The Case of Michael Faherty

A house fire in Galway leads to one of the strangest coronary verdicts in Irish history.

Above: Galway City, where Michael Faherty died in 2010.
Gerd Eichmann, Galway-14-Fussgaengerzone-2017-gje, CC BY-SA 4.0

It is 3 AM on 22 December, 2010, in Ballybane, Galway city. It is late, and with Christmas just three days away, peacefully quiet in the suburban housing estate of Clareview Park. In the house of Tom Mannion this silence is suddenly broken by the sound of his fire alarm. He quickly checks his house, but can find no apparent cause. Suspecting a false alarm, Tom decides that he will take a quick look outside, just in case. As he opens the door he is confronted by the sight of heavy smoke coming from number 64, home to his elderly neighbour Michael Faherty.


Mannion pounds heavily on the door. This succeeds in waking more residents in the estate, but there is still no sign of Faherty. The Galway fire brigade and Gardai are soon at the scene and, wasting no time, they quickly break down the front door and enter. Although the emergency services have no way of knowing it at the time, what they are about to encounter inside will baffle investigators and lead to one of the strangest rulings on a cause of death ever recorded.


Less than a year after the fire in Ballybane, an inquest into the death of Michael Faherty will be held in Galway. The verdict reached that day will go on to make headlines in Ireland and abroad and will set a unique legal precedent. The inquest will rule that Michael Faherty, 76, died as a result of spontaneous human combustion.

Spontaneous human combustion has been a source of fascination and exasperation in equal measures for some time. There are those who believe that it is just what its name suggests—spontaneous and inexplicable, and there are the many doubters who prefer rational explanations. Some of the more basic of these include high levels of alcohol in victims’ bloodstreams, lack of care with cigarettes and associated objects, and simple proximity to open fireplaces and other hazards. Ardent detractors will routinely argue that a combination of all three of these are to blame for all historical cases of spontaneous human combustion. More fanciful theories involve the suspected build-up of flammable gas in the intestines and “lightning balls”. And of course there is the much vaunted “wick effect”, whereby a flame will, somehow, cause subcutaneous human fat to burn like a candle for hours.

Although spontaneous human combustion is not a new phenomenon, it is not a widely recognised one either. This is especially true when it comes to cause-of-death rulings. The Galway case was unique in Ireland for two reasons; not only was it the first time that a death was attributed to spontaneous human combustion, it was also the first time there was a suspected case of the phenomenon in the country at all. Such a historic lack of cases either points to a serious level of under-reporting, or the much more likely explanation that it simply hadn’t happened in Ireland—in modern times at least—before 2010.

In contrast, the neighbouring island of Britain has no shortage of suspected spontaneous
human combustion cases. Interest in the subject probably peaked during the Victorian era, when individuals involved with the temperance movement were keen to stress the prevalence of alcohol as a presumed aggravating factor. Even Charles Dickens suggested this: there is a character in Bleak House who meets a fiery end as a result of his excessive drinking. But recorded cases continued through the 20th-century right up to the present.

Mary Reeser died of suspected spontaneous human combustion in Florida, 1951, in very similar circumstances to Faherty. The FBI attributed the cause of death to the wick effect. She is one of the most frequently cited cases of the phenomenon.

marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

And yet, despite the fact that there have been several coroners’ inquests in Britain where spontaneous human combustion has been suggested as a factor in otherwise unexplained deaths, there has been a reluctance to attribute any of them to the phenomenon in final rulings. What has stopped inquests from doing so, and thus stopped the inclusion of the anomaly in British legal precedent, is the fact that accelerants are almost always present. They may be there in obvious forms such as petrol and lighter fluid, but some types of clothing are also classed as accelerants. The combination of accelerants and misadventure has therefore been deemed the most likely explanation of suspected cases in the UK and, as nobody has ever reported actually seeing somebody abruptly burst into flames, the idea of spontaneous human combustion is considered fringe theory at best. Ireland—with a legal system inherited from centuries of British rule, and no cases of its own to consider anyway—duly followed suit. But that was all to change in September 2011.

As the first emergency responders to enter the house of Michael Faherty in the early hours of December 22nd, 2010, the fire brigade were called upon to give their deposition to the inquest into his death first. The representative of the Galway brigade at the proceedings was assistant chief fire officer Gerry O’Malley. When O’Malley had told the coroner what he’d encountered in the sitting room of number 64 Clareview Park, he was asked if he had ever come across such a scene in the course of his duties before. ‘I can’t say that I have’, was his reply. Next, Garda Gerard O’Callaghan gave his account of the scene, and the same question was put to him. ‘Garda, have you ever seen anything like this?’ O’Callaghan considered the question briefly, and then said, simply, ‘no’.

An Irish Garda (police) car. Members of the emergency services were shocked by the details of the case, with many claiming never to have experienced anything like it before.
Max 997, Garda and police car, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

One person who might reasonably have expected to have seen something similar in his career was the man in charge of proceedings himself, Dr Kieran McLoughlin. For 25 years a coroner of Galway west—a district that comprises not just the city but also the seaboarding region of Connemara—McLoughlin had come across all manner of strange and grisly deaths in his time, and more than his fair share of cases where fire was involved. But the evidence that was put to him that day from the fire brigade, Gardai, Michael Faherty’s neighbours, and pathologist Grace Callagy was leading him towards a very unusual conclusion.

The details of the case as presented to Dr McLoughlin on that day were as follows. Michael Faherty was discovered lying on his back in the sitting room, his head directly in front of an open fireplace. He was declared dead at the scene, as most of his body had been completely cremated. His organs were too badly damaged for examination. Despite his proximity to the fireplace, and the fact that a fire was indeed burning in the grate, the fire brigade were confident that this was not the source of the blaze that had killed him. There were no accelerants found at the scene and Gardai were certain that nobody had broken into number 64, and had ruled out foul play. But it was Garda O’Callaghan who had the strangest piece of testimony to deliver. Despite the fire burning so intensely that it put Michael Faherty’s body beyond the reach of any meaningful post-mortem examination, the damage to the inside of the house was limited to the areas directly above and below the area where he was found. Nothing else had gone up in flames that night—not curtains, furniture, flooring, nothing. Only Mr Faherty himself had burned in the fire—well, Faherty and his clothes, that is.

Having considered all the evidence presented to him that day, the coroner delivered what will certainly be the strangest cause of death verdict in his long career. In closing the proceedings, Dr McLoughlin told the inquest that, all things considered, he was ‘left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation’.

When people hear of bizarre deaths and accidents they often resort to a defence mechanism that is flawed, but uniquely human. In psychology, it is known as the fundamental attribution error. It involves the brief consideration of the circumstances of somebody else’s misfortune, and then the rapid conclusion that they must have done something wrong or made some basic mistake. In short, they earned their misfortune in some way. The fundamental attribution error is important for our species; it allows an individual to observe what has happened in the past and conclude that, where others have failed and perhaps died, they will succeed. Without this counter-factual way of thinking we would never have crossed oceans, or captured wild animals to domesticate, or learned how to harness the power of electricity.

But sometimes this characteristic only serves to cast the victim of extreme circumstances in a negative light that is undeserved. Speculation that historical cases of spontaneous human combustion are caused by carelessness with lighters and cigarettes tends to ignore the fact that millions of people are careless with such items every day, and few burn to death. When Victorian commentators emphasized the supposed connection to alcohol, they were making a statement about the moral character of the victims. Their heirs continue to assert this unproven link today. Yet while Michael Faherty was probably no stranger to drink he was certainly no souse, and even if he had been he would hardly have been alone. It’s never been explained why alcohol would cause some people to burn to death in private, while almost everybody else can drink as much as they like in public and never have to worry about suddenly bursting into flames.

Although the circumstances of his death may be debated in the future, for the time being the case of Michael Faherty is settled—legally speaking at least. And while Ireland’s first official case of spontaneous human combustion raised a few eyebrows almost everywhere it was reported, it is worth remembering that he was a person, with people who knew and cared for him. Asked on the day of the inquest if she was satisfied with the finding, his grown daughter Mairin Faherty told reporters that she was. She paused briefly before adding, quietly, ‘although it doesn’t really help me much’.