RELIGIOUS APPARITION IN CLEARWATER FLORIDA

On September 9th 1996 when I first moved to Florida from NYC, I moved away from Tampa Hillsborough County to Clearwater in Pinellas County in the month of December and witnessed something that I always thought would never happen to me.
Do you know what I mean? Apparitions which most of us have read about, leaving us to wonder why only people living in desolate areas see things like a UFO or a statue of a saint which bleeds or sheds tears.


My experience was to actually see the likeness of the typical image we have all seen in paintings of a blue hooded Virgin Mary, except this one was more of an outline of her on a 30 foot tall glass window pane of an office building in Clearwater Florida.

Up close, the streaks of shimmering color appear to be fashioned from grainy, crusted buildups of debris. The business' owner, Michael G. Krizmanich, says that he contracted to have the windows cleaned when he purchased the building one year earlier, but that the "Madonna" stains, which were present even then, proved too stubborn for removal.
A local chemist has said that the "rainbow" effect is due to water deposits and weathering combining to create a chemical reaction, such as is commonly seen in old bottles.


The image was so amazingly beautiful that I went to visit this image of the Madonna almost every day until the New Year. I moved back to Tampa that year and never returned to see the image of the Madonna again. Eight years later on March 24th 2004, I was saddened to have heard on the news that she had been vandalized by an 18 year old with a sling shot, shattering the upper 3 panes of purple, blue and yellow which formed the head.

In retrospect, I was glad that now I was one of those who had experienced something colorful, unique, amazing and much more inspiring than walking around a hiking trail and running smack into Sashquatch or Chupacabra!