We all remember the legendary story of Mary Reeser, the 67 year old Florida woman who is the most well known victim of Spontaneous Human Combustion, or SHC. Not much is known about the reason why a human body might for no reason just burst into flames, but the condition was first proposed in 1746, meaning humans have been living in fear of it for nigh on 300 years. As little as there is known about SHC though, there is even less known about SCC, also known as Spontaneous Chip Combustion.

Recently the fire department of Austin Texas had an encounter with tortilla chips of an extraordinary sort. Apparently there were some boxes of tortilla chips outside a factory that spontaneously exploded into fire for no discernible reason! If that wasn’t creepy enough, a mere three days later ANOTHER bunch of tortilla chips exploded into flames outside the very same factory! Now either this factory is the testing grounds of a new brand of weaponized chips so spicy that the flames manifest themselves into reality, or there is something truly supernatural going on...

You can read the details directly from the fire department here, and let them be a warning to you. Just because we can make chips that will metaphorically catch fire in your mouth, doesn’t mean that they might not also literally catch fire in your mouth as well. We are now 67 years since the death of Mary Reeser, who has now been dead for as long as she was alive, and we still have no answer to what happened to her. I imagine that if we could go back and examine that crime scene, maybe there would be a stray tortilla chip or two around the heap of ashes that she had once been that might give an idea...