Hiker’s apparition captured in rainbow halo in Washington — and looks almost biblical
Nikki Klein was having a bad day, so she drove to a national park in Washington for some “mountain therapy.”
She sat in a meadow, watched the clouds hug the mountain’s ridges and chatted with another hiker.
Then she spotted something she had never seen in her 30 years of hiking and backpacking: a ghostly figure illuminated by a rainbow of colorful rings hovering over the misty mountainside at Hurricane Ridge.
“I went from feeling completely terrible to feeling completely amazing. To be given such magic!” Klein told Storyful, a social media news wire.
The apparition Klein witnessed is a natural phenomenon called a Brocken spectre.
The rainbow-like halo occurs when the sun sets behind a person or object and their shadow is magnified in the clouds and mist, Mount Washington Observatory wrote on its website.
Aircraft also experience a similar optical phenomenon. As the airplane moves through the air above the clouds, a colorful shadow casts back, according to EarthSky.
The Brocken spectre lasted about 30 minutes before it disappeared, Klein wrote on her YouTube video.
Both she and the stranger had glowing lights around their shadow.
“It was one of the most amazing gifts the mountains have ever given me and I felt so lucky to have experienced it,” she wrote.
Hurricane Ridge is in Olympic National Park. It’s about 101 miles northwest from Seattle.
This story was originally published October 19, 2021 at 6:31 PM with the headline "Hiker’s apparition captured in rainbow halo in Washington — and looks almost biblical."
