When a Figure Appears

In January–March 1933, eleven-year-old Mariette Beco of Banneux, Belgium, reported eight apparitions of the Virgin Mary who identified herself as 'the Virgin of the Poor' and directed her to a spring 'for all nations.'

Between November 1932 and January 1933, five Belgian children reported 33 apparitions of the Virgin Mary appearing above a hawthorn tree near a convent school in Beauraing, Belgium.

On August 21, 1879, fifteen witnesses in Knock, Ireland, reported seeing a silent tableau of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, and a lamb on the south gable of the parish church, glowing in heavy rain.

Gathering firewood outside Lourdes in February 1858, the fourteen-year-old daughter of an impoverished former miller said she saw, in the grotto of Massabielle, a small young woman in white with a blue sash. Told to dig in the muddy ground, Bernadette uncovered a spring — one that still flows, and that two hundred million pilgrims have since followed her to.

Since June 1981, six youths (now adults) in the village of Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, have claimed ongoing daily Marian apparitions, making it one of the longest-running and most controversial alleged apparition cases in Catholic history.

In the winter of 1531, by the account handed down, Juan Diego let his rough maguey-fibre cloak fall open before the bishop of Mexico, spilling out roses that had no business blooming in the cold. The bishop was no longer looking at the roses — and the cloak he stared at instead still hangs in Mexico City, nearly five hundred years later.

A subset of Guadalupan claims holds that magnified examination of the tilma image's eyes reveals a reflected scene of thirteen or more identifiable people — evidence of a supernaturally accurate image that would have required a living eye to produce.

Beginning in 1981, several students at a school in Kibeho, Rwanda, reported Marian apparitions that included visions of mass violence and rivers of blood — interpreted after the 1994 Rwandan genocide as prophetic.

On September 19, 1846, two young French shepherd children reported a weeping apparition on a mountain near La Salette who delivered a message of penance; the event was approved by the Church in 1851 but subsequently complicated by the visionaries' divergent later claims.

A devotional image of the Virgin Mary is embedded in a rock face in the Guaitara River canyon in Colombia, reportedly appearing miraculously in 1754; geological analysis claims the pigment penetrates meters into the stone.

On January 17, 1871, four children in the French village of Pontmain reported seeing an apparition of a tall woman in the night sky surrounded by stars; adults present saw only a bright star, and a ceasefire followed within days.

Beginning August 2000, thousands of witnesses in Assiut, Egypt reported luminous figures and glowing doves over St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church over a period of months, with Coptic Pope Shenouda III affirming the apparitions' validity.

On the night of December 10-11, 2009, a luminous figure described as the Virgin Mary appeared over the domes of the Coptic Orthodox Virgin Mary church in Warraq al-Hadar, Greater Cairo, witnessed by over 200,000 people within two weeks.

On an April night in 1968, two Muslim mechanics in Cairo saw what they took for a woman in white standing on the dome of a Coptic church — one went to call the police, afraid she meant to jump. The luminous figure kept returning for three years, seen by hundreds of thousands, while security services searched a fifteen-mile radius for a projector or light source and found nothing.

From the 16th to early 20th centuries, approximately 80 documented cases of alleged dybbuk possession were recorded in rabbinic literature, representing the primary Jewish tradition of spiritual possession and exorcism.

In 2008 the academic neurosurgeon Eben Alexander spent a week in a coma from a rare bacterial meningitis, recovered fully, and in the 2012 bestseller 'Proof of Heaven' described a vivid journey to an afterlife. What set his account apart was the argument he built on his own expertise: that the experience occurred while his cortex was entirely shut down, making it, in his view, evidence of consciousness beyond the brain. A 2013 Esquire investigation placed the experience in the sedated and recovery window rather than true brain death and disputed parts of his account; defenders, including a published rebuttal, argue the investigation distorted the medical facts.

In the hot May of 2001, with the power failing and East Delhi sleeping on its rooftops, word spread of a creature — part monkey, part machine — attacking people in the dark; within two weeks, 397 accounts had reached the police. The eyewitnesses could not agree on what they had seen — four feet tall or eight, metal claws, glowing red eyes — and the police found no fur, no tracks, and no bite marks anywhere.

In the early 1980s, a cardiac arrest patient named Maria described seeing a worn blue tennis shoe on a specific third-floor window ledge of Harborview Hospital — a detail her social worker said she subsequently verified.

In 1991, surgeons cooled Pam Reynolds's body, stopped her heart, and drained the blood from her brain until the EEG went flat — the only way to reach the aneurysm at its base. Afterward she described the operation, down to the instruments, as if she had spent it watching from above the table.

From 1972 to 1978 in Dozulé, Normandy, Madeleine Aumont reported repeated apparitions of Jesus calling for a giant "glorious cross" and announcing his imminent return. On November 12, 2025, the Vatican's Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared the phenomenon "definitively, as not supernatural in origin."

In 1762, a supposed haunting at a lodging house on Cock Lane, London -- attributed to the spirit of a murdered woman -- was investigated by a committee including Samuel Johnson and exposed as a fraud perpetrated by a young girl and her father.