In chapter 32 of Charles Dickens'sBleak House, William Guppy and Tony Weevle, discover that the evil Krook has been mysteriously burned to a few charred lumps of ashes, filling the room with "hateful soot" and objects coated with an offensive "thick yellow liquid".
   "Call the death by any name…attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally - inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupt humours of the vicious body itself, and that only - Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died."
   Charles Dickens was interested in the paranormal and had witnessed some inexplicable events in his time, including SHC. This was not a commonly known phenomenon at the time, but Dickens wrote about it in Bleak House, adding the predominant theory of the time. He most likely based this incident on Countess Cornelia Bandi (see Case Log #SHC0002).

The death of the 62-year-old Countess Cornelia Bandi, near Verona, is perhaps one of the first of the more reliable reports of SHC, and whom Charles Dickens most likely based his description of Krook’s death in Bleak House (1852-53) - as in Case Log #SHC0001. According to a statement by Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, dated 4th April 1731, the Countess had been put to bed after supper, and fell asleep after several hours’ conversation with her maid. In the morning the maid returned to wake her and found a grisly scene, where she had been somehow reduced to ashes, yet none of the bedsheets had been burned.

In 1725, at Rheims, innkeeper Jean Millet, was accused of having an affair with a pretty servant girl and killing his wife. The wife - often a drunkard - was found one morning about a foot (30cm) away from the hearth, with "only a part of the head, and a portion of the lower extremities, and a few of the vertebrae, escaping combustion. A foot and a half (45cm) of the flooring under the body had been consumed, but a kneading-through and a powdering tub very near the body sustained no injury". A young assistant doctor, named Le Cat, was staying at the inn and managed to convince the court that this was no ordinary fire death but a "visitation of God" upon the drunken woman, and an obvious result of soaking one’s innards with spirits. Millet was vindicated, and Le Cat went on to qualify with some distinction, and publish a memoir on SHC.

According to a report in Lloyds Weekly News (February 1905), a woman was asleep by a fireplace. She woke to find herself in flames and she later died. The honest coroner said he could not understand what had happened: the woman had gone to sleep facing the fire, so any cinder that shot out from the grate would ignite the front of her clothes, yet it was her back that bore the severe burns.

The elderly spinster, Wilhelmina Dewar, combusted near midnight on 22nd March 1908, in the Northumberland town of Whitley Bay. Her sister Margaret, who, in a shocked state, managed to summon her neighbours, found Wilhelmina. In the house they found the severely charred body of Willhelmina in an upstairs bed. The bedclothes were unscorched and there was no sign of fire anywhere else in the house.