Brocken spectre

The figure's head can be surrounded by a bright area called Heiligenschein, or halo-like rings of rainbow-coloured light forming a glory, which appear opposite the Sun's direction when uniformly sized water droplets in clouds refract and backscatter sunlight.

[6] Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Constancy to an Ideal Object" concludes with an image of the Brocken spectre: And art thou nothing?

Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!

In The Radiant Warrior (1989), part of Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard series, the protagonist uses the Brocken Spectre to instill confidence in his recruits.

Additionally, the French–Canadian quadruple agent Rémy Marathe muses episodically about the possibility of witnessing the fabled spectre on the mountains of Tucson in David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest.

He wrote: Then the towering buttresses of Batian and Nelion appeared; the rays of the setting sun broke through and, in the east, sharply defined, a great circle of rainbow colours framed our own silhouettes.

The design of Kriemhild Gretchen, a Witch in the anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, may have been inspired by the Brocken spectre.

[9] In Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, Book II Chapter 23, Flora Finching, in the course of one of her typically free-associative babbles to Mr Clennam, says " ... ere yet Mr F appeared a misty shadow on the horizon paying attentions like the well-known spectre of some place in Germany beginning with a B ... " "Brocken Spectre" is the title of a track on David Tipper's 2010 album Broken Soul Jamboree.

The Brocken Spectre occurring is proven by lawyers to explain circumstances in a case in episode 9 of "Innocence, Fight Against False Charges", a 2019 Japanese drama.

In October 2024 the BBC News website reported that a wildlife photographer from East Yorkshire in the United Kingdom captured a photo of a Brocken Spectre whilst out bird watching in Bridlington.