DELCIA LOPEZ/Special Contributor

For the last five days, hundreds of people have congregated under the acacia tree to see ice formations hanging from the branches and to collect the drops of water melting off.

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas – An acacia tree that started sprouting a foamlike substance on its branches after its owner died is drawing hundreds of people a day to see what some believe is supernatural ice.

To the naked eye, the white stuff about 20 feet up in the tree looks like ice braving the South Texas heat.

Not likely, say insect and tree experts who viewed photographs of the substance. They said the "miracle ice" is probably nothing more than a spittlebug nest.

"It looks like spit, basically," agreed Paul Johnson of the Texas Forest Service.

The faithful and the curious have been coming to Leonisia Garcia's home near the Mexico border since last week, after Mrs. Garcia died of a heart attack.

Family members said they noticed the yellow-tinted froth and the puddles of liquid around the trunk a day after they buried the 92-year-old matriarch. They say she loved the acacia tree and spent days beneath it while coloring the cascarones – confetti-filled eggshells –she sold each year.

The tree has been "weeping" ever since, they say.

"We feel like that tree is now missing her," her daughter, Mary Lou Sanders, said. "Where it's coming from, I do not know. It is something I cannot explain."

People begin arriving as early as 7 a.m., mostly from neighboring border towns, to see the "ice" first-hand. They snap pictures and gaze in awe. They kneel before it and pray. They stand, patiently extending their open palms or clutching Styrofoam cups with hopes of getting some of the "holy water" drops.

"I drove up here to see it for myself. You can actually feel the cold breeze when you get close to the tree; it's something unexplainable," said Elaine Solis, who drove some 40 miles from Mission. "You have to come out here to believe that there is actually something on that tree."

When Maria Elena Barrera and her husband, Agapito, heard about the tree, they drove east from neighboring Roma with their 13-year-old son, Jesus Agapito. The boy has been in a wheelchair since a car accident last year. Mrs. Barrera stood under the tree and prayed that God would restore her son. She took droplets of water and anointed his forehead with the sign of the cross.

"God made a miracle to save his life," Mrs. Barrera said. "I know he is going to make another miracle and he's going to lift my son out of that wheelchair."

DELCIA LOPEZ/Special Contributor

Onlookers take photos with their cellphones of the ice that formed on the acacia tree in Leonisia Garcia's yard, who died last Sunday.

There's a long tradition of apparitions and other supernatural occurrences in the Rio Grande Valley, where many residents are Roman Catholic.

According to a Time magazine story from 1966, an acacia tree in the town of La Feria drew thousands of people after liquid began leaking from a knothole. According to that report, experts determined the liquid was only sap that spewed out when insects nested in the tree.

Some religious images reported in recent years in Texas' Lower Rio Grande Valley:

The Jesus tortilla: Image of Christ found in a tortilla by a woman frying a gordita for lunch one day in 1983 in Hidalgo. It was kept in a small Plexiglas box in a shrine at their home, open to visitors who wanted to see it.

The "holy tree": Image of a veiled, gowned figure with outstretched arms seen in the bark of a cottonwood tree in downtown Brownsville in summer 1993. Crowds of people formed blocks-long lines to touch or kiss the tree that they believed bore the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The image changed some and faded as the tree grew.

The "Holy Camaro": The shape of the bowed head of a veiled woman – the Virgin Mary – discovered in 1993 on the rusty rear fender of a 1981 maroon Camaro. The car became the centerpiece of a tin-roofed chapel, with plastic chairs and rough wooden pews for visitors.

Virgin in shower stall: A stain in the shape of the Virgin Mary was found in December 1990 on the floor of a shower stall in the bathroom of an auto-parts store in Progresso. The resulting publicity and long lines of gawkers forced the owner to close the store and sell the building – complete with now glassed-in shower stall.

Virgin on curtains: In 1995, neighbors noticed an image of the Virgin Mary in dining room curtains at a house outside La Feria. So many crowds showed up to see the sight that the family eventually took the curtains down.

Dallas Morning News research