The Marmora Apparitions at Greensides Farm

Greensides Farm lies just outside Marmora, a village in Hastings County, Ontario, 190 km northeast of Toronto. Before 1991, John Greensides read a paper by Wayne Weible, the Medjugorje writer, and ordered hundreds of copies to give away. His wife and daughters went to Medjugorje. A family friend, Eleanor Lynch, gave them fourteen Stations of the Cross. They hung them on trees around the hillside.

In June 1991 the family held a reunion for friends from the Medjugorje trip. On 24 June, at 6:30 p.m., a woman got up to the microphone. She said she saw the miracle of the sun. When they looked, Shelagh Greensides remembered, the sun was spinning. It went down and back up, like at Fatima.

The focus became the Tenth Station, in the woods on the hill. Later visitors described the sun there pulsating, turning round and round in orange, blue and yellow. By 1997, Maclean's reported, dozens had seen it. A 1996 home movie records people staring at the sun, remarking on it spinning. The farm's website says a robed woman's outline appears when the camera turns towards the sun.

Spring 1992. Our Lady appeared to ten children all in one day, Shelagh said. They were aged 4 to 14. Their names were never published.

That year Shelagh had her own vision. "She appeared as if she was in a picture in the sky." Afterwards an inner voice told her to give a Miraculous Medal to every visitor. She says she has handed out more than 30,000.

On 23 August 1992, Marci Guinto, 11, of Mississauga, reported her first vision. Statues were said to ooze oil in her presence. From 1993, Dory Tan reported messages, and visions of purgatory as "a sea of fire." Pilgrims spoke of the scent of roses and of healing spring water. In 1996, a rose petal reportedly landed on Maureen Marolly at the 14th Station.

In October 1992, Medjugorje visionary Ivan Dragicevic came to the farm. About 20,000 people came that day. By July 1997, more than 100,000 visitors had passed through. Each Marian feast day drew 2,500 to 8,000. John Greensides, who died on 23 November 2000, told Maclean's the family made no money from the site.

The Archdiocese of Kingston never ruled. "The official position on Marmora is that there isn't one," said Albert Dunn, the bishop's personal secretary, and a bishop warned that staring at the sun could cause harm. In 2006, Ronald L. Conte Jr. judged Dory Tan's messages not genuine. The Greensides themselves warned that not every would-be seer was real.

Science offered another reading in 2001, when L. A. H. Suess and Michael Persinger of Laurentian University noted the site lay near the top of a hill adjacent to an open pit magnetite mine. Between 1992 and 1997, local earthquake epicentres moved significantly closer, and most messages came one or two days after increased global geomagnetic activity. Weak magnetic fields, 0.1 to 1 microTesla, may have stimulated the visitors. It extended Persinger's tectonic strain theory, once applied to the Marian lights of Zeitoun in Egypt. Critics note his laboratory "sensed presence" effect failed a double-blind replication reported in Nature in 2004.

Pilgrims kept photographing the sky and the woods, finding a "solar Cross", "Jesus in the Clouds" and faces in tree bark. One devotee called it "Kodak Catholicism." In 2005, Shelagh, then 80, was transferring the land to the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate. As late as 2019, a sign on the hill claimed Christ was seen opposite the 10th Station.