The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (29 page)

In fact Collie had told the story twenty-three years earlier, to friends in New Zealand, and the result was a report in a New Zealand newspaper headlined: “A Professor’s Panic”. As a result of this story, another Scottish mountaineer, Dr A.M. Kellas – who was to die during the Mount Everest Reconnaissance expedition of 1921–2 – wrote to Collie telling him of his own curious experience on Ben MacDhui. Kellas and his brother Henry had been chipping the rock for crystals late one afternoon when they saw a giant figure coming down towards them from the cairn. It passed out of sight briefly in a dip, and as the two men fled down the mountainside again in mist both of them were convinced that they were being followed by the “giant”.

This account makes it sound as if some form of “Yeti”, or Abominable Snowman, lives on the slopes of Ben MacDhui. But accounts by other climbers make it clear that the explanation may not be as simple as this. Peter Densham, who was in charge of aeroplane rescue work in the Cairngorms during the Second World War, described in an interview with a journalist how in May 1945 he had left the village of Aviemore
and climbed to the cairn on the summit. Suddenly, as he was looking across at Ben Nevis, the mist closed in. He sat there eating chocolate, conscious of strange noises which he attributed to the expansion and contraction of the rocks, when he had a strong feeling that there was someone near him. Then he felt something cold on the back of his neck, and a sense of pressure. He stood up, and heard crunching noises from the direction of the cairn. He went towards the cairn to investigate, “not in the least frightened”. Then suddenly he experienced a feeling of apprehension, and found himself running towards Lurcher’s Crag, with its sheer drop. “I tried to stop myself and found this was extremely difficult to do. It was as if someone was pushing me. I managed to deflect my course, but with a great deal of difficulty . . .” He ran most of the way back down the mountain.

On another occasion Densham was on the mountain with his friend Richard Frere, searching for an aeroplane that was reported to have crashed. They were sitting close to the cairn when Densham was surprised to hear Frere apparently talking to himself on the other side of the cairn. Then he realized that Frere was talking to someone else. “I went round and found myself joining in the conversation. It was a strange experience which seemed to have a psychic aspect. We talked to someone invisible for some time, and it seemed we had carried on this conversation for some little time when we suddenly realized that there was no one there but ourselves. Afterwards, neither of us, strangely, could recall the purport of this extraordinary conversation”. What seems even stranger is that when Frere himself was tracked down by Affleck Gray, the author of a book called
The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui
, he had no recollection of the episode described by Densham. But he had had his own strange experiences on the mountain, and described it to Gray as “the most mysterious mountain I have ever been on”. He told Gray of a day when he had climbed to the high pass of Lairig Ghru, above Ben MacDhui, and sat gazing down on the cliffs of Lurcher’s Crag with its cascade of water. Then he found himself slipping into a “weird and disagreeable” train of thought, so he stood up and walked. But the gloom turned to a sense of deep depression and apathy. Then suddenly he became certain that he was not alone. “Very close to me, permeating the air which moved so softly in the summer’s wind, there was a Presence, utterly abstract but intensely real”.

Then Frere noticed something else. “The silence of the mountain was violated by an intensely high singing note, a sound which was just within the aural capacity, which never rose or fell . . . The sound, it seemed, was coming from the very soil of the mountains”. This sound
continued until he was below Lurcher’s Crag, when the music became so faint that he was not sure whether it was there at all. But the “abstract Presence” seemed to cling to him “with some sort of desperate eagerness as if it passionately desired to leave the mountain which it haunted . . .” Then there was a momentary flash of terror, and it was gone.

The experience of the strange, sustained note is not as unusual as Frere apparently thought. In her autobiography
The Infinite Hive
the eminent psychical investigator Rosalind Heywood calls it “the Singing”. She describes it as “a kind of continuous vibrant inner
quasi
-sound, to which the nearest analogy is the noise induced by pressing a seashell against the ear, or perhaps the hum of a distant dynamo”. Rosalind Heywood could hear “the Singing” fairly constantly – although very faintly – if she switched her full attention to it. She says that “it is far more evident in some places than in others; particularly so in a quiet wood, for instance, or on a moor or a mountain . . .” She notes that she also hears it in churches and college libraries, “places where thought or devotion have been intense for years”. She finds that “mountain Singing conveys a different “atmosphere” from church Singing, as an oboe conveys a different “atmosphere” from a trumpet”. And she says that she has met four other people who have heard it; in one case, she mentioned it to a young engineer, convinced that he was a thorough pragmatist; to her surprise, he replied, “Oh yes, I hear that too, in places where there have just been strong emotions”. So to some extent the “Singing” seems to be a kind of “recording”: Rosalind Heywood says that she can also “feel” it when she goes into a room where intense thought has been going on. Yet it cannot be wholly due to human “vibrations”, since she mentions that the Hampstead tube station – the deepest in London – is the only place where she has not heard it. “The silence was dead”.

If “the Singing” can be heard in places where intense thought or worship has taken place, this verifies that it could be regarded as some kind of “recording”. In the 1840s an American professor of anatomy named Joseph Rodes Buchanan came to the interesting conclusion that every object has its own history somehow “imprinted” on it, and that “psychics” can sense this history by holding it in their hands; he called this faculty “psychometry”. He observed that handwritten letters seem to be particularly good “recorders” of the writer’s state of mind, particularly if the writer was feeling some powerful emotion at the time. In the early twentieth century the scientist and psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge advanced the theory that “ghosts” may be “recordings” – that the powerful emotions associated with some tragedy
may be imprinted on the walls of the room in which it has taken place, so that a “sensitive” person who walked into the room would have a strange feeling of misery and oppression, or perhaps even see the tragedy re-enacted. A Cambridge don named Tom Lethbridge suggested a very similar “tape recording” theory half a century later. Lethbridge suggested that these “recordings” are imprinted on some kind of electrical field, and he believed that mountains, deserts and woodlands each have their own special type of “field”. (He seemed to feel that the field of water is the best “recorder”, so that ghosts are often associated with damp places).

It seems conceivable, then, that when Rosalind Heywood heard “the Singing” she was simply picking up some kind of electrical field – a field which, on account of its properties, we might christen “the psychic field”. Why Richard Frere should suddenly have become aware of this field on the slopes of Ben MacDhui must remain an open question. But at least it seems to offer some kind of confirmation that his feeling of menace and depression was not merely imagination.

The episode in which Frere and Densham held a conversation with some invisible entity seems even stranger; presumably they were responding to some “presence” on a subconscious level, almost as if dreaming. This could also explain why Frere could not even remember the episode later.

Frere also told Affleck Gray a curious story about a friend – whose identity he was not at liberty to disclose – who decided to spend the night on Ben MacDhui to win a bet. He set up his tent by the summit cairn on a January night. (This is not a man-made cairn, but a natural formation eroded by the weather.) He also began to experience the familiar sense of unreality, and “the morbidly analytical directioning of thought”. Frere explained: “He did not feel in any way mad: the terror which possessed him concerned the imminent impact of knowledge which he knew would always set him aside from his fellows. It was as if he was the unwilling recipient of a vast range of new revolutionary thought impulses built up in some all-powerful mind. And the mind was neither human nor anti-human; it just had nothing to do with him at all”.

He fell asleep and woke up “to a fear of a more terrifying nature”. Moonlight fell through the crack of the flysheet of his tent, and as he stared at it he saw a brown blur, and “knew that something lay between himself and the moon”. He lay there in frozen immobility until the shadow went away. He now pulled aside the flysheet of the tent. “The night was brilliant. About twenty yards away a great brown creature was
swaggering down the hill. He used the word “swaggering” because the creature had an air of insolent strength about it”. His impression was that the creature was about twenty feet high, and was covered with shortish brown hair. It was too erect to be a huge ape; it had a tapering waist and very broad shoulders. Affleck Gray’s book contains a photograph of footprints in the snow taken on Ben MacDhui, and they look oddly like the famous photograph of the footprints of the “Abominable Snowman” discovered on the Menlung glacier on Everest by Eric Shipton in 1951.

Frere was inclined to wonder whether the brown-haired creature was real, or whether perhaps it was somehow created by his friend’s imagination in that oddly “unreal” state of mind.

In her book
The Secret of Spey
the writer Wendy Wood describes her own experience on Ben MacDhui. She had reached the entrance to the pass of Lairig Ghru on a snowy day, and was preparing to return when she heard a voice “of gigantic resonance” close behind her. “It seemed to speak with the harsh consonants and full vowels of the Gaelic”. She wondered if someone was lying injured in the snow, and tramped around in circles until she was convinced that she was alone. Now feeling afraid, she began to hurry back, and as she descended the mountain, thought she could hear footsteps following her. “She had a strange feeling that something walked immediately behind her”. At first she thought it might be echoes of her own footsteps, until she realized that the crunching noises did not exactly correspond with her steps. She asks in her book whether perhaps the strange happenings on Ben MacDhui might be “the concretion of the imaginings of the race, clinging to a particular place, discernible only to those whose racial sensitiveness is open to receive the primal impressions and fears of a bygone day”. In other words, she is suggesting that the “ghost” of Ben MacDhui is a “recording”.

This seems to be confirmed, to some extent, by an experience recounted by the novelist Joan Grant in her autobiography
Time Out of Mind
. Her book reveals her to be highly psychic. She and her husband were not even on Ben MacDhui but down below near Aviemore; Gray suggests they were on the Lairig Ghru path near Coylum Bridge. For no apparent reason, she was suddenly overwhelmed with fear. “Something – utterly malign, four legged, and yet obscenely human, invisible and yet solid enough for me to hear the pounding of its hooves, was trying to reach me. If it did I should die for I was far too frightened to know how to defend myself”. She fled in terror. “I had run about half a mile when I burst through an invisible barrier behind
which I knew I was safe. I knew I was safe now, though a second before I had been in mortal danger; knew it as certainly as though I were a torero who has jumped the barrier in front of a charging bull”.

What seems to be emerging from most of these stories about Ben MacDhui is that the chief manifestation is a sudden feeling of depression followed by panic. Joan Grant’s account underlines another important point. Tom Lethbridge, who has already been quoted, had observed repeatedly that these sudden unpleasant sensations of fear or “nastiness” seem to have a precisely defined area, so that it is possible to step in or out of them in one single stride. He describes for example how one day he and his wife Mina went to Ladram beach in Devon to gather seaweed for the garden. At a point on the beach where a small stream flowed from the cliff both experienced an odd feeling of gloom. “I passed into a kind of blanket, or fog, of depression, and, I think, of fear”. Mina Lethbridge went off to gather seaweed at the other end of the beach but soon hurried back. “I can’t stand this place any longer. There’s something frightful here”. The following week they returned, on another dull, grey day, and were again greeted by the same feeling of depression – Tom compared it to a bad smell. It was at its worst around the stream, making him feel almost giddy. Mina went to the cliff-top to make a sketch, and had a sudden feeling that she was being urged to jump. Later they verified that someone had committed suicide from this precise spot.

Tom noted that it was possible to step in and out of the “depression” – and he noticed it once again when the old lady next door died under strange circumstances after an attempt to practise black magic. An “unpleasant” feeling hung around her house, but it was possible to step in and out of it, as if it was some kind of invisible barrier, like Joan Grant’s bullring barrier.

Gray recounts many stories that seem to support Lethbridge’s “tape recording” theory. The Scots poet James Hogg, known as the Ettrick Shepherd (because he was a shepherd by profession), once saw a herd of Highland cattle on the far side of the stream, and since they had no right to be there he sent a shepherd to drive them off the land, together with two more farmhands armed with cudgels. But they found no sign of a herd, or even of hoofmarks. No one had seen a herd of cattle in the district that day. It had been some kind of “mirage”, or perhaps a “recording” of something long past.