All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Jan. 10, 2012 - Skeptoid
16:08
Skeptoid #292: The Grey Man of Ben MacDhui

A thin, dark phantom three times the height of a man is said to stalk this peak in the Cairngorms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The Big Grey Man of Bain MacDui 00:07:38
Many urban legends are about things that we're never actually going to see with our own eyes, which is one thing I love about today's subject.
If you can get to Scotland and are willing to do some traveling and hiking, you might actually get to see, for real, one of the most frightening apparitions anywhere in the world.
The Big Grey Man of Bain MacDui.
That's up next on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Grey Man of Bain MacDui.
Today we're going to venture into the Scottish highlands to the bleak and misty summit of Bain Macdui, the highest peak in the Cairngorms.
At only 1,309 meters, it's hardly a giant compared to other mountain ranges, but it boasts a spectral giant of its own who lives there.
Because of its high latitude, Bain MacDui is well above the tree line and its rounded summit is a desolate field of windswept stones.
It is as foggy as it is remote, yet none who venture there ever seem to feel quite alone.
For more than a century, hillwalkers have been stalked by Amferlia Mor, Scots Gallic for the big grey man.
He's known best for his footsteps crunching in the gravel just out of sight, but for a certain unlucky few, the fog has thinned enough that they caught a glimpse.
The grey man stands at least three times as tall as a man, and is dark and very thin.
Some say he is covered in short brown hair like a horse.
But all who see him are filled with dread.
It is impossible to discuss the grey man of Bain Macdui without relating its most famous account, that of Professor J. Norman Colley of University College, London, expert in chemistry, fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Geographic Society, past president of the Alpine Club and member of the 1921 Mount Everest Committee.
His scientific and mountaineering credentials were in good order.
At the 1925 meeting of the Cairngorm Club, an association of hill walkers of the Scottish Mountain Range, he told the following tale.
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 and 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 Rothymerkus Forest.
Whatever you make of it, I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Bain Macdui, and I will not go back there again myself, I know.
Collie's story is today by far the most famous account of the gray man, but it was neither the first nor the most dramatic.
In 1958, naturalist and mountaineer Alexander Toonian wrote in the Scots magazine of what he described as the strangest experience of his life.
In October 1943, I spent a 10-day leave climbing alone in the Kairngorms.
One afternoon, just as I reached the summit cairn of Bain MacDwy, mist swirled across the Larak Group 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 haired down the path, reaching Glendarry in a time that I have never bettered.
You may ask, was it really the Fair Leomorph?
Frankly, I think it was.
The list of witnesses to the Grey Man is long and includes many other experienced mountaineers.
Does the Grey Man stalk the fells of the Kairngorms?
Or might there be some other explanation?
As it turns out, Bein MacDui does create a natural dead ringer for Umfer Liamor.
Brocken specters had probably been frightening people for thousands of years, but it wasn't until 1780 that Johann Silberschlag, a German member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, first characterized them after observing them on top of the Braken, the highest peak in northern Germany.
Like Bain MacDui, the Braken is a relatively low, rounded hill, often shrouded in fog.
Silberschlag found that in foggy conditions with uniform water droplets and sufficiently strong sunlight penetration from a low enough angle, his own shadow was visible on the fog itself.
Gently rounded summits, like Braken, Bain MacDui, and many others, often create ideal conditions for this, since you can stand facing downhill with the angle of the sun behind you matching the angle of the slope.
If your shadow lands on the ground, it won't penetrate enough fog to create the effect.
You want a long, deep shadow stretching off through the fog.
That effect can be striking.
The Bracken specter manifests itself as a very tall, very thin figure of a human, usually with disproportionately long legs.
In many cases, a solar glory surrounds the specter's head.
Glories are circular, multiple-ringed rainbows caused by the backscatter of light when looking directly away from the light source.
They can often be seen when you're in an airplane and you look straight down at the airplane's shadow.
Bracken specters can result from any light source, not just the sun.
A full moon, or even a lantern or flashlight, will produce the specter if the fog conditions are right.
In particular, the sun and the full moon still produce enough light even when they themselves are not directly visible due to the thickness of the fog, such that there is no perceptible cause for the specter.
And in such cases, the appearance of tall, ghostly specters can bewilder even the informed scientific mind.
That the Bracken specter is the source of at least some of the Bein-MacDui encounters is a certainty.
As far back as 1791, the poet James Hogg was tending sheep on Bain MacDuis and saw the following.
It was a giant blackamore, at least 30 feet high, and equally proportioned and very near me.
I was actually struck powerless with astonishment and terror.
He fled home in a panic, and when he went back the next day to collect his sheep, the monster returned.
Nature's Sounds and Specters 00:08:08
This time, Hogg experimented, removing his hat, and observed the figure do the same thing.
He was satisfied that what he saw was merely his own shadow in the fog.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating, skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Although the visual sighting of the gray man himself is the most dramatic element of a meeting, it's not the most often reported.
The majority of gray man encounters consist of sudden, unprovoked feelings of fear or of a presence, with nothing seen or heard.
But it is the sound of footsteps that best characterize the gray man.
Nearly all reports include this, and have since the reports began.
Two brothers heard the footsteps atop Bain Makdui in 1904, slurring footsteps as if someone was walking through water-saturated gravel.
When they returned to the Dairy Lodge, they were told, that would have been the fair Leamor you heard, 11 years before Collie regaled the Kairngorum club with his tale.
As fog thickens and thins, temperatures fluctuate, and rocks expand and contract and split.
Ice also splits rocks.
When either of these happen on a slope, a rock may tumble.
These actions are, in fact, entirely responsible for the crumbled stone of which Bain MacDui consists.
Even on a calm day, rocks make such noises, everywhere.
Animals such as deer and wildcats abound on Bain MacDui.
The reason Alexander Toonian had a pistol on his 1943 trek was to shoot hares and ptarmigan.
Hikers disturb nearby creatures, and hiking anywhere will always produce the sounds of some scattering animal.
There's no doubt that these sources of sound account for at least some of the noises reported by Gray Man witnesses.
Of course, suggesting possible sources for the sounds perceived as following footsteps does not prove that something unknown wasn't actually following some of these hikers.
If it was, it remains unknown and does not constitute evidence for a tall hairy man-beast any more than it constitutes evidence for a sprightly leprechaun.
What's needed is testable evidence.
And as it turns out, there has been one case of the gray man's giant footprints being discovered in the snow and photographed.
The footprints were seen and the photographs published by J.A. Rennie in his book Romantic Spayside, and the prints he found were in the Spey Valley, some 15 miles away from Bain MacDuis.
The prints 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 proceeded in an approximately single line.
And that's where the popular tellings of the gray man's footprints end, only with the observation, and not with the observer's own explanation.
For on a second occasion, Rennie saw such prints again, and this time he watched them form in the snow.
They were the result of precipitation.
And in his own words, Rennie said of the footprints, In that moment, I knew that the Wendigo, abominable snowman, Bodok Moor, or what have you was forever explained, so far as I was concerned.
Thus we're left with no evidence that the physical feet of an unknown creature have ever created the sounds of footsteps on Bain MacDui.
Some of the other most often cited evidence of the gray man also weakens under scrutiny.
Although Norman Colley's story is widely considered the most authoritative, it should be taken with a grain of salt within the context of Cauley's personality.
According to his biographer, Christine Mills, he was a lifelong believer in the occult.
In later years, after 1933, when the Loch Ness Monster became a phenomenon, he also became a firm believer in that, which, like the gray man, he never saw.
It's an often overlooked point of Colley's famous story that he did not report seeing anything.
He only heard footsteps and felt frightened.
Mill wrote that Colley would often tell stories around the campfire or in his den of Gallic mountain gods and goddesses and other legendary creatures, and as she put it, no one quite knowing how much he was believing himself.
Unfortunately, nothing about Collie's account raises its status from that of campfire story to that of useful evidence.
And the realm of campfire stories is perhaps where the gray man of Bain MacDui best belongs.
Never underestimate the power of nature to magnify feelings of dread, loneliness, and isolation.
Everyone who has spent a night in a tent outdoors knows the effects of small unexplained sounds on the mind.
The cold, foggy Kairn garmes are the ideal place for such sensations to augment and for our animal senses to trigger animal responses.
The gray man need not be a physical creature for it to be, as far as our minds are concerned, utterly real.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember Skepticism Best 00:00:17
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection