From the Files of Brad and Sherry Steiger
In September 1981 little Geraldine O’Rourke suddenly fell ill at the isolated rural home to which she had just moved with her parents. Helpless to prevent her condition from worsening, the O’Rourke were dismayed when Geraldine’s fever soon reached 101 degrees.
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To make matters worse, the area was beset by a torrential downfall of rain, which prevented their taking her to a hospital, and their telephone was out of order, making a call for help impossible.
Just when the desperate parents’ hopes were fast sinking in despair and they felt their fervent prayers were going unanswered, Mrs. O’Rourke heard a peculiar rustling sound and looked up from her prayers to behold the figure of a man looking down at Geraldine on the bed.
The mother felt no fear at the appearance of the phantom, and she immediately regarded the entity as one sent by God in answer to prayer. Somehow she knew that their prayers had been able to unlock the doors between worlds and summon assistance for their little girl.
The ghostly form led the amazed O’Rourkes to a hidden cache of medicines behind a panel in their living room. Trusting that the spirit entity had been sent by God to help them, they carefully followed the ghost’s instructions regarding the proper administration of the medicines to their daughter.
As the astonished O’Rourkes watched, Geraldine became still and peaceful. The entity joined their vigil until dawn, then disappeared.
Later, after little Geraldine had fully recovered, the O’Rourkes did a bit of investigation and learned that their house had formerly been occupied by a doctor. Fearing that burglars would steal his drugs, he hid them in a secret compartment. But he had died so suddenly that he hadn’t had time to leave instruction for their disposal.
The O’Rourkes will be forever grateful that the secret cache remained for the doctor’s spirit to dispense to their daughter on that grim and stormy night. According to Colin Parsons in his book Encounters with the Unknown, they have made a kind of shrine out of the compartment in which their helping hand from beyond had kept the medicines that saved Geraldine’s life.
There is an old Spanish proverb that an ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy, so Estelle Santos was going directly to the Source when she cried out to God in an anguished prayer that awful day: “Oh, God, help us! Send us a miracle and help us lift the station wagon off Ray before he dies!”
With that heaven-sent supplication, two women and a girl sought to lift a 3,500-pound station wagon off the unconscious teenaged boy being crushed under¬neath its unrelenting bulk.
Ray Santos, 17, had been repairing the transmission of his 1978 Chevrolet in the yard of his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico, when the car slipped off a jack and pinned him.
A steel cross brace under the steering column pressed heavily, agonizingly against his chest. The pain was unbearable. Ray tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t. He had the grim realization that if he didn’t get the pressure off him, he would be crushed to death. Every time he shouted for help, he let air out of his lungs, and the deadly weight on his chest increased. He feared that any second he would hear the awful sounds of his ribs cracking. The last thing he remembered before passing out was asking God to forgive his sins.
Sixty-six-year-old Felicita Madrid heard Ray’s faint, frantic shouting. When she looked out of her window and saw a pair of shoes sticking out from under the station wagon, she knew that someone was being killed. Mrs. Madrid’s cries for help summoned Ray’s mother, Estelle, their neighbor Roberta Gavarette, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Rita.
The two women and the girl grabbed hold of the station wagon’s bumper, and, at the count of three, tried with all of their strength to lift it. The bumper raised up, but the wheels would not leave the ground.
Estelle prayed aloud for God’s help before they tried once again to lift the car off Ray.
“That’s when the man ran up to us,” Estelle recalled. “He was not a very tall man, but he was stocky and powerfully built. His nose was crooked, like it had been broken. There was something about him that was fierce and wild, but his brown eyes were kind. He said that he would give us a hand.
“We figured that he was some stranger who just happened by and saw our trouble, and we were grateful for any help that we could get.
“I counted to three again; and when we lifted the bumper, the big man’s muscles bulged–and the car rose completely off the ground. The station wagon now seemed no heavier than a feather.”
The powerful man told Felicita and Rita to pull Ray out from under the car while he and the two women held the car up off his pinned chest.
“Somehow in all the excitement of the ambulance arriving to rush Ray off to the hospital, the stranger disappeared,” Estelle said. “Ray was very lucky. He was treated at a hospital, but miraculously suffered no broken bones or internal injuries. Ray was thankful to God for letting him stay around a while longer, but he was upset with us that we didn’t get the stranger’s name so he could thank him for saving his life.”
That night, Felicita Madrid startled the others when she told them that she knew the man who had appeared so fortuitously at such a desperate moment. At first, she said, she had not been certain, but after she had thought more about it, she was positive of the stranger’s identity.
She explained that twenty years before, when she and her late husband, Ramon, had first moved to the neighborhood, the Santos home had been occupied by a man named Emilio Sanchez, a powerfully built man who had wrestled professionally under the ring alias of the Mexican Mauler. Felicita remembered vividly having watched the wrestler working out with barbells in the back yard, and she recalled the night he had been killed in an automobile accident.
“Emilio was a gentle giant,” Mrs. Madrid said. “He loved people, children and young people, especially, and I have often felt that I have glimpsed him in the neighborhood. He was always there to help when he was needed.”
Although Felicita Madrid’s explanation for the sudden appearance–and disappearance–of the stranger with the strength of a Samson seemed eerie at first, Estelle Santos summed up the feelings of everyone when she said, “God heard our prayers and spared my son Ray’s life. He granted us a miracle. Who can say that God did not send us a spirit to give us a helping hand from beyond?”
Article continues tomorrow October 27, 2014 – Thanksgving Day! https://www.ufodigest.com/article/thankful-1127