The Necedah Apparitions: Mary Ann Van Hoof and the Assumption Day Crowd

Mary Ann Van Hoof was a 40-year-old farm wife. She and her husband Fred worked a 142-acre farm outside Necedah, Wisconsin.

November 12, 1949. A veiled figure came to her bedroom at night. She was frightened and kept silent for about a month. Fred, a Catholic, suggested it might be Mary. On Good Friday 1950 the crucifix on her wall began to "glow."

Pentecost. May 28, 1950. Four small ash trees stood in the yard. "I saw a flash of light, sort of like when the sun reflects across the windshield," Van Hoof said. A "blue mist behind the four little ash trees" then "floated through the tips of the trees and then formed into Our Lady."

"She lowered herself, smiling, with her arms extended." The figure stopped about two feet above the ground, on a small cloud. She wore a blue veil, and pink roses surrounded her bare feet. "It seems she blots out everything," Van Hoof said. Her family once asked if she had noticed a train going by, and she had not.

The Virgin, she said, would return on set feast days. Twenty-eight people came on Trinity Sunday. About 1,500 came on June 16. Henry Swan of the local Chamber of Commerce mailed 176,000 pieces of literature before that date, and 173,000 more before August 15.

August 15, 1950. An estimated 100,000 people from about 40 states filled the farm. Reporters from the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and Life were among them. At noon Van Hoof knelt, prayed at a statue of Our Lady of Fátima and passed on the messages. One warned that "the destruction is right above us," with black clouds coming over America and Alaska as "the first stepping stone."

Then the crowd reported signs. Some said the sun changed color, spun around and swerved towards the earth. Others saw a cross on it, and rosaries, pilgrims said, turned gold. Cures were claimed. Only Van Hoof ever said she saw the Virgin.

Bishop John Patrick Treacy of the Diocese of La Crosse formed an investigating committee in July 1950. Catholics were told to stay away. On October 7 a crowd estimated by state police at 50,000 returned. At the appointed hour "the sun burst through rain clouds which had hovered over the humble farm most of the morning, and a murmur swept through the crowd."

In 1952 tests ordered by the bishop at Marquette University Medical School contradicted her claim of living on liquids. No stigmata appeared while her hands and head were bandaged. In June 1955 the diocese declared her visions "false." In May 1975 Bishop Frederick W. Freking placed her and six followers under interdict.

By the accounts that survive, no reporter saw a miracle of the sun. Three psychiatrists who examined her at Marquette concluded she suffered from "hysteria and repressed sexual anxiety," while Thomas A. Kselman and Steven Avella read Necedah through Cold War anxiety. The shrine broke with Rome in 1979, and in 1981 Edward Stehlik, the Old Catholic archbishop who had consecrated it, called it a hoax. Yet it still operates today as the Queen of the Holy Rosary, Mediatrix of Peace Shrine. Mark Garvey called the apparitions "the most historically significant apparition series" in the United States.