Visions: The Image of Mr. Christ

It was exactly ten minutes after seven on Thursday evening, June 12, that Mrs. Lela Bass, 73, stood combing her long gray hair in the backyard of her white frame house in Port Neches, Texas. Casually she turned and saw for the first time an eerie outline etched in the plastic of her backdoor screen: a bearded, long-haired man with a halo, looking east toward a fig tree in the yard. It was, she was certain, Jesus Christ. Neighbors spread the word, and since then, more than 50,000 curious visitors have descended on the Bass home to share her vision.

Port Neches is a bleak Gulf Coast industrial town that is also intensely religious. On Sundays, most of its 10,000 inhabitants troop loyally to one or another of the town’s 35 churches; some have so much fundamentalist fear of the Lord that they respectfully refer to Jesus as “Mr. Christ.” The shared excitement over the phenomenon has brought blacks and whites together in a proximity unusual for Port Neches; but the two races sometimes differ on what they see. One white farmer, who claims that he has taken some 25 photographs showing images of “the Christ Child, the Virgin Mary, the Three Wise Men, and angels,” scoffed at Negro viewers. “These niggers come away saying they’ve seen Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and J.F.K. Boy, those people sure have an imagination.”

No Tampering. The tide of visitors keeps a constant daily crowd of 300 to 500 people on hand from dawn until late evening, reducing the Bass’s backyard to dust and littering it with Polaroid film waste. Mrs. Bass, though, rejoices that the vision has brought her 78-year-old husband back to churchgoing. She is undisturbed by the variety of reported visions (“Everyone’s seeing what they need”) and by the relic hunters who tore her fig tree apart for souvenirs and crushed what was left of it. (“Maybe the Lord intended for them to take it home.”)

According to TIME Correspondent David De Voss, “There is an image on the screen—a profile view of a man that looks like the picture of Christ we all know. There appears to have been no tampering with the screen.” The most likely rational explanation is that the screen acquired the image by the effects of normal weathering and its juxtaposition over an inner screen. But for Mrs. Bass the image is a true “sign from God.” She believes now that it explains a mysterious “revelation” she had some 35 years ago, when, one day in prayer, she saw “hundreds of saved people coming toward me.” Saved or not, at week’s end they were still coming.