As a National Geographic photographer and cultural anthropologist, I have travelled extensively in 165 countries over forty years to study more than 2000 pilgrimage places. During the decades of my exploration, I have read a large amount of material - books, journals, dissertations - about pilgrimage and find it often fails to discuss the spiritual magnetism of sacred sites from the vantage point of the pilgrims themselves. Likewise, many academic sources fail to report or analyse the miraculous phenomena that have occurred and continue to occur at the pilgrimage sites. I suggest there is an actual power of place at the pilgrimage sites caused by a variety of factors, which individually and collectively give rise to occasional miracles and apparitions. This paper, illustrated with my photographs of sacred sites worldwide, will examine the phenomenology of the miraculous and the actualisation of the divine.