14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, 3-month-old Rajeshwari Karnan was admitted at the Kilpauk Medical College Hospital in Chennai, India.
The boy had multiple burns on his body, which his parents said were due to the fact that the child had caught fire, seemingly out of the blue, on four different occasions.
As was to be expected, doctors didn't quite buy this explanation at first, and started looking for signs of child abuse.
Oddly enough, they could not find any. At this point, they came up with a rather peculiar explanation.
Long story short, they announced that, all things considered, the baby boy might have been the victim of a rare phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion.
According to ABC News, they partly based this theory on statements made by the boy's parents, who told them that the boy first caught fire nine days after he had been born, while he was alone in the hut.
The same thing supposedly happened on three other occasions, despite no obvious reason.
“The parents have held that the child burned instantaneously without any provocation. We are carrying out numerous tests,” Dr. Narayan Babu reportedly told the press shortly after the boy had been admitted.
“We are in a dilemma and haven’t come to any conclusion,” he added.
A couple of days ago, the doctors got the results of their tests, and were left with no choice except rule out spontaneous human combustion.
Thus, they could not find any signs that the boy might, under certain circumstances, catch fire without an obvious ignition sources.
“The possibility of child abuse exists and needs to be explored,” Dr. J. Jagan Mohan reportedly argued in light of these findings.
The boy's parents, on the other hand, maintain that they are not abusing they child, and that they had nothing to do with the burns now covering parts of the boy's body.
“We’re not crazy to burn our own baby,” the boy's father argued.
Spontaneous human combustion is a highly controversial theory which says that, under certain circumstances, a living organism or a recently deceased one can catch fire without an external source of ignition.
Over the past 300 years, around 200 supposed cases of spontaneous human combustion have been reported worldwide.
Some believe spontaneous combustion is a supernatural phenomenon. Those a tad more level-headed believe it occurs when highly flammable chemical compounds such as methane accumulate in the body and eventually seep through the skin.
Apparently, static electricity generated by clothing would be more than enough to ignite these chemical compounds and cause a person to catch fire.
Needless to say, there is no solid proof to confirm either of these theories.