SHC: Bianchini's Criteria - Only Valid Accounts

In 1731, Rev. Giuseppe Bianchini of Verona, Italy, investigated the strange fire death of the Countess Cornelia di Bandi... and in reporting what he found, he also proposed the first list of criteria that defined when a fire death was not a normal fire death, but one he considered to be caused by a phenomena now called 'Spontaneous Human Combustion.'

Briefly put, Bianchini's Criteria are:

1. In normal fire deaths, limbs are destroyed first, and torsos last... in these odd cases, the torso is destroyed first and limbs last.
2. Bones are very hard to destroy by fire... yet in these deaths bones are destroyed and/or rendered fragile.
3. In these cases, objects near the victim show no direct fire damage... in short, the fire had unnaturally confined itself to just the victim.
4. The victims never appear to have resisted the fire that destroyed them, implying death and burning must have been near instantaneous.

Listed below are the SHC cases in Anomalies that match Bianchini's Criteria (at least a little!), and have no known reporting problems that make them questionable.

Bianchini's Criteria: All Accounts -- Only Valid Accounts