Evening. I'm a folklorist, been researching Scottish mountain phenomena for about fifteen years now, ever since I finished my graduate work at the university. Most of what I study turns out to be misidentification, exaggeration, or just good storytelling that got away from people over the years. But there's one case that I keep coming back to, one that changed everything about how I approach this field. It's the story of Am Fear Liath Mor, the Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui. And the thing is, the man who brought it to public attention wasn't some amateur storyteller or village eccentric. He was Professor Norman Collie, one of the most respected scientists and mountaineers in all of Britain. I need you to understand who this man was, because that's the thing, it matters. Collie was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was a professor of organic chemistry at University College London. He pioneered the first medical X-ray photograph in this country. As a mountaineer, he made first ascents in the Alps, attempted eight-thousand-meter peaks in the Himalayas back in 1895, and completed twenty-one first ascents in the Canadian Rockies. There's a mountain named after him in Canada. There's a peak on the Isle of Skye that carries his name in Gaelic. This was not a man given to flights of fancy or tall tales. So when he stood up at the twenty-seventh annual meeting of the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen in December 1925, people listened. The room went quiet. And what he told them had happened thirty-four years earlier, in 1891, and he'd never breathed a word of it to anyone in all that time. Thirty-four years of complete silence about something that clearly haunted him. That detail alone tells you something about what kind of man he was, and how deeply this experience shook him.
Collie had been climbing alone on Ben MacDhui that day. For those who don't know the Scottish mountains, Ben MacDhui is the highest peak in the Cairngorms, the second highest mountain in all of Britain after Ben Nevis. It's a remote place, wild, with weather that can turn on you without warning. He was descending from the summit cairn, making his way down through the boulders, when the mist rolled in. Thick mist, the kind where you can barely see your own feet. And that's when he heard it. Footsteps. Not echoes of his own boots on the rock, but separate, distinct footsteps coming from behind him. For every few steps he took, he heard a crunch, then another crunch, as if something was walking after him but taking steps three or four times the length of his own. Now, Collie was a rational man. A scientist. He told himself it was nonsense, some trick of the mountain, some acoustic phenomenon he could explain away. He stopped walking. Stood perfectly still. Listened. The footsteps stopped too. He waited. Nothing. He started walking again. The crunching started again, right behind him. Three or four times the length of his stride, keeping pace, every single time. He couldn't see anything in the mist. He strained his eyes, turned around, looked everywhere. Nothing but grey. But he could hear it. Something was there. Something was following him. And then, and this is the part that gets me every time I read his account, this man who'd faced down blizzards in the Himalayas, who'd climbed peaks no human being had ever attempted, who had nerves of absolute steel, he was seized with terror. Pure, unreasoning terror. And he ran. He ran blindly over the boulders for nearly five miles, staggering and stumbling all the way down to Rothiemurchus Forest. In his own words, he said he would never go back to the top of Ben MacDhui alone again. And he never did.
Here's where it gets interesting, and here's why I believe there's something genuine to this. After Collie spoke publicly at that meeting, after his story hit the newspapers and caused a proper sensation, other climbers started coming forward. Experienced mountaineers, sensible and respectable people, all saying they'd had similar experiences on that same mountain but had kept quiet for years, sometimes decades, for fear of ridicule. They'd been afraid people would think them mad. alone up there sounds terrifying - Marcus' But now that someone of Collie's stature had admitted to it, they felt they could finally speak. One climber, interviewed in the 1930s, described hearing footsteps in the crusted snow while descending toward the Lairig Ghru pass. The footsteps came once for every three steps he took. He stopped, they stopped. He walked, they followed. He never saw a thing, but he felt, in his words, a queer crinkly feeling in the back of his neck. Another climber, a taller man about six feet, heard the same phenomenon but with a different ratio, once for every two and a half steps. The first man was only five foot seven. That's the thing that convinces me more than anything, the consistency of the ratios corresponding to their heights. Whatever was following them was maintaining a fixed distance, adjusting its pace to theirs. In 1943, a naturalist named Tewnion actually saw something. The mist swirled across the Lairig Ghru and he heard footsteps, loud and distinct. Then a strange shape loomed out of the grey, came charging at him. He pulled his revolver and fired three times. The figure kept coming. He turned and fled down to Glen Derry faster than he'd ever moved in his life. And years ago, I spoke to a gamekeeper's grandson. His grandfather had worked on MacDhui his whole life. When the old stalkers and gamekeepers were asked about the Grey Man, they would look at you for a long moment and simply say, we do not talk about that. The people who know that mountain best, the ones who've spent their lives on its slopes, they know something is there.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]