Big Grey Man
The presence that walks the Cairngorm plateau.
- Region
- Ben Macdui and the Cairngorm plateau, Scottish Highlands, Scotland
- Documented sightings
- 8 reports →
Overview
The Big Grey Man — Am Fear Liath Mòr in Gaelic — is a giant humanoid reported from Ben Macdui, Britain's second-highest mountain, and the surrounding Cairngorm plateau. The modern record opens with Professor J. Norman Collie, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a celebrated mountaineer, who described his 1891 encounter to the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen in December 1925. The disclosure by a scientist of Collie's standing prompted a wave of corroborating accounts from climbers who had kept quiet for fear of ridicule. Encounters divide into three consistent types: unexplained footsteps, a very tall figure glimpsed in mist, and an overwhelming, directionless dread.
Identification
Where a figure is seen at all it is reported as ten to twenty feet tall, grey or brown, gaunt and long-limbed, with broad shoulders and an outsized head; Tom Crowley added pointed ears and taloned feet. Far more often the phenomenon is heard rather than seen — a slow crunching in the scree, one footfall for every three or four of the witness's own, implying a stride several times human length. The consistent signature across every account is a sudden, disabling panic that drives witnesses to run blindly, sometimes toward cliff edges. Skeptics point to the Brocken spectre, in which a climber's own shadow is projected and magnified onto cloud, and to infrasound generated by wind over the plateau, which is known to induce unease.
Lore & Origin
Affleck Gray collected the accounts in 'The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui' (Impulse Books, Aberdeen, 1970), still the definitive treatment. The best-known incident is Alexander Tewnion's: descending the Coire Etchachan path in October 1943, he fired three revolver rounds at a shape that charged him out of the mist and then ran for Glen Derry. Other named witnesses include Hugh D. Welsh (1904), the folklorist R. Macdonald Robertson at the Shelter Stone, Wendy Wood in the Lairig Ghru, and wartime mountain-rescue leader Peter Densham at the summit cairn.