Virgin stone fetches $50,000

KIRK HARGREAVES/The Press

LATEST: Christchurch woman Lisa-Marie Corlet has received a $50,000 bid on TradeMe for this pebble, which bears the image of the Virgin Mary.

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A New Zealander has bid $50,000 for the South Island's apparent Virgin Mary pebble.
Mother of all pebbles

Christchurch woman Lisa-Marie Corlet listed a 1cm-wide pebble with a picture resembling the Virgin Mary on it on Trade Me this week with a buy now price of $50,000.

This morning, after newspapers ran stories about the pebble, someone with a New Zealand email address bought it.

Corlet found the pebble at Kaikoura's South Beach last year and decided to sell it after she ran out of money.

Several years ago an American woman paid $US28,000 for a 10-year-old cheese toasted sand wich with an image of Mary pressed into its crusty top.

The United States has been the site of many recent "sightings" of the Holy Mother, with Americans claiming to have seen her image in places such as a garage door and a lemon slice in a bar.

The Catholic Church's New Zealand spokeswoman, Lindsay Freer, said the church was "cautious" about responding to claims of holy images of the Virgin Mary, as many turned out to be fakes.

Corlet said she found the pebble at South Beach last year on her first rock-foraging expedition.

On getting home and examining her finds, Corlet said she noticed one had a distinctive pattern on it.

Friends told her it could be worth a lot of money, but Corlet said she wanted to keep the pebble as her own good-luck charm.

"I got it and I started having an awesome run of luck," she said.

Corlet said she had been asked to "authenticate" the stone by some interested parties.

"I'm not sure how I'd do that, but I guess a geologist could tell them I didn't put the picture on it."

Freer said the church would never declare something a religious image or icon without thorough investigation. "The church's approach (about purported images of the Holy Mother) is always very cautious because no-one has ever seen Mary, so how would they know what she looks like?" she said.

Freer said there had been a case a few years ago in Auckland where people claimed to have a picture of Jesus that bled for no apparent reason. The picture was tested scientifically and found to be a "fake" because it was man-made, Freer said.

The church's criterion for holy imagery was that it had no explainable natural cause, she said.

In the case of the pebble from Kaikoura, the church would be sceptical about any of Corlet's claims because she was trying to sell it.