Skyrim Glitch Fix: Continuous Soul Drain in Soul Cairn

So I came across another glitch while playing Skyrim: Dawnguard last week.  This one is more of a graphical glitch, but it was very annoying & had I not found a way to fix it, I probably would’ve never picked the game up again.  I couldn’t easily find a solution on the internet, so I’m posting the way I found to fix this here to hopefully help out others who come across the same problem.

I suffered this glitch in the Soul Cairn.  You may notice that there are many structures that have a large, floating, purple crystal atop them.  These crystals are giant soul gems, & if you get too close they will slowly drain your health away.  You’ll know when this is happening because there’s a bright column of light going from the crystal to your character.  Normally you can briefly interrupt this by eating a soul husk, which stops the crystal (light & all) for ten seconds.

But at one point, the light continued to stream even after leaving the range of the crystal.

There was no health draining effect.  The light didn’t connect to the crystal, but instead went straight into the sky out of sight.  It was constantly visible behind my character when in third person view, making it impossible to see anything, & even in first person the sound was still there.

I tried to fix it by saving & reloading, but it didn’t work.  I quit the game completely, that didn’t work.  I even left the Soul Cairn, but the light was still there in Skyrim.  Googling the glitch also revealed no solutions on any game forums.  I was just about to load an autosave from before this glitch, which I wasn’t happy about because I’d made a lot of progress since then, when I finally came across a hint to the solution some ten pages into the search results.  The tip worked, so I’m going to share it here to help out anyone else with the same problem.

1. Go back to a crystal & get close enough for it to drain your life.  This will cause an additional column of light to appear.
2. Eat a soul husk.  This should stop both the second drain & the glitched lighting effect as well.

It’s a pretty simple fix, but you wouldn’t believe how long I had to search for it.  Hell, even when I Googled it just prior to writing this for an image of the glitch, I couldn’t find anything.

I hope this helps out anyone who comes across this graphical glitch.

– GamerDame