We had a guy in our ward who told stories about going to the temple and having visions of angels, or relatives that had died appearing to him etc. I had heard other stories about heavenly visitations in the temple as well.

Did anyone else hear of these, or know someone who professed to have seen visions while in the temple?

Not sure about the temple, but when my young wife died of sudden heart failure, almost everyone in the TBM family told me of visitations they had from her during and after the funeral. At the time these stories were very comforting, but now they just piss me off.

How she always knows whether the person she is doing the work for in the temple is accepting or declining the ordinances by the spirit that's present, how well things go etc. She doesn't see angels but she swears she gets "revelations" that they are nearby. Truly weird.

On the other hand, after my grandma died when I was twelve, I prayed for years God would let her come to my wedding some day. Years after I'd forgotten this prayer, I got married and the sealer kept waiting for the "other grandma" before he would start. He kept insisting that there were 3 grandmas present, instead of the two that were seated in the sealing room and seemed truly puzzled when we told him our other 2 grandmas had died years earlier. It wasn't til after the ceremony that my new SIL came up to me and shared her impression that it was my beloved grandma's way of letting me know she was there, just like I'd prayed for. And SIL didn't know I'd prayed for this 18 years before the wedding. Stuff like that is hard to reconcile, knowing temple work is a total joke. On the other hand, that grandma would have come to see me marry in nude Satanism worship circle, because she really loved me. So I don't count it as a temple experience, per se.

As a fairly new member - not having been through the temple, but hearing a lot about it - I recall being impressed by an elderly widow telling us of being escorted by angels on a temple visit.

I wasn't so impressed after a year of HT'ing her and finding that she was regularly "visited" by angels and dead relatives at home, whilst out shopping, and even sitting next to her on the bus.

I am pretty sure that she would have made a first-rate spiritualist believer, if the mishies hadn't got to her first



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2010 06:23PM by onceanelder.

My daughter and her YG were told that story before they went to the DC temple and she was disappointed that noone she did proxy for showed up. She, now an exmo, shudders that she actually believed this occultic death-cult ancestor worshipping nonesense.
Thereare freaky stories about the dedication night at the Kirtland Temple, where Angels, Moses, Elisha and who knows who appeared and flew around in there. Cowdery said later that many of the brethren were actually drunk.

One of the best stories is about the UFO sighting during the dedicatin of the Kirtland temple, as described by Max H. Parkin, Conflict at Kirtland, p. 331:

A large number of Mormons saw a huge "steamboat...painted in the finest style...filled with people...[sail] steady along over the city [of Kirtland]...right over the Temple... Old Elder Beamon, who had died a few months before, was seen standing in the bow of the Boat swinging his hat and singing a well known hymn."

It sounds like being a mormon in Kirtland might have been fun. At least that day. Except for the bank fraud and the dictatorship that is.

I heard the stories but it was second or third hand. Nobody I knew claimed to have had the experience. It was always their cousin's friend's sister in law or something like that.

I just remember the story about all the signators of the "Declaration of Independence" showed up and begged to be babtised. LOL!

We'd heard about it many times before. But before we young teens went into the temple, they told us to expect to commune with the spirits who had been waiting and biting their nails for years anticipating a chance to turn mormon.

claims to have seen "someone," aka angel, dressed in pioneer-ish garb while in the temple. I guess he didn't do the handshake thing with him to determine the actual status.

Regardless, the rest of the family eats it up, and they use it as "proof" that the church really is "true" when talking to me.

My family history is full of such stories.

my not-so-rational ex-mother-in-law claims to have been visited by all her kids before they were born.... telling her "not to stop having kids" because more were "up there" waiting. She had quite the handful before the visits stopped... or mother nature shut her down.

My oldest is the same age as her youngest. That joke is true... you can tell it's a mormon baby shower when the mom and her mom are both pregnant.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2010 09:17PM by jpt.

that it was all a bunch of malarkey.

I had been told so many times that I would encounter deceased loved ones in the temple that I actually felt defrauded when they failed to show up as advertised.

When I told some of my Mormon friends about this disappointment, one of them asked if my deceased loved ones had been Mormons. When I said they had not, this person nodded sagely and said, "Ah, that would explain it."

WHAT A CROCK!!!

I personally think people "amp" themselves up, wanting a vision so badly which would justify their righteousness. Such people might see something odd and attribute a mundane occurrence to the divine. Family folk stories of heavenly visitors at the temple is very common. Our family has several such tales which circulate among us. After carefully listening to the first hand accounts of some of them, I have concluded they can all be explained with simple coincidences combined with a strong desire to have a divine experience.

My ex-husband's cousin and wife had a son die at 8 years old. The cousin (the father) hadn't been active and they weren't married in the temple. Of course, the pressure to go to the temple was extreme after that, with people even insuating that's why the Lard took him (he'd kill a child to get his parents to the temple?).

So a year later they go to the temple to be sealed. My ex father-in-law, who was a crazy old coot, stood in as proxy for the couple's dead son. I mean, what can make you feel more like a family than having your other three young children and an old man pretending to be your deceased son, all holding hands? Anyway, afterwards FIL went on and on about how he knew the little boy was there and how he could see shadows that were about the size of an 8-year-old, etc.

A number of years later, after the family had completely fallen apart, the parents divorced, all of them out of the church, I was still friends with the cousin. He told me that it was like losing their son all over again when they went to the temple expecting to feel him there and got nothing--nada--zilch. He and his wife were just creeped out by the time they'd gotten to the sealing room (they'd done their endowments first - pre 1990), and tried so hard to feel like their son was with them but instead felt empty.

So why, after this family had been through so much and worked so hard to get to the temple, would almightygawd let the crazy great-uncle who stood in as proxy see their son, but would not let the parents, who needed it so badly, even feel some comfort that he was really sealed to them or that his spirit was there? That's actually a rhetorical question, we all know why--it's a hoax and only the truly duped can fall for it.

There probably is a Hereafter - but thank God it has nothing to do with Mormonism.

The exmo son of a family we know died in a car accident.
Some months later the mother stood in line for the veil at the Los Angeles temple, when an unseen entity touched her ear in a special way her dead son had always done.
She knew it was him and he was letting her know he was ok and still alive somewhere.
BTW, the mother is not very tbm.

Incredibly, when she told other TBM family members, they actually denied her experience and told her the son was not worthy to be in the temple!
Mormons...uch.

My take on this is that it was her son but that Mormonism does not matter on the other side, neither does the temple.

Most likely, her son contacted her in that place because she was quietly concentrating.

I had a teacher who attended the Washington DC temple dedication many years ago who said he saw his dead parents on the temple grounds. He burst into tears as he described it.

It left me cold when I heard it. I didn't really believe it, but I also couldn't believe that a grownup would whip up some tears in order to tell a lie like that to a group of kids. My life in the Mormon church has since disabused me of that naiveté.

One of the girls in my age group told us on the Sunday after a dead-dunking session that she felt someone hug her after she left the baptismal font.

I tried valiantly to keep from laughing.

Yes I've heard many of those stories, about in the same proportion that I've heard them when supervising mental institutions.

That would make a fun segment on the TV show! :-)

Classic!! I love that TV ghost hunting show, one is the plumbers doing a ghost hunting show, and those students at Penn state.

They can go around the Temple at night, with a recorder and ask "What is wanted? for a evp. I bet they get alot of dead mormons saying funny stuff!

I remember concentrating really hard during endowment sessions-- looking for floating angels in the room. Man, I was dilusional.