Fanny Stenhouse — Who Later Left the Church — Testified “I Saw a Miracle”: A Bedridden Englishwoman Restored by LDS Elders (c. 1850)

Among the most remarkable testimonies to priesthood healing comes not from a faithful Latter-day Saint, but from a woman who eventually apostatized from the Church and wrote one of its most famous critical exposés.

Fanny Stenhouse joined the Church as a young woman in England and eventually emigrated to Utah. After years of disillusionment — particularly over the practice of polygamy — she left the Church and wrote ‘Tell It All’: The Story of a Life’s Experience in Mormonism (1874), a deeply critical and widely-read account of Mormon life.

Yet in that very book, on pages 74–75, Stenhouse recorded an account she never dismissed as fraud. Shortly after her marriage in England, around 1850, she was present when Latter-day Saint elders visited a convert — an old woman who for years had been confined to her bed, her limbs distorted and her back bent. Stenhouse watched the elders anoint her, lay hands on her, and pray most fervently. Then, in her own words, she “saw the same decrepit old woman walking and singing and praising God.”

Strikingly, Stenhouse — who by the time of writing was actively working against the Church — did not dismiss what she had seen as a trick or a fraud. She insisted she was “quite in earnest” and challenged her readers: “If that was not a miracle, I should like to know what is.”

The account stands as a remarkable piece of evidence: a hostile witness, writing in an adversarial text, who could not bring herself to deny what she had seen with her own eyes — a healing no medicine had accomplished.

Fuller account of this event (in the witness’s own words):

Not long after my marriage I saw a miracle performed—a real, true miracle. Let not the reader smile, or think that I am only jesting, for I am quite in earnest, and mean what I say. I saw a sick person who for years had been confined to her bed, her limbs distorted and her back bent; I was present when, after her conversion, the elders visited her; I saw them anoint her, and lay hands on her, and pray most fervently; and I saw the same decrepit old woman walking and singing and praising God. If that was not a miracle, I should like to know what is. I have seen many things since then, and I have heard many things, and I have learned to be very skeptical; but that one thing I saw with my own eyes, and I cannot forget it.