The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (93 page)

Two nineteenth-century novelists used spontaneous combustion to dispose of unwanted characters. Captain Marryat borrowed details from
a
Times
report of 1832 to describe the death of the mother of his hero Jacob Faithful (in the novel of the same name), who is reduced to “a sort of unctuous pitchy cinder” in her bed. Twenty years later, in 1852, Dickens put an end to his drunken rag-and-bone dealer Krook in
Bleak House
by means of spontaneous combustion – Krook is charred to a cinder that looks like a burnt log. G.H. Lewes, George Eliot’s lover, took issue with Dickens and declared that spontaneous combustion was impossible, so in his preface to
Bleak House
Dickens contradicts Lewes and cites thirty examples from press reports. Yet at the end of his article on Krook in
The Dickens Encyclopedia
(1924), Arthur L. Hayward states dogmatically: “The possibility of spontaneous combustion in human beings has been finally disproved”. He fails to explain what experiments have “finally disproved” it.

Harrison’s book, which gathers together the result of many studies, leaves no possible doubt of the reality of spontaneous combustion. But what causes it? At present it must be confessed that the phenomenon baffles medical knowledge. But Harrison offers some interesting clues. He speaks of the researches of an American doctor, Mayne R. Coe junior, who was interested in the subject of telekinesis – mind over matter. Coe was able to move aluminium strips pivoted on the points of needles by moving his hand over them – this was obviously due to some natural physical “magnetism”. He began various yoga exercises in an attempt to develop his bioelectricity; sitting one day in an easy-chair, he felt a powerful current passing downward from his head throughout his body; he thought it was of high voltage but low amperage. He suspended a cardboard box from the ceiling on a length of string, and found that he could cause it to move from a distance – when the room was dry, from as much as eight feet. He then charged his body with 35,000 volts
DC
, using an electric current, and found that he could move the box in exactly the same way. This seemed to prove that he was in fact generating a high voltage current with his mental exercises. He also went up in an aeroplane to an altitude of 21,000 feet, where the air was extremely dry, and produced electric sparks after he had charged his body to 35,000 volts. Coe theorized that this could explain the phenomenon of levitation – when the yogi’s body floats off the ground – with the positively charged human body repelling the negatively charged earth.

Harrison also cites cases of human “batteries” and magnets people (usually children) who have developed a powerful electric charge. In 1877 Caroline Clare of London, Ontario, turned into a human magnet, who attracted metal objects and could give a powerful electric shock to as many as twenty people holding hands. She was suffering from
adolescent depressions at the time. Frank McKinistry of Joplin, Missouri, developed a magnetic force which caused his feet to stick to the earth. In 1895 fourteen-year-old Jennie Morgan of Sedalia, Missouri, generated a charge sufficient to knock a grown man on his back, and when she touched a pump handle sparks flew from her fingertips. It is also worth noting that many teenagers who became the focus of “poltergeist effects” (see chapter 41) developed magnetic or electrical properties; in 1846 a French girl named Angélique Cottin became a kind of human electric battery; objects that touched her flew off violently, and a heavy oak loom began to dance when she came near it. On the other hand, Esther Cox, the “focus” of the disturbances at Great Amherst in Nova Scotia, developed a magnetism that made cutlery fly to her and stick fast. It seems that there must be two kinds of charges, positive and negative.

According to Dr Coe, each human muscle cell is a battery, and a cubic inch could develop 400,000 volts. (The inventor Nicola Tesla used to demonstrate that the human body can take immense electrical charges – enough to light up neon tubes – provided the amperage is kept very low.)

But this seems unlikely to explain spontaneous combustion: the whole point of Tesla’s experiments was that he did
not
burst into flame. It is high amperage that can cause “burn-ups”. (If two 12-volt car batteries are connected by thin wire, the wire will melt; even thick wire becomes hot.) And this could begin to explain why the surroundings of victims of spontaneous combustion are undamaged; they are non-conductors.

Victims of spontaneous combustion tend to be the old and the young. On 27 August 1938, the 22-year-old Phyllis Newcombe was dancing vigorously in Chelmsford, Essex, when her body glowed with a blue light which turned into flames; she died within minutes. In October of the same year a girl called Maybelle Andrews was dancing in a Soho nightclub with her boy-friend, Billy Clifford, when flames erupted from her back, chest and shoulders. Her boy-friend, who was badly burned trying to put her out, said that there were no flames in the room – the flames seemed to come from the girl herself. She died on the way to hospital. In such cases it seems just conceivable that the activity of dancing built up some kind of static electricity. Michael Harrison even points out that “ritual dancing” is used by primitive tribes to build up emotional tension in religious ceremonies, and suggests that this is what has happened here.

Michael Harrison also points out some curious geographical links. On 13 March 1966 three men were “spontaneously combusted” at the same
time. John Greeley, helmsman of the SS Ulrich, was burnt to a cinder some miles west of Land’s End; George Turner, a lorry-driver, was found burnt at the wheel of his lorry at Upton-by-Chester – the lorry overturned in a ditch; in Nijmegen, Holland, eighteen-year-old Willem ten Bruik died at the wheel of his car. As usual in such cases, the surroundings of all three were undamaged. Harrison points out that the three men were at the points of an equilateral triangle whose sides were 340 miles long. Is it conceivable that the earth itself discharged energy in a triangular pattern?

Another investigator, Larry Arnold, put forward his own theory in the magazine
Frontiers of Science
(January 1982): that so-called “ley lines” – lines of “earth force” may be involved. The man who “discovered” ley lines, Alfred Watkins, noted how frequently places called “Brent” occur on them (brent being an old English form of “burnt”). Other “ley-hunters” have suggested that megalithic stone circles are placed at crucial points on ley lines – often at crossing-points of several leys. It is again interesting to note how many stone circles are associated with the idea of dancing – for example, the Merry Maidens in Cornwall; Stonehenge itself was known as “the Giants’ Dance”. It has been suggested that ritual dances occurred at these sites, so that the dancers would somehow interact with the earth energy (or “telluric force”).

Larry Arnold drew a dozen or so major leys on a map of England, then set out to find if they were associated with mystery fires. He claims that one 400-mile-long “fire-leyne” (as he calls them) passed through five towns where ten mysterious blazes had concurred. He also notes several cases of spontaneous combustion occurring on this “leyne”. He cites four cases which occurred on it between 1852 and 1908.

Harrison believes that spontaneous combustion is basically a “mental freak”, where the mind somehow influences the body to build up immense charges. The answer could lie in either of the two theories, or in a combination of the two.

54

Synchronicity or “Mere Coincidence”?

The
Sunday Times
journalist Godfrey Smith was thinking of writing something about the “saga of lost manuscripts” – Carlyle’s manuscript of
The French Revolution
, burnt by a careless maid, T.E. Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, left in a taxi, Hemingway’s suitcase full of early manuscripts, stolen from a train – and decided to call on the literary agent Hilary Rubinstein, a treasure-house of similar stories. But before he could introduce the subject into the conversation a girl sitting with them – the wife of the novelist Nicholas Mosley – mentioned that her husband was upset because he had just had the first 150 pages of his new novel stolen from his car. Smith remarked in his
Sunday Times
column: “We are back in what J. W. Dunne called serial time, and Arthur Koestler called synchronicity, and some of us still call coincidence . . .”

It was Jung in fact who coined the word “synchronicity” for meaningful coincidence. But Arthur Koestler was equally intrigued by the subject, and discussed it in a book called
The Roots of Coincidence
in 1972. In the following year he wrote an article about coincidence in
The Sunday Times
and appealed to readers for examples. Many of these were utilized in his book
The Challenge of Chance
(1973), co-authored by Sir Alister Hardy and Robert Harvie. He begins with a section called “The Library Angel”, describing coincidences involved with books. In 1972 Koestler had been asked to write about the chess championship between Boris Spassky and Bobbie Fischer, so he went to the London Library to look up books on chess and books on Iceland. He decided to start with chess and the first book that caught his eye was entitled
Chess in Iceland
by Williard Fiske.

He then tells of how Dame Rebecca West was trying to check up on an episode related by one of the accused in one of the Nuremberg
war-crimes trials, and how she discovered to her annoyance that the trials are published in the form of abstracts under arbitrary headings and are therefore useless to a researcher. After an hour of fruitless searching she approached a librarian and said: “I can’t find it . . .”, and casually took a volume off the shelf and opened it. It opened at the page she had been searching for.

This anecdote is particularly interesting because it involved an apparently “random” action, a casual reaching out without logical purpose. The word “synchronicity” was coined by Jung in connection with the
I Ching
, the Chinese
Book of Changes
, which the Chinese consult as an “oracle”. The method of “consulting” the
I Ching
consists of throwing down three coins at random half a dozen times and noting whether there are more heads or tails. Two or three tails gives a line with a break in the middle, thus three heads gives an unbroken line. The six lines, placed on top of one another, form a “hexagram”:

The above hexagram is number 58, “The Joyous – Lake”, with a “Judgement:”: “The Joyous, Success – Perseverance is favourable”. But from the logical point of view it is obviously impossible to explain how throwing down coins at random can provide an answer – even if the question has been very clearly and precisely formulated in the mind before the coins are thrown.

The experience of Rebecca West can provide a glimmering of an answer. She was looking for a particular passage. We may assume that some unconscious faculty of “extra-sensory perception” guided her to the right place before she began to speak to the librarian, and then guided her hand as she casually reached out. But could it also cause the book to open in the right place? This would seem to require something more than “
ESP
”, something for which Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity”, “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by chance”. And what of the “chance” that caused the librarian to be standing in the right place at that moment? We have here such a complex situation that it is difficult to conceive of some purely “passive” faculty – a kind of intuition – capable of accounting for it. Unless
we wish to fall back on “coincidence”, we have to think in terms of some faculty capable to some extent of “engineering” a situation as well as merely taking advantage of it. And the use of the
I Ching
also seems to presuppose the use of such a faculty in causing the coins to fall in a certain order.

For most of his life Jung was unwilling even to conceive of such a possibility – at least publicly. (He was, in fact, using the
I Ching
as an oracle from the early 1920s.)

In 1944, when he was sixty-eight years old, Jung slipped on an icy road and broke his ankle; this led to a severe heart attack. While hovering between life and death, Jung experienced curious visions, in one of which he was hovering above the earth, out in space, then saw a kind of Hindu temple inside a meteor. “Night after night I floated in a state of purest bliss”. He was convinced that if he recovered his doctor would have to die – and in fact the doctor died as Jung started to recover. The result of these strange experiences was that Jung ceased to be concerned about whether his contemporaries regarded him as a mystic rather than a scientist, and he ceased to make a secret of his lifelong interest in “the occult”. In 1949 he wrote his influential introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s edition of the
I Ching
, in which he speaks about the “acausal connecting principle” called synchronicity; in the following year he wrote his paper
On Synchronicity
, later expanded into a book. Unfortunately, Jung’s fundamental premise in both these seminal works is basically nonsensical. Western science, he says, is based on the principle of causality, but modern physics is shaking this principle to its foundations; we now know that natural laws are merely statistical truths, and that therefore we must allow for exceptions. This is, of course, untrue. The philosopher Hume had argued that causality is not a basic law of the universe; a pan of water usually boils when we put it on a fire, but it
might
freeze. Kant later used this argument to demonstrate that the stuff of the universe is basically “mental”. We can now see that these arguments were fallacious. It is true that a pan of water might freeze when placed on a fire, if the atmospheric pressure were suddenly increased a thousandfold. But this would not be a defiance of the law of causality, merely a change in some of the basic conditions of the experiment. And by the same argument, we can see that modern physics has not demonstrated that the laws of nature are “statistical”, and that once in a billion times they might be “broken”. A law of nature cannot be broken except for some very good “legal” reason.