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.

In 1858, a 14-year-old French girl reported 18 apparitions of 'a Lady' in a grotto near Lourdes, where a spring emerged that has since been associated with thousands of reported miraculous cures.

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.

From 1973 to 1981 in Akita, Japan, a wooden statue of Mary in a convent reportedly wept, bled, and perspired on 101 occasions, with fluids analyzed by a forensic specialist as human in origin.

In 1531, a Marian image allegedly appeared miraculously on the cloak of indigenous convert Juan Diego in Mexico City, producing an artifact still venerated nearly 500 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.

Between April 1968 and 1971, luminous phenomena appearing in the form of a robed female figure were reported repeatedly over St. Mary's Coptic Church in Zeitoun, Cairo, witnessed by hundreds of thousands including non-Christians.

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 May 2001, New Delhi was gripped by hundreds of reported attacks by a supernatural monkey-like creature, resulting in documented injuries, two deaths from panic falls, and a landmark academic study of mass psychogenic illness.

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, musician Pam Reynolds accurately described surgical instruments and procedures during a hypothermic cardiac standstill in which she was clinically brain-dead, making her case the most scrutinized veridical near-death experience in the medical literature.

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.