Atlas Obscura's 'What the Light Knows': a writer's meditation on grief, place and an unexplained sighting

Atlas Obscura published this week a personal essay titled "What the Light Knows" in which a writer describes seeing an unexplained shaft of coloured light hovering over a Smoky Mountains overlook one week after her father's death. The piece reads as a grief story positioned at the edge between place and feeling, and between science and belief.

The essay does not begin with a dramatic insight: it records an ordinary afternoon walk that the writer took with her mother in the Tennessee Smokies in mid-April. "It had been exactly one week since my father had died," the writer says. "We had set out to do something with ourselves." While they were standing at an overlook, on a clear, rainless day, a coloured shaft of light appeared in the air in front of them.

This was not, the essay insists, on a screen, not a reflected rainbow on the camera, but a phenomenon visible in the air itself, a band of green and blue moving as they moved. The writer recalls: "My mother turned toward the camera and took a photograph. I still have that photograph. She is standing by a stone wall, her back to the lens — and her eyes are fixed on something that should not be there."

In an editor's note Atlas Obscura describes the piece as "sitting somewhere between hallucination, optical phenomenon and metaphysics." The essay does not commit to any single explanation; instead it explores how the experience binds the writer to the world. This meditative register is an example of the emotional-and-informational balance that atlasobscura.com has been adding to its place writing in recent years.

Optically, the phenomenon the writer describes — coloured light in a clear sky with no rain or visible prism — admits a small set of plausible explanations. Atmospheric physicists tend to attribute such observations to halo or sundog phenomena produced by ice crystals suspended high in the atmosphere scattering sunlight. The writer does not endorse any of these explanations in the essay; the experience is left as an observation that resists explanation.

In the bereavement literature there is an area known as the "sensed presence" phenomenon. Studies in journals such as Heart and Spirit and Bereavement Care report that 30 to 60 percent of the bereaved at some point sense the presence of the lost loved one in a physical or visual form. The Cambridge psychiatrist David Brierley, in a 2023 review, argued such experiences are not pathological but a natural adaptation of human cognition. The essay does not unpack this literature for the reader, but you can sense its background through the prose.

The essay's real strength is its almost poetic discipline of observation. The writer describes the overlook, the granite wall, the shaft of light very carefully; she emphasises that the scene is unstable, but that the moment was indisputably real. "When I look at that photograph," she writes, "I can take my mother back to that place." That sentence shifts the essay from a personal grief story into a piece about the power of place itself.

For Atlas Obscura, this is a register the platform has been developing for two years. Long known mainly for its place-guide format, the platform has recently been publishing more long-form essays; "What the Light Knows" is the fourth in this series. Editor Sarah Laskow told the Columbia Journalism Review last year: "Writing about place is not just writing about geography — place is the envelope of identity."

Reading the essay may motivate a visit to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The park is the most-visited national park in the United States, drawing more than 14 million visitors a year. The writer's overlook is not directly named in the essay; clues in the prose — a stone wall, a westward view — suggest something like Newfound Gap.

The essay sits in Atlas Obscura's "Articles" section, the part of the site that readers go to for essays rather than place lookups. According to the site's metrics, long-form essays generate average reader dwell times about three times longer than place-guide pages. "What the Light Knows" is one of those pieces that asks emotional investment; for a reader willing to sit in the transition zone between loss and the surface of the Earth, it is an offering worth lingering in.