Joe Nickell, PhD, is CSI’s senior research fellow. He is author of many investigative books, including The Science of Miracles (2013).
Figure 1. “Our Lady of Knock,” a hand-colored lithograph by Courier and Ives depicting a scene that “miraculously” appeared on a church wall at Knock, Ireland, in 1879. (Author’s collection)
In January 2015, I acquired for my collection a rare Currier and Ives print—an original hand-colored lithograph (Figure 1)—depicting a supposedly miraculous occurrence at Knock, Ireland, in 1879. I had written about this event previously (Nickell 1993, 175–176), but I now decided to see if the apparitional experience could be explained in more detail.