Big Grey Man Sightings

Highland author Richard Frere relayed the account of a friend who had pitched camp on the summit plateau. Waking in the night, the man saw movement at the tent opening and looked out into bright moonlight to see a great brown creature moving across the plateau below him — broad-shouldered, thick-necked, with a disproportionately large head. Using the tent and the slope as reference points he afterwards worked the height trigonometrically at roughly twenty feet. Frere himself later reported a separate experience on the mountain in 1948, describing not a figure but 'a Presence, utterly abstract but intensely real.'

Source: Richard Frere, quoted in Affleck Gray, 'The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui' (1970); https://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-big-grey-man-of-ben-macdhui.html

Peter Densham, who ran aircraft rescue operations in the Cairngorms during the Second World War and knew the plateau as well as anyone alive, was eating lunch at the summit cairn in mist when he heard crunching footsteps close beside him. As he stood to investigate, an uncontrollable wave of fear took him and he ran — not down the path, but straight toward the cliff edge above Lurcher's Crag, checking himself only at the last moment. Densham's account carries unusual weight because of his professional familiarity with the mountain in bad conditions.

Source: Affleck Gray, 'The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui' (1970); https://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/featured-sites/the-grey-man-of-ben-macdhui/

Mountaineer Alexander Tewnion was descending by the Coire Etchachan path after a sudden mist closed over the summit. He heard footsteps in the murk, and — remembering Collie's story — stopped and peered back. A strange shape loomed out of the mist and came at him. Tewnion drew the revolver he carried, fired three shots into the figure at close range, and ran for Glen Derry. The thing did not stop. He published the account in The Scots Magazine in June 1958, closing with the line that on that day he was convinced he had shot the only Fear Liath Mòr. Only the month, October 1943, is recorded.

Source: Alexander Tewnion, The Scots Magazine, June 1958; https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usscotfax/outdoors/greyman.html

Scottish nationalist and writer Wendy Wood was crossing the Lairig Ghru in snow when she heard a voice of what she called 'gigantic resonance' speaking Gaelic, seemingly from beneath the snow at her feet. She searched the ground and found nothing. Setting off again, she heard enormous footsteps overtaking her from behind and was overtaken by what she described as blinding panic, running the remaining miles out of the pass. Wood's account is the principal source for the tradition that the Big Grey Man speaks.

Source: Affleck Gray, 'The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui' (1970); https://www.spookyisles.com/big-grey-man-ben-macdhui/

Scottish folklorist R. Macdonald Robertson and a companion were sheltering at the Clach Dhian — the Shelter Stone at the head of Loch Avon — when their dog rose and began to growl at the darkness. Both men then heard heavy crunching steps approaching along the gravel path outside. The footfalls came steadily nearer and then stopped abruptly, close by. Nothing was found. Robertson, who collected Highland oral tradition professionally, published the account as a first-hand experience rather than as folklore.

Source: R. Macdonald Robertson, collected in Affleck Gray, 'The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui' (1970); https://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/featured-sites/the-grey-man-of-ben-macdhui/

Tom Crowley, a member of an Aberdeen hillwalking club, was descending Braeriach — the neighbouring summit across the Lairig Ghru from Ben Macdui — when he became aware of something following him down the corrie. Turning, he saw an undefined grey figure of great height with pointed ears, disproportionately long legs, and feet ending in talons. He fled. Crowley's is one of the few Cairngorms accounts to describe anatomical detail rather than sound alone, and one of the few to place the phenomenon off Ben Macdui itself. The record preserves only the decade.

Source: Affleck Gray, 'The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui' (1970); https://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-big-grey-man-of-ben-macdhui.html

Hugh D. Welsh and his brother were camped high on the plateau collecting biological specimens for the University of Aberdeen. Over the course of the fieldwork they repeatedly heard slow footsteps circling the camp, both at night and in daylight — a sound Welsh described as 'slurring,' as if someone were walking through water-saturated gravel. The pacing kept a rhythm that never matched their own movements, and they were never able to locate a source. Welsh's account is the earliest independent corroboration of Collie's experience and predates Collie going public by more than twenty years.

Source: Affleck Gray, 'The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui' (1970); https://www.spookyisles.com/big-grey-man-ben-macdhui/

Professor J. Norman Collie — chemist, Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the foremost mountaineers of his generation — was descending alone from the summit cairn in thick mist when he heard a crunching in the scree behind him, one footfall for every three or four of his own. He estimated the strides at three to four times the length of his own. Seized with terror, he ran, in his words 'staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles,' down toward Rothiemurchus Forest. Collie told no one for 34 years, disclosing the encounter only at the Cairngorm Club annual general meeting in Aberdeen in December 1925: 'there is something very queer about the top of Ben Macdhui.' The press coverage that followed prompted a wave of similar admissions from other climbers. No exact date survives; Collie placed the ascent in 1891.

Source: Affleck Gray, 'The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui' (Impulse Books, Aberdeen, 1970); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am_Fear_Liath_M%C3%B2r