Christy Wilson Beam’s daughter Annabel fell 30 feet into a hollow tree in December 2011. However, in the days that followed, the mom saw a remarkable change in her.

As a parent, you can’t help but worry about the safety of your child when they leave your sight. Christy Wilson Beam can certainly relate to that, after a 30-foot fall into a hollow tree left her daughter Annabel stranded. However, following her rescue, the mother saw an extraordinary change in the young girl.

Residents of Cleburne, Texas, Christy and her husband Kevin had three daughters together – Abigail, Adelynn and Annabel. However, the latter suffered from a very rare condition known as intestinal pseudo-obstruction. An incurable disorder, it affects the muscles and nerves in the intestines, preventing food from passing through as it normally would.

As a result of that, Annabel was unable to eat any solid food and was also taking a number of different medications each day. However, everything changed in December 2011 when the three girls were playing outside in the backyard, near a hollow cottonwood tree.

While playing around on the tree, Annabel somehow fell inside it, tumbling 30 feet to the bottom of the cottonwood. “She hit her head three times on the way down and this is consistent with the findings of an MRI scan,” Christy told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper in April 2015. “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,” Christy added. With her daughter in a seemingly precarious position, the local emergency services dispatched a fire crew to get her out of the tree. Using a harness they were able to pull Annabel to safety before a helicopter transported her to hospital.

Due to the severity of the incident, the doctors at Fort Worth’s Cook Children’s Hospital had spinal and brain injury teams ready to treat Annabel. However, as it turned out, the Cleburne native didn’t require their assistance. Remarkably, she survived the fall without sustaining any serious injuries, leaving her parents stunned.

“The E.R. doc told us the one thing that we weren’t expecting to hear,” Christy recalled to the Daily Mail. “He said, ‘Other than a possible 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.”

As Annabel continued her recovery, though, she started to recall visions that she had had while inside the tree trunk. Despite falling in and out of consciousness after the accident, the youngster spoke with clarity, insisting that she had a religious experience. “I went to heaven when I was in that tree,” she told her mom and dad. “I sat in Jesus’ lap.”

“I saw in Anna’s eyes the conscious decision to confide in us,” Christy told the Daily Mail. “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.”

With that in mind, Christy recalled what her daughter apparently saw. “[Annabel described] some of what she’d experienced while inside the tree – how the gates of Heaven are made of gold, how Jesus told her that it wasn’t time,” she said. However, while the mom didn’t believe that Annabel was making it up, she still had concerns.

Due to the accident, Christy feared that Annabel was showing signs of a head injury, despite C.T. and MRI scans suggesting otherwise. Meanwhile, something else changed during that period. Following some further tests, it was discovered that the young girl was no longer showing symptoms of intestinal pseudo-obstruction.

As a result of that, Annabel’s medication was dramatically reduced and she no longer needed her prescribed painkillers. The youngster was now able to incorporate solid food into her diet, leaving her father at a loss as how to describe what had changed after the accident.

“I can’t explain what happened to [Annabel] physically while she was in that tree,” Kevin told the Daily Mail. “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.”

With that in mind, Kevin then backed Annabel’s claims of having a religious experience inside the cottonwood. “All I know beyond that is that she believes that she went to Heaven,” he continued. “And I believe her when she tells me that she believes it.”

From there, Annabel described in greater detail what had happened to her on that fateful day in December 2011. “I started to wake up in the tree and I could hear the firemen’s voices,” she recalled to the Daily Mail. “And I saw an angel that looked very small, like a fairy. And then God winked at me through the body of the angel.”

“What God was saying to me was, ‘I’m going to leave you now and everything is going to be OK,’” Annabel continued. “And then the angel stayed with me the entire time, shining a light so that I could see. We didn’t talk. We just sat together peacefully.”

With Annabel seemingly cured of her condition, Christy then felt inspired to write a book based on the incident. Titled Miracles From Heaven, the book was published in April 2015 and a movie adaption followed in March 2016. Starring the likes of Jennifer Garner and Queen Latifah, the film was well received, earning over $73 million worldwide from an estimated $13 million budget.

As for Annabel, she shared a message ahead of the film’s release. “What I want to say is this,” the young girl told People magazine in March 2016. “Believe in it if you want to. We put this out so you could have a stronger faith and probably a better life.”

“But we’re not trying to force it down your throat,” Annabel added. “So you can believe as you want but we put this out there to help you, not hurt you.” Following the release of the book and the movie, Christy then started writing a children’s version of the story as she looked to share her daughter’s incredible tale with people of all ages.

In December 2011, a seemingly terrible accident changed everything for the Beam family. But while few can explain how young Annabel was apparently cured of her intestinal pseudo-obstruction, one thing is without doubt. As her father Kevin said to People magazine in March 2016, “The girl who fell into that tree is not the girl who came out of that tree.”