UNSOLVED MYSTERY: Clayton Vecellio of Lewis Run had another historic story to share. This one is local — a strange happening in Coudersport.
Clayton tells us, “Don Gosnell, a meter reader for North Penn Gas Co., set out on his accustomed rounds on the morning of Dec. 5, 1966, exactly 50 years ago today in Coudersport, Pa.
“His first call was Dr. John Irving Bentley, a 93-year-old retired physician, who was semi-invalid but still able to get around his house with the aid of a walker.
“Gosnell opened the front door and yelled but received no answer, so he proceeded downstairs to the basement to read the meter.
“In the corner of the dirt-floored basement was a pile of fine ash about 14 inches in diameter and about 5 inches high, perhaps enough to fill a bucket.
“He did not notice the hole in the ceiling — an irregular area about 2 ½ feet wide and 4 feet long, charred around the edges — burned clear through the floorboards above. He read the meter and went upstairs to look in on the doctor. Don Gosnell stuck his head in the bathroom. He was appalled at the sight that greeted him. The doctor’s walker was tilted over the burned hole in the floor, and alongside it was all that remained Dr. Bentley — his right leg from the knee down, browned but not charred. The shoe was intact. Gosnell ran out of the house white as a sheet, yelling at the top of his lungs: ‘Dr. Bentley burnt up!’
“The coroner, John Dec, had too many unanswered questions to determine how the accident could have happened. One theory was that the doctor had set his robe on fire in the living room while striking a match to light his pipe, then used his walker to get to the bathroom for water to put out the flames. (His robe was found in the bathtub next to the drain, singed but not badly burned.) But even if the robe had burst into flames, how could it have generated enough heat to set a body on fire? If the fire had started in the living room, why was there no trace of it? And how was it possible for a body to be consumed so completely with so little else being affected?
“The coroner’s certificate finally gave ‘asphyxiation and 90 percent burning’ as the cause of Dr. Bentley’s inexplicable death.
“There have been many reports of people bursting into flames (spontaneous human combustion) and it is a phenomenon for which there is no logical explanation.”
