"Dark Guardians" has been scaring people in the mountains of California for three hundred years

For centuries, people look at the misty peaks of the Santa Lucia Mountains (California) and see strange figures in raincoats. The silhouettes disappear quite quickly. No one has time to figure out what it is.

The three-meter-tall silhouettes were called "dark guardians". They occur, as a rule, during the day for three hundred years. The ghosts were first encountered by the arriving Spaniards in the 1700s. They thought someone was watching them.

Katie Dowd writes that the phenomenon may well be pareidolia. This is when the brain finds familiar shapes in random images. There are many cases when people have seen the image of Jesus on burnt toast or the face of dolls on the lunar surface. Enhances the effect of fog. The shadows cast on the misty mountain peaks form another illusion called the Brocken ghost.

The resulting shapes often have iridescent halos, which are created by refraction of light from droplets of fog or clouds. It is possible that tourists in the Santa Lucia Mountains observe their own shadows, magnified several times.