The Grey Man of Ben Macdui

Ben Macdui, Cairngorms, Scotland

Britain's highest plateau hosts an encounter tradition stretching from 1891 to the present day — a vast grey figure, immense footprints in snow, and an overwhelming panic that drives experienced mountaineers off the summit at a run.

Ben Macdui is Britain's second-highest mountain, and the Cairngorm plateau — the broad, high, featureless ground around it — is one of the few genuinely dangerous wilderness areas in the British Isles. In winter conditions it is comparable to Arctic tundra. The Grey Man — Am Fear Liath Mòr in Gaelic — first entered documented discussion in 1891, when the respected mountaineer and scientist Professor Norman Collie admitted to an encounter during a lecture to the Cairngorm Club. He had been descending from the summit in mist when he became aware of footsteps behind him — crunch, crunch in the snow, coming at intervals suggesting strides considerably longer than a human being's. He looked back and saw nothing. The footsteps continued. He ran the four or five miles to Rothiemurchus without stopping, and did not return to Ben Macdui for years. Collie was a serious scientist with a reputation to protect. His disclosure prompted others: a pattern emerged of experienced, credible climbers who had experienced the same phenomena on Macdui — the footsteps, the sense of an immense presence in mist, and what several described as 'panic' — not fear of something identified but a primitive compulsion to leave, immediately, at all costs. Photographs taken on the plateau in clean conditions have occasionally captured very large prints in snow of an unidentified bipedal animal. The Cairngorm gamekeepers are not inclined to dismiss the accounts.