Four Children In A Spanish Mountain Village Walked Backwards Up Rocky Paths At High Speed For Four Years. Hundreds Of Pilgrims, Doctors, And A Spanish Jesuit Priest Watched. The Church Has Neither Approved Nor Condemned It.
On a stone-paved village lane in the remote mountain village of San Sebastián de Garabandal in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain, on a quiet warm summer afternoon in 1962, four village girls aged twelve and eleven walked rapidly backwards uphill, holding hands, heads tilted back, eyes fixed on a point above them. Hundreds of pilgrims, several named doctors, and the village parish priest watched. The girls did not trip. The girls did not stop.
Their names were Conchita González, María Loli Mazón, Jacinta González, and María Cruz González. On the eighteenth of June, 1961, the four had been playing in the lane on the edge of the village when they reported seeing the Archangel Michael. The angel returned, and then brought the Catholic Virgin Mary. Between June 1961 and November 1965, the four reported approximately two thousand visionary trances.
During each trance, doctors pricked the girls with medical needles. The girls felt nothing. Doctors held candle flames close to their fingers. Their skin did not burn. Their pupils did not contract to torch light. Grown men could not lift them from the ground. Others raised them with one finger. The girls held heavy iron crucifixes out at arm's length for pilgrims to kiss, bent fully backwards, motionless, for tens of minutes at a time.
On the eighteenth of July, 1962, in the same village lane, with the American blind pilgrim Joey Lomangino and dozens of villagers present, Conchita González knelt in trance with her tongue extended. Eight-millimetre colour cine film records a small white circular Catholic consecrated host visibly materialising on her tongue. The film and the signed affidavits are in the Diocesan Archives at Santander.
Among the doctors who tested the girls were the Barcelona neurologist Dr Ricardo Puncernau and the Santander psychiatrist Dr Luis Morales. The Spanish Jesuit Father Luis Andreu witnessed an ecstasy on the eighth of August, 1961 and died the following day, reportedly serene. The Diocese of Santander has held that the events have not been declared supernatural, nor declared false. None of the four girls has ever recanted.
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