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A Pennsylvania teen had to be hospitalized after she sustained “life-altering injuries” while attempting the viral “fire-breathing” challenge circulating on social media.
Wilmerding Fire Marshal Al Hussey told KDKA that the unnamed 14-year-old girl had tried to “breathe fire” by drinking isopropyl alcohol while in her apartment complex in Pitcairn, Pittsburgh, CBS News reported.
She was seemingly performing a variation of the fireball challenge, a dangerous stunt where youngsters try to ignite rubbing alcohol to create a makeshift Molotov cocktail.
The stunt backfired after the youngster sustained severe burns across 8% of her body, including her face, neck and chest, WTAE reported.
She is now intubated and being treated for her injuries at the University Of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Pitcairn Fire Chief Tommy Dick said the girl is lucky to be alive as the flames could’ve “easily gone inside their digestive track, and she could have died.”
“It’s not a very smart thing for anybody to do, let alone children,” Dick said, warning about using rubbing alcohol as an accelerant. “It’s supposed to be for cleaning off wounds and cuts and stuff, not ingesting and trying to blow fire.”
“We are not meant to breathe fire as human beings,” seconded Hussey. “First and foremost, you can lose your life. Second, you can have life-altering injuries to your appearance.”
“Third, you could injure others in a building where you’re in, or a room, or the home,” he added.
Fire officials are now using the incident to highlight the dangers of online challenges.
“Just because you’ve seen it on social media doesn’t mean you should do it,” cautioned Dick, who urged parents to educate their children on fire safety and be “active in their lives.”
In a similar incident in 2023, Arizona teen Corey Lee sustained burns on over half his body following a botched attempt at a fireball challenge he had allegedly seen on social media.
“Because of social media, my baby is scarred for life,” said the boy’s mother, Tiffany Roper, of the freak accident, which occurred just days after her son’s 12th birthday.
The fire-breathing challenge is just one of many harebrained stunts circulating on TikTok and other platforms.
Among the most dangerous is the blackout challenge, in which youngsters deprive themselves of oxygen to attain a euphoric state of mind. This hazardous stunt is responsible for over 100 deaths to date, per a 2025 survey by the California-based Omega Law Firm.
To make matters worse, these foolhardy feats are especially popular among teens and tween social media users.
That’s because teens’ prefrontal cortexes are not fully developed, making them more susceptible to peer pressure and suggestion — the whole gist of the dangerous challenges that proliferate on social media.
“Social media challenge videos often encourage users to mimic trending stunts they’ve seen online and then share their version for public attention,” the team explained in the report, adding that many challenges cross into “seriously risky and sometimes life-threatening territory.”
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