AP Poll: In a changing nation, angels, Santa, are enduring symbols

By Ad Crable
Lancaster New Era

Published: Dec 22, 2006 3:03 PM EST

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - Unspeakable horrors have visited the Nickel Mines Amish community. But so too, many believe, have miracles.

The night after her older sister Marian was buried, little Emma Fisher had a dream. Marian appeared to her in heaven. So did her uncle, who had died of cancer; his firstborn, Reuben, a crib-death victim, and her great-grandfather.

She had never laid eyes on the latter three. But she insisted she recognized them all.

It wasn’t the first otherworldly experience for the 9-year-old. Only days earlier, as Charles Carl Roberts IV held 11 little girls at gunpoint in the West Nickel Mines School, Emma heard a voice tell her to run.

She did, escaping out a side door while Roberts struggled with a window blind.

Emma insisted a visitor gave her the instructions. But the woman said she never said anything to Emma, and none of the other survivors remembers anyone speaking at the time.

“The angels told Emma to go out,” said a relative of two girls killed in the shootings. “She is being prepared for something by God,” she declared, referring to both incidents.

According to a correspondent in Die Botschaft, an Amish newspaper, as four visiting women fled the school after being released by Roberts, they looked back and saw an angel hovering above the schoolhouse.

And the night after the shootings, the schoolteacher, who also escaped, was unable to sleep until she drifted off and saw her schoolroom filled with angels.

Some consider it miraculous that shooting victim Rosanna King is alive. Days after being shot in the head, she was taken off a breathing machine and doctors at Hershey Medical Center released her to be taken home to die.

Although the prognosis for recovery is not good, no one expected her to be alive today.

“It’s really been a miracle that she’s pulled through,” said one of the girl’s relatives.

“The doctors can’t believe it. They never saw a patient like her,” said a family friend.

There are subtle wonders, too.

Outside Nickel Mines, an Amish woman greeted two visitors with a bouquet that included sprigs of white lilac, a spring flower that had blossomed in late October.

“I see these as connected to the girls,” she said. “They are so pure and so white.”