The monk of Messina: for 140 years a monk steps from behind the altar at midnight asking for a Mass; a priest answers; a walled-up skeleton is found; the monk foretells the priest's death

Read it in the books

Page numbers refer to the edition named in the source list.

The Church’s teaching on this

• Question: Do the souls appear to the living? What about “ghosts”?
• Chapter: The Place of Purgatory
• Chapter: The Witnesses’ Map of Purgatory
• Question: Is Purgatory a place?
• Chapter: The Three States of the Church and the Communion of Saints
• Question: Do the souls in Purgatory know we pray for them?
• Question: Can the souls in Purgatory pray for us?
• Question: Can my refusal to forgive keep a soul in Purgatory?

What the witnesses report on this

• Theme C: Where the souls expiate — a place, the earth, the house, the “ghost”Purgatory as a place, souls serving their Purgatory on earth, haunted houses.
• Theme E: What the souls know, and do, for the livingWho prays for them, whether they pray for us, warnings, help and gratitude.
• Theme H: Days and hoursAll Souls, Christmas, Easter, Our Lady's feasts, Saturdays, the moment of the Mass.
• Theme J: Discernment — soul, demon, or imaginationHow witnesses and clergy tested apparitions, and what the Church leaves free.

About the witness

19th–20th-century cases and saints1800 to the present · T4 — visions and the collections that retell them