“A series of spontaneous fires started in mid-January in the town of Canneto di Caronia in about 20 houses. After a brief respite last month, the almost daily fires have flared up again — even though electricity to the village was cut off.

An endless flow of scientists, engineers, police and even a few self-styled ‘ghostbusters’ have descended on the town searching for clues to the recent spontaneous combustion of everything from fuse boxes to microwave ovens to a car.” —Reuters [via dangerousmeta]

Spontaneous combustion and its most vexing variant, spontaneous human combustion, are a puzzling and, I am convinced, real phenomenon. Perhaps the urgency of such a prodigious clustering of these events will provide the impetus for fruitful investigation and some clues to the phenomenon’s cause.