All my life I’ve heard about people that supposedly “spontaneously combust.” I always put that in the category of old wives tales, or more recently fake news. But I ran across something interesting a few days ago that “appears” to be true. It was an article about Jacqueline Prietman, a British woman, that constantly produces ten times the static electricity of a normal human being.
The lady, who ironically married an electrician before she knew about her strange condition, grew up with no more than the usual mild electromagnetic field that surrounds everyone. But when she turned 22 years old, she noticed that her mere touch would cause ordinary household appliances to short out and “fizzle.”When others used the same appliances, they worked normally. Apparently she could also change the channels on her TV by just going near it. Priestman had to buy at least 30 new vacuum cleaners in her married life, plus five irons and several washing machines.
She was studied by Michael Shallis, a former astrophysicist, at Oxford University. He said that she was actually able to transmit tiny bolts of “lightening” that could affect any electrical system nearby.
He couldn’t come up with an explanation for the phenomenon, but he did say that most similar cases he had investigated involved women.
After studying more than 600 people with Pressman’s condition, he wrote a book called The Electrical Connection.
There is a name for people like Priestman. Because people with abnormal amounts of static electricity often cause streetlights to flicker when they pass by, scientists call the strange disorder Street Light Interference, or SLI. People with the condition are called SLI-ders or Sliders. (I’m not making this up.)
I guess people like this lend a whole new meaning to “getting a charge out of life.”
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