Hans Jensen Hals Sees Angels Enter by the Temple Window (1893)

Among the roughly seventy-five thousand Latter-day Saints who attended the forty-one dedication services of the Salt Lake Temple in April 1893 was Hans Jensen Hals, who attended with his family and some two hundred members of his ward. In his journal for 6 April 1893 — the day of the first dedicatory session — he recorded a heavenly manifestation that matched reports from other witnesses in the building the same week.

"I and [my] family and two hundred members of the ward had the privilege to be at the dedication services and had a splendid time," he wrote. "Rich instructions [came] from the authorities [of the Church]. Angels of God were seen coming in the south-east window and sitting on the corners. Two of them moved across the large hall over the people and went out the north window."

His account is an independent corroboration of the angelic manifestations reported at the dedication. Eleven-year-old George Monk of Payson described a personage appearing at that same south-east circular window of the assembly hall, and President Wilford Woodruff testified that the heavenly host — Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, and the prophets of old — were in attendance at the dedication services. Hals's journals are preserved in the Church History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.