Tales of the Unexplained.

Mark Shea links to Father Dwight Longenecker for a story of the inexplicable.  Here's the story:

My parents were driving home from the youth club they ran every week. It was late and they were making their way down the country lanes of rural Pennsylvania. I was asleep in the back of the station wagon with my older brother and sister--all of us little children.


My Dad said as they came over the brow of the hill they saw in the distance another car coming at high speed directly in the oncoming direction. The country lane was only wide enough for one car. There were steep banks on either side, and they knew that as they went down into the dip the oncoming driver would not be able to see them.

There was no place to turn. There was no space to get over to let him pass. All of this happened in a split second. Sure enough, the car came over the hill and my mother and father, sitting up front, said later that they braced themselves for the impact. They even saw the shocked and terrified face of the other driver as he prepared to crash into them head on at high speed.

Next thing they knew they were looking out the back window of the car at his fast receding tail lights. There was no way he could have got around them. There was simply no space for two cars. Instead, one car passed through the other, and went on its way. The laws of physics as we understand them were suspended for a moment and we were delivered.

Cue the Twilight Zone music.

The interesting thing is that these stories are not that uncommon.  Peter Kreeft says that "angel sightings" are for more common than "ufo sightings," and "angel sightings" do not involve watching odd moving lights in the sky.  They commonly involve things like, well, what Father Longenecker describes.

Weird Tales.

Check this one out, about a guy who went into a burning car to save a little girl and was visited by her father - her dead father - a few days later:

Days passed, and Johnson went back to his routine.


That is, until Tuesday morning around 6, he says.

"My wife is next to me in bed. She's sleeping. Everything is where it's supposed to be," says Johnson. "Then there is this man standing right by the bed. He says he needs help with a few things. I say, 'OK.'

"Now, I know it's him (Kotowicz) even though the only time I had seen him was at the accident, when he didn't look, you know, normal. He says he wants me to give a message to his wife and to his daughter. That's private so I can't tell you about that message.

"He also tells me to talk to the people at Sub Pop, he wants to let them know not to be mad at the driver that caused the accident. That's his message."

Johnson says that later that day, he went to the Sub Pop website, and there it was, a memorial photo of the man who had stood by his bed: Kotowicz.

Mark Shea observes:

These things do happen. What? You think the Church got this stuff about the communion of saints from thin air? Behind every Catholic doctrine is a great mass of human experience, both Christian and pagan. The doctrine doesn't create the experience, it merely gives us a framework for interpreting it. Catholic theology describes reality. That's why any person of good will from anywhere, open to pursuing reality, will sooner or later find himself on the road to the Catholic faith. The Roadmaker and the Mapmaker are One and the Same.

My father tells a story about his mother was visited one night by her dead father, who told her that my father was alright, which was around the time of some shipboard accident occuring during his deployment.  My father and grandmother were not given to making up stories, so I can't disregard the story out of hand. 

Also, the story is a "one-off"; it's the only story of that kind that they tell.  This seems to be common among the "credible" stories of the supernatural; the tellers of the story don't have the braggart's retinue of amazing stories.  And they never describe the event as somehow pointing to their personal uniqueness; their tone is always something like, "this is what I saw, make of it what you will."