The Cokeville Miracle — Angels and Ancestors Protect 154 Schoolchildren in a Hostage Bombing (1986)

May 16, 1986 — Cokeville, Wyoming. On a sunny Friday afternoon, David Young — a former Cokeville town marshall who had been fired for misconduct years earlier — and his wife, Doris, quietly took control of Cokeville Elementary School. Armed with guns and a homemade gasoline bomb, they herded 154 children and teachers into a single 30-by-32-foot first-grade classroom. Young, who imagined himself the leader of a "brave new world," demanded a ransom of $2 million per child and read aloud from a rambling manifesto he titled "Zero Equals Infinity."

As gasoline fumes from the bomb filled the hot, crowded room and made the children sick, teachers did everything they could to keep their students calm — reading stories, letting them color pictures and play — and some gathered in groups to pray. Sixth grader Kamron Wixom knelt with about a dozen classmates and afterward recalled "one of total confidence that we had just placed our lives in the hands of our loving Heavenly Father... It was like our part was completely done, and it was just a matter of time." Fifth grader Amy Bagaso Williams, who did not belong to any church, told a kindergarten teacher who invited her to pray that she didn't know how. "You don't have to know how," the teacher answered — and Williams suddenly felt "a warm blanket around my shoulders," an inexpressible comfort and joy, and knew in her heart she would be okay no matter what happened. Lori Nate Conger, another fifth grader, remembered thinking that David Young could control many things, "but he can't keep us from praying. That's one thing he cannot do."

To keep the children away from the bomb, teachers used masking tape to mark a "magic square" around it and told the children to stay outside the line. Late in the afternoon Young stepped away to the restroom, leaving the detonator string tied to Doris's wrist. While he was gone she accidentally jerked the string, and the bomb exploded.

The room erupted in fire and thick smoke. Children and teachers escaped through the windows and the classroom door; several children who caught fire were saved by teachers who beat out the flames with their bare hands. David Young fired a gun into the smoke-filled classroom — and not one child was struck. Music teacher John Miller was shot in the back as he helped children out of the burning school, and he later recovered. Young then shot his wife and took his own life.

What followed defied every physical expectation. A gasoline bomb of that size, detonating in a small, packed classroom, should have killed dozens. Instead, all 154 hostages survived. About 79 were injured — mostly burns — and every one of them recovered. The bomb's shrapnel, bolts packed around the explosive, lodged in the walls above the children's heads rather than tearing through the room at their level, and witnesses described the flames as seeming to go around the children.

Then came the reports the town could not ignore. In the days and months afterward, dozens of the children independently described "people in white" standing in the room — beside the windows, by the door, next to them — telling them not to be afraid, instructing them where to stand and how to get out. Many of the children later identified the figures from family photographs: they were deceased ancestors. Katie Walker Payne, seven years old and in first grade, said the woman in white who stood by her was later identified from the only existing photograph — a family locket — as her grandmother, who had died before Payne was born. "Those who love us and have passed on are near us," she testified years later. "I am grateful to be a witness to angels." Jennie Sorensen Johnson, also seven, was led out of the burning room by the hand by a woman she assumed was a teacher she didn't recognize, who told her not to go back; several years later, leafing through a family album, she recognized the woman as an aunt who had died before the bombing. Filmmaker T.C. Christensen, who interviewed scores of survivors while making the 2015 film The Cokeville Miracle, observed that most children who had a spiritual experience that day said it was an ancestor who helped them.

The events transformed the tiny ranching town of Cokeville and the lives of hundreds who witnessed them. Survivors and their own children later worked as extras in The Cokeville Miracle, and in 2015 several survivors — including Payne and Johnson — shared their testimonies at Brigham Young University's annual Conference on Family History and Genealogy. Their accounts, given at the risk of ridicule by those who lived through the trauma, all point to the same conclusion the children reached that afternoon: seen or unseen, they were not alone in that room.