I had this period in my early thirties when I would have what I guess for lack of a better word I’d have to call visions. I once saw a woman –a stout, elderly woman in a disturbingly translucent gown– levitating in the lovely chapel of a huge hospital in the Midwest.
This chapel was a spectacular and ornate place. It was bigger than many of the Catholic churches I’d attended in my childhood.
The place was entirely abandoned at the time I saw the levitating woman. It was very late at night, and the chapel was eerily silent and cloaked in shadows. I’m not even sure that what this woman was doing could properly be called levitating; she was actually floating, and hovering around up in the rafters high above the pews, her gown billowing around her and swollen with what appeared to be moonlight.
In the silence of the chapel I could clearly hear the labored, wheezing respiration of the old woman. She seemed to be having a tough time of it up there. She also seemed to be entirely oblivious to my presence. I wondered if perhaps what I was witnessing was an angel or a saint, although I could recall no instances where such beings had been portrayed as either quite so stout or so elderly.
I had some change in my pocket, which I proceeded to throw at the woman one coin at a time. I finally managed to hit her, but she didn’t seem to even flinch. Many of the coins I threw ricocheted back down to the marble floor, where they rattled around noisily. I recall listening as several of them rolled all the way down to the altar.
A short time later the woman disappeared, and I shrugged the whole thing off as an exhaustion-induced hallucination.
The next morning, however, the word was going around town that some nuns had discovered the body of an old woman on the floor of the hospital chapel, and the local newspaper later reported that the woman had a quarter embedded in her ribcage.
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