The Grey Man of Ben MacDhui

Mark Valentine logs the various works that have explored the Grey Man folklore here.

My first and favorite telling of the lore is by Colin Wilson in his Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (1987):

The Grey Man of Ben MacDhui

At the 27th Annual General Meeting of the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen, in December 1925, the eminent mountaineer Professor Norman Collie made a startling disclosure. He told how in 1890 he was climbing alone on Ben MacDhui, 4,000 feet above sea-level, when he had a terrifying experience. As he was returning from the cairn on the plateau there was a heavy mist, and Collie heard crunching noises behind him, "as if someone was walking after me, but taking steps three or four times the length of my own". He told himself it was nonsense, but as he walked on, and the footsteps continued to sound behind him, "I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles down to Rothiemurchus Forest".

In fact Collie had told the story twenty-three years earlier, to friends in New Zealand, and the result was a report in a New Zealand newspaper headlined: "A Professor's Panic". As a result of this story, another Scottish mountaineer, Dr A.M. Kellas – who was to die during the Mount Everest Reconnaissance expedition of 1921–2 – wrote to Collie telling him of his own curious experience on Ben MacDhui. Kellas and his brother Henry had been chipping the rock for crystals late one afternoon when they saw a giant figure coming down towards them from the cairn. It passed out of sight briefly in a dip, and as the two men fled down the mountainside again in mist both of them were convinced that they were being followed by the "giant".

This account makes it sound as if some form of "Yeti", or Abominable Snowman, lives on the slopes of Ben MacDhui. But accounts by other climbers make it clear that the explanation may not be as simple as this. Peter Densham, who was in charge of aeroplane rescue work in the Cairngorms during the Second World War, described in an interview with a journalist how in May 1945 he had left the village of Aviemore and climbed to the cairn on the summit. Suddenly, as he was looking across at Ben Nevis, the mist closed in. He sat there eating chocolate, conscious of strange noises which he attributed to the expansion and contraction of the rocks, when he had a strong feeling that there was someone near him. Then he felt something cold on the back of his neck, and a sense of pressure. He stood up, and heard crunching noises from the direction of the cairn. He went towards the cairn to investigate, "not in the least frightened". Then suddenly he experienced a feeling of apprehension, and found himself running towards Lurcher's Crag, with its sheer drop. "I tried to stop myself and found this was extremely difficult to do. It was as if someone was pushing me. I managed to deflect my course, but with a great deal of difficulty . . ." He ran most of the way back down the mountain.

On another occasion Densham was on the mountain with his friend Richard Frere, searching for an aeroplane that was reported to have crashed. They were sitting close to the cairn when Densham was surprised to hear Frere apparently talking to himself on the other side of the cairn. Then he realized that Frere was talking to someone else. "I went round and found myself joining in the conversation. It was a strange experience which seemed to have a psychic aspect. We talked to someone invisible for some time, and it seemed we had carried on this conversation for some little time when we suddenly realized that there was no one there but ourselves. Afterwards, neither of us, strangely, could recall the purport of this extraordinary conversation". What seems even stranger is that when Frere himself was tracked down by Affleck Gray, the author of a book called The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui, he had no recollection of the episode described by Densham. But he had had his own strange experiences on the mountain, and described it to Gray as "the most mysterious mountain I have ever been on". He told Gray of a day when he had climbed to the high pass of Lairig Ghru, above Ben MacDhui, and sat gazing down on the cliffs of Lurcher's Crag with its cascade of water. Then he found himself slipping into a "weird and disagreeable" train of thought, so he stood up and walked. But the gloom turned to a sense of deep depression and apathy. Then suddenly he became certain that he was not alone. "Very close to me, permeating the air which moved so softly in the summer's wind, there was a Presence, utterly abstract but intensely real".

Then Frere noticed something else. "The silence of the mountain was violated by an intensely high singing note, a sound which was just within the aural capacity, which never rose or fell . . . The sound, it seemed, was coming from the very soil of the mountains". This sound continued until he was below Lurcher's Crag, when the music became so faint that he was not sure whether it was there at all. But the "abstract Presence" seemed to cling to him "with some sort of desperate eagerness as if it passionately desired to leave the mountain which it haunted . . ." Then there was a momentary flash of terror, and it was gone.

The experience of the strange, sustained note is not as unusual as Frere apparently thought. In her autobiography The Infinite Hive the eminent psychical investigator Rosalind Heywood calls it "the Singing". She describes it as "a kind of continuous vibrant inner quasi-sound, to which the nearest analogy is the noise induced by pressing a seashell against the ear, or perhaps the hum of a distant dynamo". Rosalind Heywood could hear "the Singing" fairly constantly – although very faintly – if she switched her full attention to it. She says that "it is far more evident in some places than in others; particularly so in a quiet wood, for instance, or on a moor or a mountain . . ." She notes that she also hears it in churches and college libraries, "places where thought or devotion have been intense for years". She finds that "mountain Singing conveys a different "atmosphere" from church Singing, as an oboe conveys a different "atmosphere" from a trumpet". And she says that she has met four other people who have heard it; in one case, she mentioned it to a young engineer, convinced that he was a thorough pragmatist; to her surprise, he replied, "Oh yes, I hear that too, in places where there have just been strong emotions". So to some extent the "Singing" seems to be a kind of "recording": Rosalind Heywood says that she can also "feel" it when she goes into a room where intense thought has been going on. Yet it cannot be wholly due to human "vibrations", since she mentions that the Hampstead tube station – the deepest in London – is the only place where she has not heard it. "The silence was dead".

If "the Singing" can be heard in places where intense thought or worship has taken place, this verifies that it could be regarded as some kind of "recording". In the 1840s an American professor of anatomy named Joseph Rodes Buchanan came to the interesting conclusion that every object has its own history somehow "imprinted" on it, and that "psychics" can sense this history by holding it in their hands; he called this faculty "psychometry". He observed that handwritten letters seem to be particularly good "recorders" of the writer's state of mind, particularly if the writer was feeling some powerful emotion at the time. In the early twentieth century the scientist and psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge advanced the theory that "ghosts" may be "recordings" – that the powerful emotions associated with some tragedy may be imprinted on the walls of the room in which it has taken place, so that a "sensitive" person who walked into the room would have a strange feeling of misery and oppression, or perhaps even see the tragedy re-enacted. A Cambridge don named Tom Lethbridge suggested a very similar "tape recording" theory half a century later. Lethbridge suggested that these "recordings" are imprinted on some kind of electrical field, and he believed that mountains, deserts and woodlands each have their own special type of "field". (He seemed to feel that the field of water is the best "recorder", so that ghosts are often associated with damp places).

It seems conceivable, then, that when Rosalind Heywood heard "the Singing" she was simply picking up some kind of electrical field – a field which, on account of its properties, we might christen "the psychic field". Why Richard Frere should suddenly have become aware of this field on the slopes of Ben MacDhui must remain an open question. But at least it seems to offer some kind of confirmation that his feeling of menace and depression was not merely imagination.

The episode in which Frere and Densham held a conversation with some invisible entity seems even stranger; presumably they were responding to some "presence" on a subconscious level, almost as if dreaming. This could also explain why Frere could not even remember the episode later.

Frere also told Affleck Gray a curious story about a friend – whose identity he was not at liberty to disclose – who decided to spend the night on Ben MacDhui to win a bet. He set up his tent by the summit cairn on a January night. (This is not a man-made cairn, but a natural formation eroded by the weather.) He also began to experience the familiar sense of unreality, and "the morbidly analytical directioning of thought". Frere explained: "He did not feel in any way mad: the terror which possessed him concerned the imminent impact of knowledge which he knew would always set him aside from his fellows. It was as if he was the unwilling recipient of a vast range of new revolutionary thought impulses built up in some all-powerful mind. And the mind was neither human nor anti-human; it just had nothing to do with him at all".

He fell asleep and woke up "to a fear of a more terrifying nature". Moonlight fell through the crack of the flysheet of his tent, and as he stared at it he saw a brown blur, and "knew that something lay between himself and the moon". He lay there in frozen immobility until the shadow went away. He now pulled aside the flysheet of the tent. "The night was brilliant. About twenty yards away a great brown creature was swaggering down the hill. He used the word "swaggering" because the creature had an air of insolent strength about it". His impression was that the creature was about twenty feet high, and was covered with shortish brown hair. It was too erect to be a huge ape; it had a tapering waist and very broad shoulders. Affleck Gray's book contains a photograph of footprints in the snow taken on Ben MacDhui, and they look oddly like the famous photograph of the footprints of the "Abominable Snowman" discovered on the Menlung glacier on Everest by Eric Shipton in 1951.

Frere was inclined to wonder whether the brown-haired creature was real, or whether perhaps it was somehow created by his friend's imagination in that oddly "unreal" state of mind.

In her book The Secret of Spey the writer Wendy Wood describes her own experience on Ben MacDhui. She had reached the entrance to the pass of Lairig Ghru on a snowy day, and was preparing to return when she heard a voice "of gigantic resonance" close behind her. "It seemed to speak with the harsh consonants and full vowels of the Gaelic". She wondered if someone was lying injured in the snow, and tramped around in circles until she was convinced that she was alone. Now feeling afraid, she began to hurry back, and as she descended the mountain, thought she could hear footsteps following her. "She had a strange feeling that something walked immediately behind her". At first she thought it might be echoes of her own footsteps, until she realized that the crunching noises did not exactly correspond with her steps. She asks in her book whether perhaps the strange happenings on Ben MacDhui might be "the concretion of the imaginings of the race, clinging to a particular place, discernible only to those whose racial sensitiveness is open to receive the primal impressions and fears of a bygone day". In other words, she is suggesting that the "ghost" of Ben MacDhui is a "recording".

This seems to be confirmed, to some extent, by an experience recounted by the novelist Joan Grant in her autobiography Time Out of Mind. Her book reveals her to be highly psychic. She and her husband were not even on Ben MacDhui but down below near Aviemore; Gray suggests they were on the Lairig Ghru path near Coylum Bridge. For no apparent reason, she was suddenly overwhelmed with fear. "Something – utterly malign, four legged, and yet obscenely human, invisible and yet solid enough for me to hear the pounding of its hooves, was trying to reach me. If it did I should die for I was far too frightened to know how to defend myself". She fled in terror. "I had run about half a mile when I burst through an invisible barrier behind which I knew I was safe. I knew I was safe now, though a second before I had been in mortal danger; knew it as certainly as though I were a torero who has jumped the barrier in front of a charging bull".

What seems to be emerging from most of these stories about Ben MacDhui is that the chief manifestation is a sudden feeling of depression followed by panic. Joan Grant's account underlines another important point. Tom Lethbridge, who has already been quoted, had observed repeatedly that these sudden unpleasant sensations of fear or "nastiness" seem to have a precisely defined area, so that it is possible to step in or out of them in one single stride. He describes for example how one day he and his wife Mina went to Ladram beach in Devon to gather seaweed for the garden. At a point on the beach where a small stream flowed from the cliff both experienced an odd feeling of gloom. "I passed into a kind of blanket, or fog, of depression, and, I think, of fear". Mina Lethbridge went off to gather seaweed at the other end of the beach but soon hurried back. "I can't stand this place any longer. There's something frightful here". The following week they returned, on another dull, grey day, and were again greeted by the same feeling of depression – Tom compared it to a bad smell. It was at its worst around the stream, making him feel almost giddy. Mina went to the cliff-top to make a sketch, and had a sudden feeling that she was being urged to jump. Later they verified that someone had committed suicide from this precise spot.

Tom noted that it was possible to step in and out of the "depression" – and he noticed it once again when the old lady next door died under strange circumstances after an attempt to practise black magic. An "unpleasant" feeling hung around her house, but it was possible to step in and out of it, as if it was some kind of invisible barrier, like Joan Grant's bullring barrier.

Gray recounts many stories that seem to support Lethbridge's "tape recording" theory. The Scots poet James Hogg, known as the Ettrick Shepherd (because he was a shepherd by profession), once saw a herd of Highland cattle on the far side of the stream, and since they had no right to be there he sent a shepherd to drive them off the land, together with two more farmhands armed with cudgels. But they found no sign of a herd, or even of hoofmarks. No one had seen a herd of cattle in the district that day. It had been some kind of "mirage", or perhaps a "recording" of something long past.

Gray also quotes The Mountain Vision by the mountaineer Frank S. Smythe. Smythe describes how, crossing the hills from Morvich to Loch Duich, on a bright sunny day, with a wonderful panorama of cloud-dappled hills and the distant sea, he entered a grassy, sun-warmed defile and "became instantly aware of an aura of evil" in the place. "It was as if something terrible had once happened there, and time had failed to dissipate the atmosphere created by it".

On impulse, Smythe decided to eat lunch there. As he smoked his pipe the atmosphere seemed to become increasingly unpleasant. Then, as he strove to be receptive to the strange influence, he seemed to witness a massacre: a score or so of ragged people were straggling wearily through the defile when concealed men rushed down on them with spears and axes, and killed them all. As Smythe hurried on, he seemed to hear screams behind him. He was later able to confirm that a massacre of Highlanders by British troops had taken place on the road, but he remained convinced that this is not what he had seen. "The weapons I saw, or seemed to see, were those of an earlier date".

Yet the many strange accounts of invisible presences on Ben MacDhui seems to throw doubt on the notion that the "big grey man" is nothing more than a "recording". George Duncan, an Aberdeen lawyer and a mountaineer, was totally convinced he had seen the devil on the slopes of the mountain. He and a fellow-climber, James A. Parker, had descended from Devil's Point, and were driving in a dog cart along the Derry Road. Duncan said: "All at once, I got the shock of my life by seeing before me a tall figure in a black robe – the conventional figure of the Devil himself, waving his arms, clad in long depending sleeves, coming towards me". He seemed to see the figure surrounded by smoke. In a few moments it passed from view as the cart went round a corner. James A. Parker verified the story. "It was only at dinner that evening he told me that when we were about a mile below Derry Lodge he had looked up to the hillside on his right and seen the Devil about a quarter of a mile away waving his arms to him".

Perhaps the oddest and in some ways the most interesting explanation that Gray encountered was given by Captan Sir Hugh Rankin, Bart, and his wife. Rankin was a Mahayana Buddhist, and his wife was a Zen Buddhist. He and Lady Rankin were cycling from Rothiemurchus to Mar via the Lairig Ghru pass, and although it was July it was bitterly cold in the pass. At the Pools o' Dee they suddenly felt "the Presence" behind them; they turned and saw a big, olive-complexioned man dressed in a long robe and sandals, with long flowing hair. "We were not in the least afraid. Being Buddhists we at once knew who it was. We at once knelt and made obeisance". They had instantly recognized the stranger as a Bodhisattva, "one of the five 'Perfected Men' who control the destinies of this world, and meet once a year in a cave in the Himalayas". According to Sir Hugh, the Presence addressed them in a language he thought was Sanskrit, and he replied respectfully in Urdu. "All the time the Bodhisattva was with us [he gave the time as about ten minutes] a heavenly host of musicians was playing high up in the sky . . . Immediately the Bodhisattva left us the music ceased and we never heard it again". It sounds as if they had heard some version of "the Singing". But his comment that the Presence spoke in Sanskrit raises the question of whether Wendy Wood had not mistaken Sanskrit for Gaelic when she heard it on the mountain.

Shortly before his death, F.W. Holiday, author of a classic book on the Loch Ness monster (see Chapter 18), advanced the startling theory that the Grey Man, like the Loch Ness monster and the Surrey puma, and possibly the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, is a member of "the phantom menagerie", creatures who belong to some other world or dimension. In The Goblin Universe (chapter 6) he cites various stories about the Fear Liath More (the Celtic name for the Grey Man), and goes on:

Pan, the goat-footed god, is not so funny when you encounter him . . . The chief symptom of being in the presence of Pan is panic, which the Oxford dictionary defines as "unreasoning and excessive terror, from Greek panicos, of god Pan, reputed to cause panic . . ."

The phenomenon is certainly not localised to the Cairngorms. Hamish Corrie, when he was nearing the summit of Sgurr Dearg on Skye, turned back when he was overcome by "an unaccountable panic".

The late John Buchan reported the same effect in the Bavarian Alps. He describes how in 1910 he was returning through a pinewood on a sunny morning with a local forester when panic struck them out of the blue. Both of them fled without speaking until they collapsed from exhaustion on the valley highway below. Buchan comments that a friend of his "ran for dear life" when climbing in Jotunheimen in Norway. The Pan effect may be worldwide.

Holiday connects "the phantom menagerie" with Unidentified Flying Objects, and cites the authority on UFOs, John Keel, who began by assuming that UFOs are some kind of unknown aircraft, perhaps from other planets, and ended by accepting that they come from "another dimension", and that they seem to have a distinctly supernatural element. In one of his books, The Mothman Prophecies, Keel speaks of a gigantic winged figure sighted again and again in West Virginia, and describes his own feeling of "panic" on a road close to one of the sightings. Like Lethbridge, Keel found that the area of "panic" seemed to be sharply defined, so that he could walk in and out of it with one stride. And the area of sightings of "Mothman" also has many sightings of UFO phenomena.

Oddly enough, Affleck Gray is willing to consider the "space visitors" theory as an explanation of the Ben MacDhui phenomena. He points out that in 1954 an ex-taxi driver named George King inaugurated the Aetherius Society in Caxton Hall, London. King claimed that he had met the Master Jesus on Holdstone Down, North Devon, and been made aware that he had been chosen as the primary mental channel of certain Space Intelligences. He was told to travel the world, his task being to serve as the channel for "charging" eighteen mountains with cosmic energy. One of these mountains was Creag an Leth-Choin, three miles north-west of Ben MacDhui, and King asserts that there is a huge dome-shaped auditorium, a retreat of the Great White Brotherhood, in the bowels of Ben MacDhui. Another group of "seekers", the Active Truth Academy in Edinburgh, also believe that Ben MacDhui "has become the earth-fall for space beings". But it is clear from Gray's chapter on Space Beings that he regards this explanation with skepticism.

If we wish for a "scientific" explanation of the Ben MacDhui phenomena, then the likeliest seems to be that the answer lies in Ben MacDhui itself: that the "panic" is caused by some natural phenomenon, a kind of "earth force" which may be connected with the earth's magnetic field. There are areas of the earth's surface where birds lose their way because the lines of earth magnetism somehow cancel one another out, forming a magnetic vortex. "Ley-hunters" also believe that so-called "ley lines" – which connect sacred sites such as churches, barrows and standing stones – are basically lines of magnetic force. Many are also convinced that places in which this force is exceptionally powerful are likely to be connected with "supernatural" occurrences – in fact, that such places "record" human emotions, producing the effects that are described as "hauntings". This explanation would account for Frank Smythe's experience of the "haunted" valley where the massacre had occurred.

The non-scientific explanation may be sought in the belief of most primitive peoples that the earth is alive, that certain places are holy, and that such places are inhabited by spirits. The Western mind is inclined to dismiss such beliefs as superstition; but many travellers who have been in close contact with them are inclined to be more open-minded. In The Lost World of the Kalahari Laurens Van der Post tells how, when he was seeking the vanished Bushmen of South Africa, his guide Samutchoso took him to a place called the Slippery Hills. The guide insisted that there must be no hunting as they approached the hills, or the gods would be angry. Van de Post forgot to tell his advance party, and they shot a warthog. From then on they ran into an endless stream of bad luck. When Samutchoso tried to pray Van der Post saw that he was pulled over backward by some unknown force. All their technical equipment began to malfunction. Then Samutchoso "consulted" the spirits and began to speak to invisible presences. He told Van der Post that they were angry, and would have killed him if he had tried to pray again. Van der Post suggested that they should all write a message of apology, and that this should be buried in a bottle at the foot of a sacred rock. Apparently this worked; the spirits were propitiated, and suddenly the equipment ceased to malfunction. Through the guide, the "spirits" told Van der Post that he would find bad news waiting for him when he reached the next place on his route. In fact his assistant found a message saying that his father had died and he had to return home immediately. After all this, Van der Post had no doubt of the real existence of the "earth spirits" worshipped by primitive people.

F.W.Holiday's view was that the explanation of such phenomena as the "Grey Man" lay somewhere between these two sets of explanations: the scientific and the "supernatural". But he believed that the Western mind will be capable of grasping the answer only when it has broadened its conception of science.

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