The Paracast Newsletter
June 29, 2025
www.theparacast.com
Renowned Paranormal Researcher Fred Andersson Reveals Amazing Encounters, Including Werewolf Sightings, This Week on The Paracast.
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022 and later now feature better audio and fewer ads. We are also re-releasing some of our most popular classic episodes.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Episodes for subscribers to The Paracast+ are now released 24 hours earlier. Flash! Now includes over 100 classic episodes, so take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode (June 29, 2025): Gene and cohost Tim Swartz feature Fred Andersson, a renowned researcher, television freelancer, author, and podcaster from Sweden. With a focus on high strangeness, the paranormal, and UFOs, He has carved a niche for himself as an out-of-the-box thinker and explorer of the weird. In 2023 “ Northern Lights: High Strangeness in Sweden,” was published, which is the first book written in English entirely devoted to the subject of high strangeness, UFOs, and other mysteries in Sweden. Fred has worked on UFO-Mysteriet, the first Swedish documentary series on the UFO phenomenon, and, in the fall of 2025, will see the release of a new series about hauntings and other strange things around in Sweden. He’s currently researching conspiracy theories for an upcoming television project and is researching a unique form of historical ghostly mass hysteria.While Sweden is known as a secular, rational country, where stories of the paranormal are considered something of the past, the truth is quite the opposite. According to Fred, the country has a long history of weirdness, unexplained observations, and eerie encounters, often connected to the countryside, desolate roads, and empty fields. From gnomes, elves, and trolls of the past to UFOs and aliens in modern times, are they perhaps all connected, just different perceptions of the same underlying phenomenon? And what about sightings of purported werewolves? His website: fred-andersson.medium.com
After The Paracast — Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers by June 28: Renowned paranormal researcher Fred Andersson returns to talk with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about such topics as shape shifters, amazing encounters that he and his family have experienced over the years, plus reports of gnomes in Sweden. Seriously. You’ll also hear about what Fred describes as “out of place people.” With a focus on high strangeness, the paranormal, and UFOs, he has carved a niche for himself as an out-of-the-box thinker and explorer of the weird. In 2023 “ Northern Lights: High Strangeness in Sweden ,” was published, which is the first book written in English entirely devoted to the subject of high strangeness, UFOs, and other mysteries in Sweden. Fred has worked on UFO-Mysteriet, the first Swedish documentary series on the UFO phenomenon, and, in the fall of 2025, will see the release of a new series about hauntings and other strange things around in Sweden. While Sweden is known as a secular, rational country, where stories of the paranormal are considered something of the past, the truth is quite the opposite. According to Fred, the country has a long history of weirdness, unexplained observations, and eerie encounters, often connected to the countryside, desolate roads, and empty fields. From gnomes, elves, and trolls of the past to UFOs and aliens in modern times, are they perhaps all connected, just different perceptions of the same underlying phenomenon? And what about sightings of purported werewolves? His website: fred-andersson.medium.com
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. And look for @theparacast on Bluesky Social, Facebook, Threads and X.
Spontaneous Human Combustion: Myth or Marvel?
By Larry E. Arnold
"Do difficult research – it's where the true answers lie," neurosurgeon and NASA researcher Mark Wilson has said.
A prime contender for difficult research would surely be what history labels Spontaneous Human Combustion.
SHC is the alleged, controversial, and hotly debated enigma that defies common sense and utterly affronts orthodoxy. If real, it's a nightmare for debunkers and a great 21st Century medical mystery.
As concept, SHC is the smoking, blistering or burning of a person in the absence of a known, identifiable nearby burn agent; that is, no flame, caustic chemicals, high amperage electricity, radioactive materials or radiant heat source. In what history characterizes as SHC – what we term classic SHC and rename Sudden Human Cremation – a human body is consumed almost wholly to ash by what appears to be a high-heat inferno that produces minimal damage to surrounding combustibles. That is, a person cremated in an environ devoid of the attendant effects that fire science mandates should be present but are not.
There is no gore, often no guts and blood. Just the scariest, most terrifying and frightful spookiness imaginable. A scene macabre scene beyond belief.
“Spontaneous human combustion,” said Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001, is “this most gruesome of mysteries.” It’s one he didn’t want to know much about.
It is a topic definitely difficult to research. Investigating SHC is hampered by rabid ridicule and prodigious denial within mainstream science and in the minds of professional skeptics.
Because an adult body is about 70% water, Dr. Elizabeth Murray argues SHC would be “like igniting a swimming pool.” German forensic biologist Mark Benecke shouts that SHC is fallacy because “there are no known cases in which internal organs of a burned corpse were damaged more severely than the outer parts.” Professor Elayne Pope burns up cadavers scientifically as America’s "dame of flame" and contends she can find evidence for foul play in the worst-burned bodies. Renowned professional skeptic Joe Nickell touts that belief in SHC is “pseudoscience” and mystery-mongering.
Easy it would be to stuff this essay with quotes by physicians and fire forensic experts who make SHC arguably the most detested of all Fortean topics. Damned boring that would be. And unilluminating.
Instead, let’s get to fact-based fire fatalities that belie these experts.
We first encountered the idea of SHC in junior high school in Frank Edward’s paperback book, Stranger Than Science. He described in its “Incredible Cremations” chapter the July 1951 death of Mary Reeser in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Overnight this 67-year-old, 175-pound, cigarette-smoking widow incinerated to less than ten pounds of rubble: pieces of calcined vertebrae, “crisp ash,” something that resembled liver, a skull “shrunk uniformly to the size of an orange” and, just beyond the ashes in her small Circle of Death, a “wholly untouched left foot still wearing its slipper.” The rubble included her chair and a side table, both destroyed. Nowhere else in her small apartment was found the expected massive heat-and-flame damage.
“I never saw anything like this in the 48 years I have been investigating fire cases,” declared arson specialist Edward Davies; “we just don’t know what could have caused it.”
Thousands of fatal fires occur annually in the United States; most caused by dropped cigarettes, cigars or pipe tobacco alit. Burned flesh odor is officious; hard to eradicate. Bodies get picked up, bagged and autopsied for cause-of-death; for evidence of foul play. This could not be done for Mrs. Reeser. So thorough was this isolated burn-up, firemen scooped up her ashes with shovels.
A renowned expert on fire’s impact to humans, anthropologist Dr. Wilton Krogman was in the vicinity and, having done many body-burn experiments himself, he took a professional’s interest in Reeser’s demise. Dubbing her The Cinder Woman, he called the scene “macabre beyond belief.”
As did St. Petersburg police detectives, Krogman faced seven puzzlements: 1) 95% reduction of her body; 2) absence of tremendous heat – “Only at 3000° have I seen bone melt,” he attested; 3) time available – likely 3.5 hours (or less) to do what his experimentation needed 3,000° for 12 hours to replicate; 4) an atypical “sweet smell”; 5) alleged shrunken skull; 6) the affront to common sense; and 7) similarity to other deaths attributed historically to SHC.
“Such things can’t happen!” Krogman lamented. “The Cinder Woman…couldn’t happen, but it did.”
After a month of national publicity and consternation among scores of investigators, a cause is suddenly announced: chair-fire smoking mishap. Mrs. Reeser fell asleep while smoking and cremated in a smoldering fire fueled by her own fat over many hours. The wick-effect.
So simple. So logical?
If incinerating a human were as easy and simple as "wick" proponents argue, crematory owners would not spend $100,000 on a retort and licensing fees and lift tables and rakes and filtration systems and a cremator to grind up post-cremation bone fragments, plus millions of cubic feet of gas or 40-50 gallons of fuel oil to fire the oven to 2,200-2,400°, if they could lay a 25-cent lit cigarette on the corpse and soon find a pile of dry powder to give to next-of-kin.
Having interviewed many crematory owners/operators, we know they don’t do this because they can’t.
Unfortunately for SHC naysayers, Mrs. Reeser is not a one-off to be casually explained away.
In 1975 we uncovered an even more startling, bewildering localized burn-up in the home of Dr. John Irving Bentley, whose 180-pound body transformed on 5 December 1966 into half a leg, a head unrecognized by some first-responders, and a cone of ashes fourteen inches in diameter. Plus a sweet odor likened to BBQ’d steak, no flame damage overhead, no blistered enamel paint inches from the death hole through which he incinerated, no melting of his aluminum walker atop the hole.
We challenge Ms. Pope and any forensic specialist to find evidence of foul play in Bentley’s ashes. The blaze consumed all his internal organs yet left a lower leg (along with its leather slipper), thus roundly refuting Benecke’s criteria to reject SHC.
We have invested five decades and untold personal funds to document hundreds of similar cases worldwide. Photographs depicting these remarkable fire scenes are not hoaxes, as debunkers claim; first-responders are not uneducated dolts, as debunkers assert; witnesses and survivors of these ‘impossible’ combustions – yes, some people do live to tell incredible tales – are not liars and frauds, as debunkers allege.
Our paradigm-shattering book, ABLAZE! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion, presents compelling evidence for a multitude of fantastic freakish fires that cannot be debunked. Not honestly, anyway.
Don’t want to believe in SHC? Don’t read the book. Ignore what we say on The Paracast.
Otherwise, study its 400+ pages and its photographs. Still curious? Contact us through www.ParaScience.com to ask questions, share ideas or, best of all, give a lead about another instance that could be, gasp, spontaneous human combustion.
He who is afraid of research is ashamed of learning.
© 2025 Larry E Arnold, director: PSI: ParaScience International, 1025 Miller Ln, Harrisburg PA 17110
Copyright 1999-2025 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
June 29, 2025
www.theparacast.com
Renowned Paranormal Researcher Fred Andersson Reveals Amazing Encounters, Including Werewolf Sightings, This Week on The Paracast.
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022 and later now feature better audio and fewer ads. We are also re-releasing some of our most popular classic episodes.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Episodes for subscribers to The Paracast+ are now released 24 hours earlier. Flash! Now includes over 100 classic episodes, so take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode (June 29, 2025): Gene and cohost Tim Swartz feature Fred Andersson, a renowned researcher, television freelancer, author, and podcaster from Sweden. With a focus on high strangeness, the paranormal, and UFOs, He has carved a niche for himself as an out-of-the-box thinker and explorer of the weird. In 2023 “ Northern Lights: High Strangeness in Sweden,” was published, which is the first book written in English entirely devoted to the subject of high strangeness, UFOs, and other mysteries in Sweden. Fred has worked on UFO-Mysteriet, the first Swedish documentary series on the UFO phenomenon, and, in the fall of 2025, will see the release of a new series about hauntings and other strange things around in Sweden. He’s currently researching conspiracy theories for an upcoming television project and is researching a unique form of historical ghostly mass hysteria.While Sweden is known as a secular, rational country, where stories of the paranormal are considered something of the past, the truth is quite the opposite. According to Fred, the country has a long history of weirdness, unexplained observations, and eerie encounters, often connected to the countryside, desolate roads, and empty fields. From gnomes, elves, and trolls of the past to UFOs and aliens in modern times, are they perhaps all connected, just different perceptions of the same underlying phenomenon? And what about sightings of purported werewolves? His website: fred-andersson.medium.com
After The Paracast — Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers by June 28: Renowned paranormal researcher Fred Andersson returns to talk with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about such topics as shape shifters, amazing encounters that he and his family have experienced over the years, plus reports of gnomes in Sweden. Seriously. You’ll also hear about what Fred describes as “out of place people.” With a focus on high strangeness, the paranormal, and UFOs, he has carved a niche for himself as an out-of-the-box thinker and explorer of the weird. In 2023 “ Northern Lights: High Strangeness in Sweden ,” was published, which is the first book written in English entirely devoted to the subject of high strangeness, UFOs, and other mysteries in Sweden. Fred has worked on UFO-Mysteriet, the first Swedish documentary series on the UFO phenomenon, and, in the fall of 2025, will see the release of a new series about hauntings and other strange things around in Sweden. While Sweden is known as a secular, rational country, where stories of the paranormal are considered something of the past, the truth is quite the opposite. According to Fred, the country has a long history of weirdness, unexplained observations, and eerie encounters, often connected to the countryside, desolate roads, and empty fields. From gnomes, elves, and trolls of the past to UFOs and aliens in modern times, are they perhaps all connected, just different perceptions of the same underlying phenomenon? And what about sightings of purported werewolves? His website: fred-andersson.medium.com
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. And look for @theparacast on Bluesky Social, Facebook, Threads and X.
Spontaneous Human Combustion: Myth or Marvel?
By Larry E. Arnold
"Do difficult research – it's where the true answers lie," neurosurgeon and NASA researcher Mark Wilson has said.
A prime contender for difficult research would surely be what history labels Spontaneous Human Combustion.
SHC is the alleged, controversial, and hotly debated enigma that defies common sense and utterly affronts orthodoxy. If real, it's a nightmare for debunkers and a great 21st Century medical mystery.
As concept, SHC is the smoking, blistering or burning of a person in the absence of a known, identifiable nearby burn agent; that is, no flame, caustic chemicals, high amperage electricity, radioactive materials or radiant heat source. In what history characterizes as SHC – what we term classic SHC and rename Sudden Human Cremation – a human body is consumed almost wholly to ash by what appears to be a high-heat inferno that produces minimal damage to surrounding combustibles. That is, a person cremated in an environ devoid of the attendant effects that fire science mandates should be present but are not.
There is no gore, often no guts and blood. Just the scariest, most terrifying and frightful spookiness imaginable. A scene macabre scene beyond belief.
“Spontaneous human combustion,” said Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001, is “this most gruesome of mysteries.” It’s one he didn’t want to know much about.
It is a topic definitely difficult to research. Investigating SHC is hampered by rabid ridicule and prodigious denial within mainstream science and in the minds of professional skeptics.
Because an adult body is about 70% water, Dr. Elizabeth Murray argues SHC would be “like igniting a swimming pool.” German forensic biologist Mark Benecke shouts that SHC is fallacy because “there are no known cases in which internal organs of a burned corpse were damaged more severely than the outer parts.” Professor Elayne Pope burns up cadavers scientifically as America’s "dame of flame" and contends she can find evidence for foul play in the worst-burned bodies. Renowned professional skeptic Joe Nickell touts that belief in SHC is “pseudoscience” and mystery-mongering.
Easy it would be to stuff this essay with quotes by physicians and fire forensic experts who make SHC arguably the most detested of all Fortean topics. Damned boring that would be. And unilluminating.
Instead, let’s get to fact-based fire fatalities that belie these experts.
We first encountered the idea of SHC in junior high school in Frank Edward’s paperback book, Stranger Than Science. He described in its “Incredible Cremations” chapter the July 1951 death of Mary Reeser in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Overnight this 67-year-old, 175-pound, cigarette-smoking widow incinerated to less than ten pounds of rubble: pieces of calcined vertebrae, “crisp ash,” something that resembled liver, a skull “shrunk uniformly to the size of an orange” and, just beyond the ashes in her small Circle of Death, a “wholly untouched left foot still wearing its slipper.” The rubble included her chair and a side table, both destroyed. Nowhere else in her small apartment was found the expected massive heat-and-flame damage.
“I never saw anything like this in the 48 years I have been investigating fire cases,” declared arson specialist Edward Davies; “we just don’t know what could have caused it.”
Thousands of fatal fires occur annually in the United States; most caused by dropped cigarettes, cigars or pipe tobacco alit. Burned flesh odor is officious; hard to eradicate. Bodies get picked up, bagged and autopsied for cause-of-death; for evidence of foul play. This could not be done for Mrs. Reeser. So thorough was this isolated burn-up, firemen scooped up her ashes with shovels.
A renowned expert on fire’s impact to humans, anthropologist Dr. Wilton Krogman was in the vicinity and, having done many body-burn experiments himself, he took a professional’s interest in Reeser’s demise. Dubbing her The Cinder Woman, he called the scene “macabre beyond belief.”
As did St. Petersburg police detectives, Krogman faced seven puzzlements: 1) 95% reduction of her body; 2) absence of tremendous heat – “Only at 3000° have I seen bone melt,” he attested; 3) time available – likely 3.5 hours (or less) to do what his experimentation needed 3,000° for 12 hours to replicate; 4) an atypical “sweet smell”; 5) alleged shrunken skull; 6) the affront to common sense; and 7) similarity to other deaths attributed historically to SHC.
“Such things can’t happen!” Krogman lamented. “The Cinder Woman…couldn’t happen, but it did.”
After a month of national publicity and consternation among scores of investigators, a cause is suddenly announced: chair-fire smoking mishap. Mrs. Reeser fell asleep while smoking and cremated in a smoldering fire fueled by her own fat over many hours. The wick-effect.
So simple. So logical?
If incinerating a human were as easy and simple as "wick" proponents argue, crematory owners would not spend $100,000 on a retort and licensing fees and lift tables and rakes and filtration systems and a cremator to grind up post-cremation bone fragments, plus millions of cubic feet of gas or 40-50 gallons of fuel oil to fire the oven to 2,200-2,400°, if they could lay a 25-cent lit cigarette on the corpse and soon find a pile of dry powder to give to next-of-kin.
Having interviewed many crematory owners/operators, we know they don’t do this because they can’t.
Unfortunately for SHC naysayers, Mrs. Reeser is not a one-off to be casually explained away.
In 1975 we uncovered an even more startling, bewildering localized burn-up in the home of Dr. John Irving Bentley, whose 180-pound body transformed on 5 December 1966 into half a leg, a head unrecognized by some first-responders, and a cone of ashes fourteen inches in diameter. Plus a sweet odor likened to BBQ’d steak, no flame damage overhead, no blistered enamel paint inches from the death hole through which he incinerated, no melting of his aluminum walker atop the hole.
We challenge Ms. Pope and any forensic specialist to find evidence of foul play in Bentley’s ashes. The blaze consumed all his internal organs yet left a lower leg (along with its leather slipper), thus roundly refuting Benecke’s criteria to reject SHC.
We have invested five decades and untold personal funds to document hundreds of similar cases worldwide. Photographs depicting these remarkable fire scenes are not hoaxes, as debunkers claim; first-responders are not uneducated dolts, as debunkers assert; witnesses and survivors of these ‘impossible’ combustions – yes, some people do live to tell incredible tales – are not liars and frauds, as debunkers allege.
Our paradigm-shattering book, ABLAZE! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion, presents compelling evidence for a multitude of fantastic freakish fires that cannot be debunked. Not honestly, anyway.
Don’t want to believe in SHC? Don’t read the book. Ignore what we say on The Paracast.
Otherwise, study its 400+ pages and its photographs. Still curious? Contact us through www.ParaScience.com to ask questions, share ideas or, best of all, give a lead about another instance that could be, gasp, spontaneous human combustion.
He who is afraid of research is ashamed of learning.
© 2025 Larry E Arnold, director: PSI: ParaScience International, 1025 Miller Ln, Harrisburg PA 17110
Copyright 1999-2025 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!