“I was returning from the cairn on the summit in a mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps. Every few steps I took I heard a crunch, then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own. I said to myself ‘this is all nonsense’. I listened and heard it again but could see nothing in the mist . As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch sounded behind me I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest. Whatever you make of it I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDhui and will not go back there again by myself I know.”
So speaks J. Norman Collie, a noted climber in 1925 some 35 years before of the Am Fear Liath Mor or the Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui, perhaps Britain’s only claim to the Bigfoot lore. Outlandish at it may appear, he is not along a long list of climbers have claimed to have experienced or ‘seen’ the beast. The earliest is poet James Hogg in 1791 fled home in panic leaving the sheep he was tending described it:
It was a giant blackamoor, at least thirty feet high, and equally proportioned, and very near me. I was actually struck powerless with astonishment and terror.
When he returned he noticed the beast was back…something I will refer back to later. .
Some people had an even more frightening experience, such as that of Alexander Tewnion who writing in the 1958 copy of The Scots magazine relates:
…In October 1943 I spent a ten day leave climbing alone in the Cairngorms… One afternoon, just as I reached the summit cairn of Ben MacDhui, mist swirled across the Lairig Ghru and enveloped the mountain. The atmosphere became dark and oppressive, a fierce, bitter wind whisked among the boulders, and… an odd sound echoed through the mist – a loud footstep, it seemed. Then another, and another… A strange shape loomed up, receded, came charging at me! Without hesitation I whipped out the revolver and fired three times at the figure. When it still came on I turned and hared down the path, reaching Glen Derry in a time that I have never bettered. You may ask was it really the Fear Laith Mhor? Frankly, I think it was.
All in all very strange. But what is the Grey Man?
No one appears to have seen him directly – but is described as a tall man covered in short hair.
The rarefied atmosphere of the mountain could claim to wrong foot climbers – the cold, the reduced oxygen, the elements can make a deer sound unworldly too. However some may not be convinced:
“…tell me that the whine was but the result of relaxed eardrums, and the Presence was only the creation of a mind that was accustomed to take too great an interest in such things. I shall not be convinced. Come, rather, with me at the mysterious dusk time when day and night struggle upon the mountains. Feel the night wind on your faces, and hear it crying amid rocks. See the desert uplands consumed before the racing storms. Though your nerves be of steel, and your mind says it cannot be, you will be acquainted with that fear without name, that intense dread of the unknown that has pursued mankind from the very dawn of time.”
Two brothers heard the footsteps atop Ben MacDhui in 1904:
“slurring footsteps as if someone was walking through water-saturated gravel.”
When they returned to the Derry Lodge they were told
“That would have been the Fear Liath Mòr you heard,”
Yet significantly no photographs of the Grey Man have been taken yet some footprints were found and photographed. These prints were:
“…were running across a stretch of snow covered moorland, each print 19 inches long by about 14 inches wide and there must have been all of seven feet between each “stride”. There was no differentiation between a left and a right foot, and they preceded in an approximately single line.”
This is according to John Rennie’s Romantic Strathspey when he saw the prints in the Spey Valley which was 15 miles from Ben MacDhui but was thought to be related. However, later this piece of conclusive evidence was debunked by the author. He stated:
“In that moment I knew that the Wendygo, Abominable Snowman, Bodach Mor, or what have you, was forever explained so far as I was concerned.”
Why? For he saw these footprints form again due to the action of precipitation – they were a natural phenomena. What is interesting about the Grey man is that he is never really seen but experienced suggesting a more natural explanation. One of these being a meteorological effect when one’s own shadow is stretched by an inversion or gap in the clouds –called a Brocken Spectre. One of the key locations where these phenomena can occur is Lurcher’s Crag which significantly is where many sightings occur. This would also explain why James Hogg experienced it when returning of course!
So sadly with no firm sightings, no photos, no physical evidence it seems that the Grey Man is a bit grey in the evidence front…but he continues to be ‘spotted’ and ‘felt’ and adds to the tales climbers tell!
Animalfolklore 