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A nine-year-old girl claims she sat in Jesus' lap after going to heaven while unconscious after a 30ft fall.

Mum Christy Wilson Beam has told of her astonishment after her daughter Annabel, now 12, survived the horrifying accident without injury.

The 42-year-old even claimed her daughter woke miraculously cured of an illness she had suffered from throughout her childhood.

For the first time in her life, she can eat solid food – and her mother thinks her brush with Jesus is the reason why.

In December 2011, Annabel was playing outside the family’s Texas home with her sisters Abigail, now 14 and Adelynn, now 10 when she slipped and fell inside a hollowed out cottonwood tree.

“She hit her head three times on the way down and this is consistent with the findings of an MRI scan,” Mrs Wilson Beam said.

(Image: PA Real Life)

“With the facts in front of me now, I see it all with sickening clarity.

“Sometimes at night, it replays in my head – a dark twist on Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.”

An emergency fire crew managed to harness Annabel to safety and she was rushed to Cook Children’s Hospital in Forth Worth in a helicopter.

Fearing the worst, medics prepped brain and spinal injury teams to stand by for Annabel’s arrival – but, incredibly, she survived without a scratch.

Doctors told her relieved parents: “I guess someone up there was looking out for her.”

(Image: PA Real Life)

“The ER doc told us the one thing we weren’t expecting to hear,” her mother said.

“He said, ‘Other than a possibly concussion and some superficial bumps and bruises, she doesn’t appear to have been injured at all,’

“[My husband] Kevin and I exchanged a look of pure astonishment.”

In the days following the accident, Annabel began to talk of religious visions she experienced while laying unconscious.

She told her parents: “I went to heaven when I was in that tree.

“I sat in Jesus’ lap.”

“I saw in Anna’s eyes the conscious decision to confide in us,” Mrs Wilson Beam said.

“There was no drama, she wasn’t playing either.

“This wasn’t like one of her long, spun-out recaps of a funny dream or movie she’d seen.

“She’d been through enough real drama in her short life. She had no interest in melodrama.

“[She described] some of what she’d experienced while inside the tree – how the gates of Heaven are made of gold, how Jesus told her it wasn’t time.”

Initially, Mrs Wilson Beam was concerned that Annabel was indicating a head injury, but MRI and CT scans revealed she had not sustained one.

(Image: PA Real Life)

Further tests also revealed Annabel had remarkably stopped displaying symptoms of pseudo-obstruction motility disorder, a rare incurable condition that had seen her in and out of hospital since 2008.

Doctors advised she could begin to come off the antibiotics she had been taking for years.

Instead of taking ten different types of medication throughout the day, she only needed three, and the painkillers that were prescribed “as and when she needed them” were not required at all.

Previously, Annabel’s medication meant she had to have a liquid diet or stick to soft, bland food – but now, she can happily tuck into pizzas and McDonald’s happy meals.

The family have gone over a year without a single visit to the doctor.

“I can’t explain what happened to her physically while she was in that tree,” said Mr Beam, a vet.

“All I have to go on is the radiological data and the medical records from before and after. The proof is in the pudding. She wasn’t well before and now she is.

“All I know beyond that is that she believes she went to Heaven. And I believe her when she tells me she believes it.”

(Image: PA Real Life)

Annabel talked of seeing a “guardian angel” as she came to.

The schoolgirl said: “I started to wake up in the tree and I could hear the fireman’s voices.

“And I saw an angel that looked very small, like a fairy.

“And the God winked at me through the body of the angel and what He was saying to me was, ‘I’m going to leave you now and everything is going to be okay.

“And then the angel stayed with me the entire time, shining a light so I could see.

“We didn’t talk. We just sat together peacefully.

When asked what Jesus looked like, Annabel said: “He had a beautiful long white robe, dark skin and a big beard – kinda like Santa Claus, but not really.”

She also spoke of seeing Mimi, her great-grandmother who’d died in 2010 after surgery on a blocked intestine.

Miracles from Heaven by Christy Wilson Beam is published by Piatkus in paperback, priced at £13.99.