Despite Skeptics, Faithful Line Up to View Cross Images in Window

They have been lining up for days along the narrow street that leads to Alejandrina Carmona’s small home in Montecito Heights.

Children, pregnant women, young tough men: All crowd to the backside of the house to peer at a bathroom window where some claim they see a sign from God.

Two images in the shape of crosses appear on the window’s frosted glass. Sometimes, Carmona and her family insisted, three crosses appear.

Police, Roman Catholic priests and even many who visit the makeshift shrine are more than a little skeptical. The images, they said, have clearly been formed by light refracted through textured glass. There have been numerous similar “sightings” over the last few years, they pointed out.

“It is a phenomenon of the light which can be explained very easily,” said Father Miguel Plascencia, assistant pastor of the nearby Divine Savior Roman Catholic Church. “It is nothing supernatural or out of the ordinary.”

But that simple, logical explanation has not stopped the faithful--or, at least, the curious--from waiting their turn to gaze at the window, light a candle and say a prayer. Police estimated 500 people filed by Wednesday night; at least 300 were in line Thursday at 7 p.m.

“ Es una bendicion ,” gasped one woman as she viewed the reflections. “It is a blessing.”

“I think it is something from God. A warning,” said Lucina Montoya, a neighbor, who has stopped by the window for the third time, most recently with her three daughters in tow.

The Carmonas’ modest house sits on a jagged hillside on Isabel Street. Reaching the “vision” requires climbing up about 40 steps, then maneuvering along a dirt path to the back of the house. There, people can look from the outside onto the bathroom window; the lights from inside the bathroom, shining through the etched glass, form the cross-shaped images. Turn off the light, of course, and the images disappear.

The Carmonas have set up an old bathtub under the window on the ground. There, visitors have placed at least 26 lighted candles, some red plastic poinsettias and a wilted rose as offerings. Some people leave money--though the Carmonas said it has not amounted to much.

On Thursday, men with video cameras tucked under their arms lined up alongside high school students. The line stretched a block or so. Several spectators attempted to capture the image with their Polaroid cameras. Little girls took leaves from a nearby palm tree as holy souvenirs.

“It speaks very much to people’s need to have something to believe in,” Richard Halladay, a high school counselor who visited the Carmona residence Thursday afternoon, said as he surveyed the crowd. “For some people, it reflects (today’s) uncertainty.”

Alejandrina Carmona, 53, a housewife and mother of six, said she first noticed the images Sunday when she went to feed the dog. She claimed at times she can also see the Virgin Mary, an image of Jesus on the crucifix and another of Jesus as a child. Most recently, she says, Mary appeared on the backyard palm tree.

“It is a gift from God,” she said. “He is telling us to convert, that he is tired of us, of our youths being wasted to drug addiction . . . of so much hunger and war.”

News of the spectacle spread very quickly through the largely Latino, working-class neighborhood where the Carmonas live, and the crowds have been growing steadily since Monday, Carmona said.

The Carmonas admitted they have had to put up with their fair share of doubting Thomases. Marilena Carmona, a daughter-in-law, said several people insisted on breaking the lightbulbs in the bathroom to see whether tiny crosses had been placed in the fixtures.

Some visitors have pointed to an odd placement of a dressing mirror inside the bathroom as a possible explanation.

“I was amazed at how people were freaking out,” said Tom Cobb, 26, of Eagle Rock, who took his 2 1/2-year-old son to see the sight--but came away disappointed when he figured out how the images were created.

Plascencia said two priests inspected the window shrine and became convinced it was nothing more than the play of light on the type of translucent glass frequently used in bathrooms. The priest said it is the third such “phenomenon” he has been asked to view in little more than a year, one in West Covina, another in El Monte. Both were crosses that appeared on bathroom windows.