Ireland’s Moving Statues – Illusion or Reality?

On 14 February 1985, some of the children in a group of 30 who were praying at St Mary’s church in Asdee, Country Kerry, claimed to have seen the right hand of a statue of Jesus beckoning them and the eyes of a Madonna statue moving. A month later, some children alleged that a statue in their church at Ballydesmond in County Cork had been moving.

Thus began an extraordinary year in which religious icons all over Ireland reputedly exhibited varying degrees of unexpected mobility. The site of the greatest fervor, however, was the shrine at Ballinspittle, County Cork, whose 152 kg statue of the Virgin Mary was claimed by 17-year-old Clare O’Mahoney and her mother to have rocked backwards and forwards as they walked by its grotto on the evening of 22 July. This initiated a flurry of interest, which led to great numbers of people visiting the shrine during the next four months and numerous allegations that the statue was indeed rocking on its heels, sometimes moving its head and shoulders too. Two days after the O’Mahoneys’ sighting, it was watched with some alarm by Sergeant John Murray of the Garda Siochana, who stated that it was vibrating from side to side to such an extent that he had wondered if it was going to fall over.

Happily it did not, but events at Ballinspittle nonetheless reached a dramatically violent climax when, during the early evening of 31 October, two men attacked the Madonna with a hammer and an axe, badly damaging its head, hands and the illuminated halo around its head. After jeering the horrified crowd for being “stupid fools, worshipping a plaster statue”, the two men and a colleague who had been photographing their vandalism jumped in their car and drove off. Although soon caught, they were acquitted at their trial on a legal technicality.

In The Moving Statue of Ballinspittle, Lionel Beer listed 47 locations in Ireland that experienced reports of moving statues or other phenomena connected with the Virgin Mary during 1985, and a collection of journalistic accounts concerning these remarkable incidents featured in Seeing Is Believing: Moving Statue in Ireland, edited by Colm Toibin.

If they did not compromise authentic miracles, the sightings were presumably due to various optical effects. Investigators of the Asdee reports have shown that an illusion of movement can be effected with the two tall statues in St Mary’s church merely by staring for a short time at the small round window between the statues and then gazing at either one of them.

Similarly, the glare of lights illuminating various statues in dark conditions might well have stimulated unconscious eye movements in the observers, thereby eliciting illusory movement by the statues. This is a likely explanation for the many claimed sightings that occurred outdoors at night, or inside churches with subdued lighting.

Another illusion is the autokinetic effect, often experienced by mountaineers, in which stationary objects seen at a distance and lacking a detailed background can appear to move. Perhaps, this couple with the power of suggestion, always a potent force, was responsible for some reports too. After all, the Ballinspittle Madonna stands over 6 metres away from the viewing area, in a dark alcove on a hillside, from where it would surely be difficult for even the keenest-eyed observers to state categorically that they had detected genuine movement.

Last, but certainly not least, while stopping short of citing mass hallucination, it is evident that if there is a sufficient desire to see something, people will see it, whether it is real or not – a psychological situation arising time and time again with mysterious phenomena.