[Footnote 4: Görres describes them fully in his _Christliche Mystik_, band iii.]
Such was her condition during about two years, when her confessor, Father Capistran, a quiet, prudent man, and for years a true friend of the distressed family, observed "that at certain times, when she was interrogated by him, she did not answer, and seemed to be out of herself." When he questioned her nurses and others on this point, they informed him that such was always the case when she received the holy communion. This was the first symptom of her _ecstatic_ state, into which she entered in her twentieth year, and which soon became more and more striking. On the feast of Corpus Christi, 1832, which in Kaltern, as throughout the whole Tyrol, is celebrated with unusual solemnity, Father Capistran, for special reasons, gave her the holy sacrament at three A.M., and immediately she fell into an ecstasy which lasted, to his personal knowledge, for several hours! He left her to attend to other duties; and when he returned, at noon on the following day, he found the ecstatic still kneeling in the same place where he had left her thirty-six hours before; and heard, to his astonishment, that she had remained the whole time thus undisturbed in contemplation. The good Franciscan now comprehended for the first time that ecstasy had become almost a second nature to her; and undertook the regulation of this supernatural condition of his saintly penitent.
The power of the perceptive faculties increased wonderfully with her ecstasies, as several presentiments and prophecies demonstrated in a surprising manner. Her fame was soon noised abroad. The report of her ecstatic kneeling and prayer spread through the Tyrol, and great excitement was created throughout the whole land. Crowds of people flocked to see her, and to be edified by the sight. From different and distant places numbers came as pilgrims to Kaltern. During the summer of 1833, more than forty thousand persons, of all classes, visited her, without the slightest disorder or scandal, although sometimes two or three thousand people in a day passed through the room of the rapt maiden, kneeling undisturbed in contemplation. Many sinners were moved and converted by the spectacle.