MEXICO – Veronica Dennis was looking for a miracle Tuesday, wondering how she was going to get her family back together and find a place to live after a Sunday fire that destroyed their home on Burton Street.
She might have found it on a scorched kitchen wall where the image of the Virgin Mary appeared. The image was created by smoke, according to the town’s fire chief. Others will say it is a miracle.
“It’s amazing to look at,” Susan Bernard, spokeswoman for the Catholic Church in Maine, said after viewing a Sun Journal photograph of the image on Tuesday. “As far as the church is concerned, we do not jump to conclusions quickly. We often take a wait-and-see attitude; we wait to see if it causes conversions, improves the lives of people or miracles happen.
“We would never encourage people to go to Mexico in droves,” she said. “We just know in history that if this is a true sign, miracles will happen there. If it’s authentic, it will prove itself in time.”
Dennis’ home at 4 Burton St. caught fire Sunday morning after a space heater in her daughter Tausha’s bedroom ignited a bed and a nearby dog bed, state Fire Investigator Chris Stanford said Tuesday morning as he inspected the charred house.
Spooked yet comforted, Dennis said the image was found behind a framed painting of a palm tree.
The large whitish-blue and black image shows a figure standing with the right arm out away from the body.
“It is so eerie, so freaky,” she said, standing outside the house while waiting for Stanford’s investigation to end.
When he said it was OK to enter, Dennis went inside to examine the damage.
Stepping through a doorway to the right and into the kitchen, she pointed to the Virgin Mary likeness that glowed in the sunlight streaming in from a broken window in Tausha’s bedroom.
“I took it as a sign that things were going to be OK, that someone was watching out for us,” Dennis said.
“This has been a bad-luck-year-and-a-half for us. It started slowly, but it’s been major over the past two days,” she added.
Bernard said the church does not make any quick decisions on whether such an image is a true sign or miracle from God. She said the church sometimes takes hundreds of years to determine that a certain place is indeed a place where miracles happen.
Pilgrims often will make a place or object a phenomenon long before the church makes that decision.
Bishop Richard Joseph Malone was traveling Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.
The Rev. Angelo Le Vasseur, pastor for three area Catholic churches, also could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Mexico Fire Chief Gary Wentzell, who was investigating the blaze with Stanford, said the Virgin Mary resemblance was striking.
When Dennis and others were removing family portraits from the living room wall, one of them took down the painting of the palm tree, stunning everyone that saw the likeness.
“One of the guys with (Dennis) saw it, and his jaw just dropped,” Wentzell said.
Standing outside Tausha’s bedroom window Tuesday and looking at the image, he said, “If you see tears coming out of her eyes, I’m out of here.”
Wentzell, who said he is Baptist, downplayed the Virgin Mary image, saying it was caused by smoke seeping around the picture frame.
“What you’re seeing when you look at it, is the outline of smoke. When that room got all smoked up, the picture protected the wall behind it,” he added.
“But the weird part was that (Dennis) had a statue of the Virgin Mary on the floor, and the heat didn’t touch it,” Wentzell said. Dennis said the statue is from her mother’s grave. She brings the sculpture inside during the winter and puts it back in spring.
Since the fire, Dennis, her 14-year-old daughter, Tara, and Tausha, 22, have stayed with friends, family and neighbors from Portland, Bethel, Jay and Rumford.
The run of bad luck got worse this past weekend when Dennis lost her job, then Tausha’s boyfriend, Keith Sinclair, who lived with the family, got injured.
Sinclair, a newspaper carrier, fell on ice early Saturday morning in a yard while delivering a Sun Journal. He fractured a leg in two places, Dennis said, and was taken to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.
Sometime during the night, Dennis’ heating oil ran out and they hooked up a space heater in Tausha’s bedroom to warm the room for Sinclair.
Then, Dennis, Tausha, Sinclair’s friend Brad Dubay and Dubay’s friend, Tim Tuttle, both of Rumford, went outside to move their cars and remove ice in front of the house, so Sinclair wouldn’t fall again.
That’s when they noticed smoke and Dennis called 911 to report the fire.
“Keith said he couldn’t wait to get home, and now it’s gone,” Dennis said, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears.
Although the 2-story house was insured and the first floor will have to be gutted and redone, the family lost their furniture and some clothing.
“We saved some clothes, and we’ve had donations from friends and family members. The clothes and money are a godsend,” Dennis said.
Regarding the Virgin Mary likeness, Stanford, the fire investigator, said that he’s probed a lot of fires, “but I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
Regional Editor Liz Chapman contributed to this report.
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