The Tomhannock Lights
The View from Parker Hill
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A note on location: The Tomhannock Reservoir is a manmade lake located in Rensselaer County, New York, approximately seven miles northeast of the city of Troy. It serves as the primary drinking water source for Troy and several surrounding communities. The reservoir stretches over five miles in length and covers roughly 1,700 acres. Its approximate geographic coordinates are 42.7878° N latitude and 73.5906° W longitude.
Before cell phones had cameras, before the internet could turn a flash in the sky into a thousand theories by morning, there were stories, shared quietly, passed from person to person like a memory too strange to carry alone. If you lived near Pittstown or Brunswick in the mid- to late-1990s, you might’ve heard them. You might’ve even seen what they were describing.
They weren’t headlines. They didn’t spark investigations or make the late-night news. But if you knew where to look, or more importantly, when, you might’ve seen the lights over the Tomhannock too.
Locals said they tended to appear late, often just before midnight. Bright. Low. Silent. Sometimes there were two. Sometimes they moved in tight, deliberate patterns over the reservoir, if they moved at all. Whatever they were, they didn’t seem ordinary. And those who watched said the best view was from up on Parker Hill.
I didn’t see them. I’ve heard these stories not as a witness, but as someone who’s spent years listening. In my work, documentary photography, environmental history, visual preservation, I’ve learned that some of the most revealing truths aren’t found in archives. They come from people. From the things they remember when they’re standing in a place they’ve known their whole lives, when they can tell you something without fear of being laughed at or dismissed.
Over the years, I’ve heard variations of the Tomhannock lights from a dozen different people.
One man told me he saw a light split in two and vanish. Another said he once watched a glowing sphere hover above the water for minutes without shifting. In a Facebook message, a woman recalled how her family stood in silence one summer night as three white lights darted in synchronized patterns across the surface of the reservoir. Her father called the State Police. They told him to go back inside.
There’s no footage. No radar confirmation. No paper trail. Just memories. Accounts that are oddly consistent in detail and tone. Stories of something in the sky over the Tomhannock that didn’t behave like anything we were told existed at the time. These stories haven’t spread far. Most remain local, passed from person to person—familiar stories told when the moment feels right. Still, they’ve persisted.
The Tomhannock is one of those places I’ve come to know deeply. I’ve spent thousands of hours at the reservoir, mapping ghost farms that vanished beneath its waters, photographing water and light, documenting the quiet rhythm of seasonal change. I’ve walked the same stretches of shoreline in snow, fog, and blistering heat, in high water and in low. It’s a place I know in layers. A place that keeps revealing more.
And like any place shaped by time and silence, it has its stories.
Some are strange. Others are unsettling. In the winter of 1988, the Tomhannock became the site of something profoundly tragic. On March 10, the body of 18-year-old Karolyn Ann Lonczak was found near the reservoir’s edge along County Route 117. She had been abducted from her workplace in Cohoes and killed, strangled and stabbed before being left near the frozen shore. Jeffrey D. Williams was later convicted of her murder. For a time, the reservoir that had quietly reflected the sky became something else entirely, a crime scene, a place people spoke of differently.
There’s a quiet unease to certain parts of the Tomhannock. Especially in winter. The ice moans and cracks at night, sending long, hollow tones across the surface. Gunshots ring out from the wooded hills. One-car pull-offs line the roads, just wide enough for a vehicle to stop and sit with its engine ticking in the cold. Crosses mark where lives ended suddenly. And beneath that stillness, always, the memory of the land before it was water. The buried fields. The homes now gone.
I first came to photograph the light, sunsets and sunrises mostly. It was close, easy to reach, and dependable in its beauty. But over time, something shifted. I started to notice its stillness. Its quiet strangeness. The way some corners of the reservoir, harder to access, felt as remote as any forest in Upstate New York. What began as a practical shooting location became something else entirely. Something beautiful, yes, but also, at times, deeply eerie.
One of the stories that stayed with me came from a woman I’ll call Catherine. That’s not her real name, but she reached out to me through Messenger after seeing a few of my photos of the reservoir. We spoke over the phone a few days later.
She asked if I’d ever seen the lights.
I told her I hadn’t, but I’d heard plenty about them.
“Oh, we used to drive up near Parker Hill late,” she said. “Back when the kids were older but still around. My husband didn’t believe it until he saw one go straight up. Just like that. No sound. Just a white light, steady, hovering low over the water. Then it moved, straight up, fast, like it got pulled.”
I asked her what year that was.
“Ninety-seven, I think. Early summer. We were walking our dog that night. It was quiet. Still. Then this light comes gliding in over the reservoir. Slow. Then it just stopped and sat there. No blinking. No sound. Just… there. Like it was observing something.”
She paused on the phone. The memory hadn’t lost its shape. It felt like something she’d turned over in her hand again and again.
“Then it rose. Not like a jet. It was smooth, like it jumped a level. And then it was just gone.”
I asked if they ever told anyone.
“We told a few friends. Some had their own stories. Others rolled their eyes. You didn’t call the cops for something like that. What would you even say? A light stopped in the sky and watched us?”
Had she ever seen it again?
“Not like that night. A few flashes over the years, maybe. But that one, whatever it was, it felt different. It didn’t feel threatening. Just… unfamiliar. Like we’d seen something we weren’t meant to.”
The Tomhannock Reservoir, situated in the rolling countryside of Rensselaer County, supplies drinking water to the city of Troy and nearby communities. It’s not remote like the Adirondacks, but it’s far enough from city light to remain dark at night, even with the glow of nearby towns low on the horizon. The land around it is mostly flat, offering long, unobstructed views of the sky. The reservoir has a wide fetch, and from the surrounding hills, it can resemble a loch, much longer than it is narrow, a ribbon of water dotted with islands, narrows, and peninsulas. A buried valley, flooded and repurposed, still showing traces of its original shape.
And maybe that’s the point.
It’s important to say this plainly: unidentified does not mean extraterrestrial. In recent years, we’ve learned that the Department of Defense and other agencies have, at times, allowed UFO mythology to persist, sometimes even encouraged it, as a convenient distraction from classified testing. According to investigative journalist Garrett Graff in his book UFO: The Inside Story, some Cold War sightings were quietly tied to programs like the U-2 and A-12 spy planes. When civilians reported strange objects in the sky, the government didn’t always deny it. Sometimes they let the mystery do the work.
That doesn’t mean that’s what was happening at the Tomhannock.
But it does raise questions.
Could these lights have been early drone tests? It’s a possibility worth considering. The military had unmanned aerial vehicles long before the public was widely aware, and the 1990s saw rapid development in surveillance platforms. Testing often occurred in quiet, rural airspace, but usually near military installations or research corridors. There are no such facilities near the Tomhannock, which makes the idea less likely, though not impossible. A low-altitude platform with infrared or topographic capabilities might still have passed over a quiet body of water like this one—briefly, and without leaving much trace.
Could it have been civilian aircraft? Possible, though unlikely given the movement described, sharp angles, dead stops, quick vertical climbs. Even medevac helicopters don’t behave like that, and there’s no record of routine helicopter patrols over the reservoir.
Ball lightning, meteorological phenomena? Perhaps. But ball lightning is rare and typically appears during thunderstorms. These sightings came on still nights, under stars, with no wind and no rain. Swamp gas has been offered as an explanation in other sightings, but the Tomhannock isn’t a marshland, it’s a managed reservoir with little biological decay to support that kind of ignition. The conditions simply don’t fit.
One thing is clear: people were seeing something. And they were talking about it. And the stories match.
It’s easy to forget, in the age of instant digital evidence, how much once slipped through the cracks. Before smartphones and ring cams and flight tracking apps, we relied on word of mouth. And word of mouth, when consistent and specific, deserves our attention, even when it lacks proof.
Today, Parker Hill is still quiet after dark. You can pull over near the rise, look out over the dark water, and imagine what might have passed above it thirty years ago. The trees haven’t changed much. The skyline is still empty.
Maybe what people saw over the Tomhannock was ours. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was never meant to be understood. Still, the stories remain. They’re passed along quietly, not stored in files or captured in photographs, but carried in memory. That counts too. It’s a kind of record.
Local legends don’t behave like official histories. They shift in the telling, shaped by time, place, and the person willing to speak. These stories aren’t written down, they’re handed over. They aren’t meant to mislead; they live where trust and memory intersect. This kind of knowledge moves through people. It reflects how we navigate uncertainty, how we try to make sense of the strange.
Often, you don’t hear these things until someone decides you’re ready. Until they’re sure you’ll listen without trying to explain it away. That kind of trust opens slowly. It comes from standing in the same field, walking the same shoreline, knowing the same kind of dark.
Some stories never announce themselves. Some are only visible from a hill at midnight, above a reservoir that seems to hold more than just water.
And some lights never return, but they still leave a trace.
If you’ve seen something, or heard stories like these, feel free to get in touch. These memories matter. They help us understand a place, through maps and documents, yes, and also through the stories people choose to carry.
This story is part of a larger effort to document how we experience darkness, memory, and the unknown—threads I explore more deeply in my book, Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night.
Discover Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night by John Bulmer
A hauntingly beautiful journey through how darkness has shaped human history, culture, and memory, from wartime blackouts and Cold War surveillance to ancient skywatchers and light‑polluted nights. Part memoir, part cultural history, this immersive field guide challenges us to step out of the glow and reconnect with what the night still has to teach.
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Restoration Obscura is where overlooked history gets another shot at being seen, heard, and understood. Through long-form storytelling, archival research, and photographic restoration, we recover the forgotten chapters—the ones buried in basements, fading in family albums, or sealed behind locked doors.
The name nods to the camera obscura, an early photographic device that captured light in a darkened chamber. Restoration Obscura flips that idea, pulling stories out of darkness and casting light on what history left behind.
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Restoration Obscura may not hold copyright for all images featured in its archives or publications. For uses beyond educational or non-commercial purposes, please contact the institution or original source that provided the image.
The accounts shared in this story are drawn from personal conversations, memory, and local oral tradition. They do not reflect official reports, confirmed sightings, or documented government records. While care has been taken to preserve the language and intent of those who contributed their stories, these accounts remain anecdotal and unverifiable by conventional standards. Restoration Obscura presents them not as evidence, but as part of the cultural landscape, expressions of how people experience mystery, place, and the unknown. Readers are encouraged to approach this material with curiosity, empathy, and an understanding of the line between folklore and fact.