange sweet smell reported and a weird ashy glaze that seemed to coat everything. There was very little damage to the space surrounding the burned remains and there was no clear indication of what could have possibly ignited the blaze in the first place.
For hundreds of years, scientists and scholars had been developing theories behind how these strange fire events could happen. And the only feasible explanation they could come up with was that these intense fires were actually ignited from inside the bodies of the victims.
Back in the 1800s, many believed this was God's judgment delivered to those who led an immoral life. Some thought it could be a byproduct of alcoholism, with the excess alcohol increasing the body's flammability. As the decades passed, many, many other theories have also been put forward to explain how a human body that is 60% water could spontaneously ignite. Larry Arnold had his own theories.
He knew the human body was full of electrical activity that pulsed through the brain, the nervous system, and through every heartbeat. So what if the electricity somehow got amplified? Could the body start an explosive electrical fire that burnt itself out from the inside? Could it burn fast enough and hot enough that it incinerated the victim without burning anything nearby? Whatever the cause, this strange and rare event eventually became so widely known that it got its own name.
"Spontaneous Human Combustion." When Tony heard Larry's theory, he thought it sounded crazy, but he also thought it made more sense than any other explanation he'd heard for what happened to George. By the time Tony officially finished his own investigation into the death of George Mott, he concluded that the cause was spontaneous human combustion. But despite Tony's support of this theory, the official reports by police never changed for George Mott.
His death is still listed as accidental, with no mention of spontaneous human combustion. While there are many believers in the theory, the vast majority of scientists dismiss spontaneous human combustion as pseudoscience that is unsupported by physical evidence. And the physical evidence in this case is still contradictory and confusing.
But, despite not fully understanding what happened, for instance, why the outside of George's refrigerator was untouched while the hot dogs inside were cooked through, Larry felt confident in his conclusion that George Mott was indeed a victim of spontaneous human combustion. According to the wishes of George's family, his ashes were sent to a crematorium along with his foot and what was left of his skull. Then, after that second burning, George Mott was scattered at sea and finally laid to rest.
Thank you for listening to Mr. Balan's Medical Mysteries. If you enjoyed today's story, be sure to come back next week because we put out a brand new mind-boggling medical mystery each week. From Balan Studios and Wondery, this is Mr. Balan's Medical Mysteries, hosted by me, Mr. Balan. A quick reminder, the content in this episode is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This
This episode was written by Matt Olmos. Our editor is Heather Dundas. Sound design is by Ryan Patesta. Coordinating producer is Sophia Martins. Our senior producer is Alex Benidon. Our associate producers and researchers are Sarah Vytak and Natalie Bettendorf. Fact checking was done by Sheila Patterson. For Ballin Studios, our producer is Alyssa Tominang. Our head of production is Zach Levitt. Executive producers are myself, Mr. Ballin, and Nick Witters. For
For Wondery, senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Our head of sound is Marcelino Villapondo. Our producer is Julie Magruder. Additional support from Natalie Shisha. Senior producers are Laura Donna Pollyvoda, Dave Schilling, and Matt Olmos. Our executive producers are Aaron O'Flaherty and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Was there a crime committed?
As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't. Guilty by Design dives into the wild story of Alexander and Frank, interior designers who in the 80s landed the jackpot of all clients. We went to bed one night and the next morning we woke up as one of the most wanted people in the United States. What are they guilty of? You can listen to Guilty by Design exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
