This is a collection of miracle stories told by Mormons living in Cache Valley. Stiles isn’t a Mormon herself, but presents Mormon beliefs respectfully. Since I grew up Mormon, I found much of this book to be unnecessary since I already know the Mormon beliefs she describes. I’d say this is largely written for a non-Mormon audience, although Mormons will still find some stories they haven’t heard before. It was interesting to read an anthropologist discussing Mormonism like it’s an exotic culture when I was raised in it.

She explains the three different kinds of spirits listed in D&C 129. There are resurrected beings like the Angel Moroni, angels without bodies like unborn children or deceased relatives, and there are evil spirits that serve the Devil. She also explains the handshake test: Resurrected beings can shake hands, spirits of just men will not offer their hand, but evil spirits like the Devil will offer their hand, but you won’t feel it when you try to shake.

There’s a lot of fun urban legends documented in these pages. For example, Christian Rindlisbacher wanted to get sealed to a dead woman but his wife didn’t want him to. He did anyway and died shortly afterward because the dead woman wanted to take him away from his living wife and have him all to herself in heaven.

There’s another one about a grandmother looking at old family photos. Her grandson pointed at a picture of her deceased father (who’d he’d never met) and knew who he was. (This reminds me of something that happened to me. Walking home from school one day, I saw an elderly couple driving past in an old-fashioned truck. They looked just like my great grandparents who died before I was born. They smiled and waved at me.)

A man falls asleep at the wheel and sees his mother in front of the truck waving him over. He wakes up and pulls the wheel in the same direction, narrowly avoiding going over the edge of the road.

A lot of the stories involve missionaries. A couple missionaries knock on a door and a young girl answers and tell them to come back later. When they come back, they meet her parents. There’s a picture of the girl above the mantel, but they find out she died awhile ago.

A woman is warned by her departed husband that the devil wants her soul and she needs to move out of the house, so she does.

A woman named Mary Anderson becomes very ill and might die. She has a dream about her deceased mother making a white dress for her because she’s arriving to the afterlife unexpectedly. Mary has young children and doesn’t want to die. Her mother talks to a man and he says Mary can continue living if she wants.

Another woman is driving and is involved in a serious car crash, but the emergency workers find her in the backseat. Six years later, she has a four-year-old son. While she’s looking at a picture of the car accident, her son says, “I remember that. That’s the day I pulled you into the back seat of the car.”

Another woman has a dream of three girls and a boy. These turn out to be the children she will have in the future. There’s a story of a woman being told having another child will endanger her health. She has a vision of a boy being sad because he won’t be born. She decides to get pregnant and everything turns out fine. In another story, a woman dies and meets two children who are sad because they can’t go down to earth because she was supposed to be their mother. She convinces God to let her go back to life to have them.

Someone having trouble doing genealogy gets visited by an ancestor who points out where to look.

People doing baptisms for the dead see a large group of people in the viewing area. Each time he’s baptized, one of them smiles or nods their head and disappears. He notices a little boy crying, asks him why he’s sad, and is told they forgot his name. He asks the person in charge if a name was missed, he says there was, they baptize him and the boy disappears.

There’s a woman who was doing baptisms for the dead. When she gets home, she finds one of her children fell into a canal, but was rescued by the spirit of one of the people she got baptized for.

There’s a story of an Aunt Sheila having dreams about a beautiful woman riding naked on a horse, then she gets baptized for Lady Godiva.

In one story, a girl at a stake camp is singing “I am a Child of God” in Spanish. Other girls thought it was devil worship, and their parents were called to pick them up and take them home early!

Some kids are playing with a Ouija board. It won’t work, until the girl takes off her CTR ring. Later, she finds the ring in a corner twisted up in a knot.

Patriarchal blessings sometimes indicate that a person’s physical or mental disability is due to successfully battling against Satan in the preexistence.

A couple missionaries summon the Devil so they can cast him back out, however, they can’t cast him out. The MTC president explains their priesthood power wasn’t effective because they had invited him in. In one version of the story, the building has to be closed for a month until the General Authorities are called in to rid the building of evil spirits.

There’s a variation of this story in which a missionary summons the Devil, can’t cast him back out, and is found the next day on the roof of the house with every bone in his body broken.

A drowned missionary’s spirit leaves his body, but he tells another missionary to restore him to life with a priesthood blessing.

A missionary broke his leg while on a mission. A clergy member of a rival Christian church healed him. The missionary begins to doubt that Mormonism is the only true church. His mission president blesses him to restore his leg to its broken state! He’s told even Satan has the power to heal. Then his leg is healed again.

Exorcism isn’t big in Mormonism, but there have been cases of it going back to Joseph Smith casting a devil out of Newell Knight in 1830.

In one story, a girl starts screaming in the night. Her parents aren’t able to open her door. They manage to get into her room and see a black figure on top of the girl trying to rape her. She’s screaming “Get off of me!” Her dad commands the spirit to leave. All the darkness from the corners zoomed into the middle of the room, then shot into the closet and slammed the door. The girl was wearing a Walkman at the time and it played backwards ever since.

There’s less impressive stories such as a couple missionaries feeling a bad presence in a room that no one else notices. They bless the room and don’t feel the bad feeling anymore.

Some missionaries knock on a door and a woman asks them to help her daughter who’s possessed. The girl didn’t know English, but spoke to them in English and also knew their first names. She jumped up and down on the bed and hung from the ceiling and stepped over the walls. They cast out the spirits and she couldn’t remember what had happened to her.

Some other missionaries are asked to cast out a devil and find a fifteen-year-old girl in a wheelchair with a mental disability. She falls out of her wheelchair and appears to inflate. She swerves on the floor and sticking out her tongue like a snake. In this case, the missionaries leave without trying to treat the girl.

In current Mormon practice, only men have the priesthood, but before 1946, women were ordained in some manner and allowed to perform healings. There’s an account of a woman named Lucy Meserve Smith who cast a demon out of her husband in northern England.

An account related by church historian Leonard Arrington discusses a woman possessed by the Devil in Washington D.C. in the 1970s. The missionaries and stake president aren’t able to cast him out, only the highest-ranking priesthood holder in the area, M. Russell Ballard, was able to.

Whether you believe they’re true or not, there’s a lot of fun stories in this collection.