# Spontaneous Human Combustion | They Found Only Her Skull and Foot; Her Room Left Unscorched

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827/spontaneous-human-combustion-they-found-only-her-skull-and-foot-her-room-left-unscorched
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827/spontaneous-human-combustion-they-found-only-her-skull-and-foot-her-room-left-unscorched.md
Podcast: [Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories](https://stenobird.com/podcast/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827)
Published: 2026-06-17T00:00:04+00:00
Episode link: https://weirddarkness.com/MaryHardyReeser
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/72555535/wd20260616a_maryhardyreeder.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827/episodes/spontaneous-human-combustion-they-found-only-her-skull-and-foot-her-room-left-unscorched
Duration seconds: 4228

## Resource

Sometime before dawn on July 2, 1951, a 67-year-old St. Petersburg widow was reduced to ash in her own armchair while the room around her sat almost untouched, leaving behind little more than a shrunken skull, a piece of spine, and a single foot still resting in its slipper. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/MaryHardyReeser READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88de8v FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When police found her in 1951, she was almost entirely ash. But mysteriously, the rest of her apartment remained almost perfectly intact. We’ll look at the death of Mary Reeser – which became known as “The Cinder Woman Case”. (Did Mary Hardy Reeser Spontaneously Combust?) *** Most crimes are pretty ordinary – assault, robbery, the occasional murder, but once in a while a crime is committed in a strange, shocking way – to the point it’s almost hard to believe what you are hearing is a true story. I’ll share a few of those strange crimes. (Creepy Crimes and Crazy Criminals) *** One of the reasons we find chimpanzees so interesting is because they are so much like humans – in body shape, the way they express themselves, it’s eerie sometimes. But still, we know they are just apes. Then there is the strange case of Oliver – a chimpanzee that also appeared to be human. Or was he a human that appeared to be a chimpanzee? Or, is it possible, that Oliver was a genuine genetic hybrid of the two? We’ll look at his incredibly strange story. (Oliver, The Humanzee) *** Some hauntings are more terrifying than others – and some are stranger than others. What happened to the Palzon family in Zaragoza, Spain possibly qualifies for both. They didn’t have a typical haunting – this was no poltergeist or spirit of a…

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## Transcript

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