The spring apparitions of Our Lady of Caysasay

1603. A fisherman named Juan Maningcad netted a small wooden image of the Virgin in the Pansipit River. Accounts say it was waterlogged but glowed. Tradition holds that it left its keeper's urna at night and was back by morning. Moved to the church of San Martín de Tours, it kept leaving. Then it vanished.

Around 1611, Catalina Talayn, a servant gathering firewood and water, went to a spring called Binogsocan with a companion, Mariana Bagoyn. In a hollow like a little cave in a rock, she saw a person a little over a palm high. It shone with a great glow and brightness. The two women fled to Taal. Questioned later, she said she could not clearly identify what she had seen.

Juana Tangui came next. Her eyes were sick from a fire that had arisen in them. She could not open them. At the spring she saw a brightness like a large lit candle and felt as if someone behind her turned her by the shoulder. A figure about two palms high stood there, with a crown on its head and a small cross on its forehead. It spoke. Since you are not wearing the confraternity's sash, it said, do not come back to see me. She returned wearing the sash of the Cofradía de San Agustín. The figure blessed her rosary and sash and gave them back. Her eyesight was restored.

Then the reports multiplied. A light lasting hours, bright enough to read by. An arm holding a lit torch that moved up and down, though it remained in its place in the opening. Candles that went out and relit on their own. Music like a harp, guitar, shawm or organ, and bells where there were none. A strong, sweet fragrance. Fray Alonso Colón saw a light as bright as or brighter than the sun come down from the roof like lightning. Agustín Lontog, governor of Agonoy, watched the Virgin lift the Child for about half an hour. Then the scene faded, as when a veil is drawn. Pablo Caraig described a Thursday when 60 to 70 people saw the Virgin.

29 July 1619. Fray Pedro Arce, Bishop of Cebu and governor of the Manila archdiocese, signed a commission to look into and verify the case. The Augustinian provincial, Fray Alonso Barona, had requested it. Fray Juan Bautista de Montoya, prior of Taal, sat among the judges. Sessions ran at Taal in October 1619, at Quisasay in November, and again in February 1620. Testimony in the local language was translated. One ratification carries a baybayin signature.

The manuscript survives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. It once belonged to the library of the Convent of San Pablo in Manila, looted in 1762. The transcription ends partway through a statement. No verdict appears in it.

No hoax finding is recorded. No natural explanation for the lights, the music or the fragrance has been put forward in the sources. Discussion has turned instead to the statue's origin: lost from a Spanish expedition or a shipwreck, thrown into the sea to calm a storm, or of Chinese origin. Sources even disagree on its height, from six inches to 27.2 cm.

In 1718, Casimiro Díaz confirmed the apparitions in his Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas. José M. Cruz of the Ateneo de Manila studied the inquiry on microfilm and judged that Talayn was not fabricating the story. Christina H. Lee reads the cult as an expression of dissidence, resistance and survival among native, Chinese and Spanish devotees.

The image was crowned on 8 December 1954. The spring is now the Balón ng Sta. Lucia, twin wells under a carved coral stone arch near the shrine at Caysasay. In 2020 the well, the church and the stone stairway were declared a National Cultural Treasure. Fr. James Reuter SJ called these the first recorded apparitions of Our Blessed Mother in the Philippines.