When leaving Varanasi by train, I stopped to take a photograph outside the station. The image above is what I captured. If you look closely at the woman in red, standing with a bag beside her, you’ll notice something strange: a brilliant beam of light appears to be coming either from her head or from the sky above.
This picture has not been altered or Photoshopped. It came straight from my Sony Xperia P phone. There were no lights behind the woman, so the beam couldn’t have originated there. What’s more, the beam ends abruptly in mid-air. When I looked at the same area with my eyes, there was no visible light at all.
There were no lamp posts near the woman. The light streams visible on the left are far less intense than the radiance around her. A tall light standard stood about 50 feet to my left, but since the beam is coming out of the woman and extending up to the right, that lamp could not have been the source. Another light standard was 100 feet to my right and 50 feet back, but again, the angle doesn’t align with the beam, and the fact that it ends so suddenly rules that out. Stranger still, the shape at the top of the beam is a perfect oval—or a circle, depending on your perspective—and extremely bright. Because that light was behind me, my phone camera would never have picked it up.
The only other lights in the area were mounted on the building, too distant to matter.
After I took the photo and glanced at it, I immediately noticed the odd light. I looked up again—and the woman in red was gone. She couldn’t have left; her bag was still on the ground. The five seconds it took me to glance at the picture and then look back should have left her in the exact same spot. I scanned the entire area, but she was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t appear to be traveling with anyone. The group of men to her right weren’t connected to her. She had simply vanished.
And in Varanasi of all places. Varanasi is one of Hinduism’s seven holiest sites, where many come to die or to be cremated. Eerie, to say the least.
I showed the photo to several people on my tour, and no one could explain it—except to shrug and say, “Well… Varanasi.”
Can you?