The Ghost in the Clouds: The Spectre of the Brocken
Oct 17, 2025
In the Harz Mountains of Germany, the Brocken has always been a place of mystery. On foggy mornings, climbers have reported seeing a towering figure rise from the mist, surrounded by rings of coloured light. They called it the Spectre of the Brocken.
To those who lived in its shadow, the Brocken was no ordinary mountain. It was a place of strange lights and stranger sounds, where the line between natural and supernatural seemed to blur. Locals spoke of ghostly figures appearing on its slopes, and travellers who vanished after venturing into the fog. When the mist rolled in and the air grew still, some claimed to hear faint voices or laughter carried on the wind. Others saw a shape in the haze, a giant, arms outstretched, haloed in color. To them, it was the mountain’s guardian, or perhaps its curse.
The Brocken already had a reputation steeped in legend. It was said to be the gathering place of witches on Walpurgis Night, where they danced and conjured spirits under the moonlight. Stories told of fires burning on the summit and dark figures moving through the smoke. When the spectre appeared, it seemed to confirm everything those tales suggested, that the Brocken was a place where the living and the dead seemed to share the same ground.
One of the earliest known witnesses was Johann Silberschlag, an 18th-century traveler who saw a vast shadow rise before him on the summit, surrounded by a rainbow-like halo. Terrified, he fell to his knees, believing it to be a divine or ghostly vision. He later gave the phenomenon its name, though he could not explain what he had seen.
Not long after, others claimed to have seen the same figure rising from the mist. In later years, hikers told of feeling watched before the spectre appeared, as though something vast were waiting in the fog. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, reports from the Alps, the Scottish Highlands, and even Japan told of similar apparitions, leading many to believe that certain mountains were haunted.
In Scotland, the poet James Hogg told of seeing a dark, towering figure on Ben Macdui, a vision so lifelike that he believed it to be a giant spirit until it copied his gestures. The same effect was later reported by mountaineers across Europe, who spoke of their shadows rising before them like living doubles. In the Andes, explorers during the 18th-century French Geodesic Mission wrote of luminous halos forming around their own silhouettes on the cloud-banks below, describing them as “circles of light around one’s shadow.” Even in France, travellers in the high Auvergne recorded seeing ghostly shapes surrounded by rainbows, believing they had witnessed something holy.
The spectre was no longer confined to one peak. Wherever the right mix of mountain, mist, and sunlight came together, the same illusion appeared, convincing travellers that they had glimpsed a spirit in the clouds.
But as the years passed, the mystery began to unravel. Scientists studying light and atmosphere realized that the Spectre of the Brocken was not a spirit at all, but a trick of perspective and reflection. When the sun shines from behind a person standing above a layer of mist or cloud, their shadow is cast forward onto the vapour. Because the mist’s surface is uneven, the shadow appears distorted and enormous, often ringed by a coloured halo known as a glory.
This combination creates the illusion of a towering figure surrounded by light, the spectre so many mistook for a ghost. The halo forms when sunlight is scattered back by tiny droplets of water, producing concentric rings of color like a personal rainbow. Even knowing this, the sight can still be unsettling. The shadow moves as you move, shifting with every step, as though something unseen is mirroring your every motion.
The same effect can be seen from above the clouds as well. Pilots sometimes report watching their aircraft’s shadow glide across the cloud tops, ringed by a rainbow halo, the same optical illusion that once convinced travellers they had seen a spirit. It’s a reminder that even when we understand what we’re seeing, it can still feel like something more.