Spontaneous Combustion is a myth.

I believe that in fact it is caused by a small source of fire (often a cigarette) that falls on a person whilst they are unconscious (drunk, probably). This slowly starts to burn them and if the conditions are correct, and especially if our burning chap is particularly portly, the fat of the body will start to burn, along with the rest of them. The fire catches the bone marrow of the person after a while (this is a very long process - 8 hours, I think) and because the bone marrow is in side bones, and the heat is quite a lot, this successfully burns away all the bones as well.

Commonly, however, the persons legs are not totally consumed; there is not enough flammable material present for those to get hot enough.

I saw it on a panorama (I think) documentary (a BBC series of documentaries, if you've never heard of panorama - very reliable invesitgations) a few years back. What I want to know it this. If these combustions are so damn efficient (if you break a persons legs so they are laying over the body) then why don'pt they use this instead of a fuel-wasting crematorium fire process to deal with dead bodies?

NB: In the panorama investigation they did an *actual* "spontaneous combustion", but they did it on a pig, because it wouldn't be right to show a burning dead body on TV.

Alas and alack Charles Dickens, one of the great lights of English literature, has a character in Bleak House die of spontaneous combustion and despite the fact that Charly was a bloody fucking bore and major hack writer, many people have read it in a book and so believe that it is true. Coupled with the fact that so many people can't imagine how a cigarette can burn up a whole body completely (its mostly fat and fat burns exceptionally well) and wonder where the body went when it burned up, this explains why such nonsense is still believed in. BTW most of the body ends up as condensation on the window panes and a whole lot of carbon dioxide that goes up the chimney.
Personally these cases are much nicer to deal with than MMFs-- people who died of heart attacks a week ago and have just now been discovered. Major maggot festival.