My great-grandmother and my great-grandfather had a vision of Our Lady in 1940.
Here’s what happened…
In 1940 my great-grandmother secretly married my great-grandfather aged only 18. They had a secret liason which was frowned on by their parents. My grandmother hid her wedding ring from her father. They so longed to be “authentically” married in a Catholic Church. Eventually the secret came out. My great-grandfather was a very handsome young man but his family were incredibly poor. They were of Gypsy descent - so they didn’t even have a house! My great-grandmother, Jane, was madly in love with him and also (and I am not being biased) was very beautiful. She was so fasihionable for her time.
Her family came round to the fact eventually that there daughter loved this lad and so they had a second wedding, a Catholic wedding.
Then in 1940 lying in bed one night, my gran looked to the side of her bed and saw a most mysterious thing. She had a cage beside her bed with a little canary bird in it. The canary, whose name was Charlie, had flown out of the cage and was perched on her pillow, staring at her. She saw that the cage, in which she had the little canary bird, had been miraculously opened - without its key - and the bird had flown out and was now resting on her pillow. It had been the bird on her pillow which had woken her up. My great-gran thought, how did the canary get out his cage? She hadn’t opened it - she’d actually locked it before going to bed and the key was safe in her drawer. So she at first thought that there was an intruder in the house. But then she heard what she described as the most beautiful sound. She described it as being like the most heart-rending music, like a heavenly song. She said it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. She used to keep saying to me, “And the music! Oh the music, it was incredible, like heavenly music, like angels singing”.
This sound seemed to calm her down. And then, as she looked in front of her bed her eyes beheld a bright light, brighter than the sun. Her entire bed, she said, was lit up by it. This can’t be a dream, she thought, wondering how her eyes might betray her so. For the light somehow radiated warmth. As she gazed more and more into its shining heart, she experienced an overpowering sense of heat; comfortable, consoling warmth tenderly rushing through her body. No light she’d ever beheld on earth could’ve embodied such sweet, pleasant, glorious warmth.
And she saw a woman appear from within the light, clothed in the light. She said that this was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Her hair was blond, although in truth she said it might have just been the light, so it could have been any colour. Her skin was like wax, she always emphasised this part, that it was wax-like, so soft and pure looking. And she was robbed in white and sitting under what looked like a great arch made out of light and just gazing at her, smiling.
My grandmother described this arch in great detail. She said the light was just heavenly, with all different kinds of colours radiating out from it. The skin, she always went on about the skin, so soft, so pure like “wax” she would say. She maintained that this woman was the most beautiful lady she had ever seen and that she was a young woman, aged about 20. Sitting under an arch, dressed in white robes with that stunning music playing in the background.
She turned to my great-grandfather to tell him what she had seen but at the same time he was turning to tell her that he had seen the exact same thing! They both bumped into each others’ heads and told each other the exact same thing about this exact same woman and the exact same time.
Then, as they both looked back, the beautiful woman had vanished. Only the little bird remained, tweeting away on the pillow.
My gran’s sister went to a local priest, for although they believed they had witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary, they were frightened people might think them crazy. He never believed it. At the end of 1940, my great-grandfather died tragically in a World War II sea-battle. He drowned and my great-gran was left pregnant and widowed. We now know that he was murdered. Because of his looks, some of his so-called friends were jealous of him. He had the job of throwing coal into the ship or something, he did something to keep the ship going but apparently as he was doing this, and the sheep was trying to escape from the Nazi vessel the Admiral Hipper, one of these evil guys threw him overboard and he drowned to death.
An eyewitness saw this and told my gran’s sister but they hid it from my gran, because she had become so distraught and had to be taken into care. Then she had a painful labour and lost a lot of her eyesight due to the stress.
But something kept her going: Her faith in Jesus and the vision of his Mother that she had seen. Every morning, from that day to the end of her life this year aged 89, she prayed the rosary every morning.
My great-grandmother’s daughter - my grandmother - saw the woman, Mary, as well when she grew up, in the 1960s. Thing is, she at this time didn’t know her mother had seen Mary as well 20 odd years earlier. This time gran woke up in the middle of the night, turned round and saw the same woman beside her bed but this time with no light and with a headcovering, just staring at her. My grandmother got such a fright - thinking a woman had entered her house and was sitting beside her bed - that she screamed out and fell out of bed but when she looked back up, the lady was gone. It is a family secret… I am not supposed to tell but hey… Also, I haven’t told you every minute detail but I have given you the bare bones of the story.
I don’t know what the bird being freed from the cage represents, the light, the Blessed Virgin, the arch she was sitting under, the music, or her skin being like wax but…
Thoughts anybody?
& read about what Catholics believe. I was blown away, their answers were so reasonable & with such love I knew they were true. So then I went on a Mary-quest reading anything I could find to know her better.