The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (30 page)

Gray also quotes
The Mountain Vision
by the mountaineer Frank S. Smythe. Smythe describes how, crossing the hills from Morvich to Loch Duich, on a bright sunny day, with a wonderful panorama of
cloud-dappled hills and the distant sea, he entered a grassy, sun-warmed defile and “became instantly aware of an aura of evil” in the place. “It was as if something terrible had once happened there, and time had failed to dissipate the atmosphere created by it”.

On impulse, Smythe decided to eat lunch there. As he smoked his pipe the atmosphere seemed to become increasingly unpleasant. Then, as he strove to be receptive to the strange influence, he seemed to witness a massacre: a score or so of ragged people were straggling wearily through the defile when concealed men rushed down on them with spears and axes, and killed them all. As Smythe hurried on, he seemed to hear screams behind him. He was later able to confirm that a massacre of Highlanders by British troops
had
taken place on the road, but he remained convinced that this is not what he had seen. “The weapons I saw, or seemed to see, were those of an earlier date”.

Yet the many strange accounts of invisible presences on Ben MacDhui seems to throw doubt on the notion that the “big grey man” is nothing more than a “recording”. George Duncan, an Aberdeen lawyer and a mountaineer, was totally convinced he had seen the devil on the slopes of the mountain. He and a fellow-climber, James A. Parker, had descended from Devil’s Point, and were driving in a dog cart along the Derry Road. Duncan said: “All at once, I got the shock of my life by seeing before me a tall figure in a black robe – the conventional figure of the Devil himself, waving his arms, clad in long depending sleeves, coming towards me”. He seemed to see the figure surrounded by smoke. In a few moments it passed from view as the cart went round a corner. James A. Parker verified the story. “It was only at dinner that evening he told me that when we were about a mile below Derry Lodge he had looked up to the hillside on his right and seen the Devil about a quarter of a mile away waving his arms to him”.

Perhaps the oddest and in some ways the most interesting explanation that Gray encountered was given by Captan Sir Hugh Rankin, Bart, and his wife. Rankin was a Mahayana Buddhist, and his wife was a Zen Buddhist. He and Lady Rankin were cycling from Rothiemurchus to Mar via the Lairig Ghru pass, and although it was July it was bitterly cold in the pass. At the Pools o’ Dee they suddenly felt “the Presence” behind them; they turned and saw a big, olive-complexioned man dressed in a long robe and sandals, with long flowing hair. “We were not in the least afraid. Being Buddhists we at once knew who it was. We at once knelt and made obeisance”. They had instantly recognized the stranger as a Bodhisattva, “one of the five ‘Perfected Men’ who control the destinies of this world, and meet once a year in a cave in the
Himalayas”. According to Sir Hugh, the Presence addressed them in a language he thought was Sanskrit, and he replied respectfully in Urdu. “All the time the Bodhisattva was with us [he gave the time as about ten minutes] a heavenly host of musicians was playing high up in the sky . . . Immediately the Bodhisattva left us the music ceased and we never heard it again”. It sounds as if they had heard some version of “the Singing”. But his comment that the Presence spoke in Sanskrit raises the question of whether Wendy Wood had not mistaken Sanskrit for Gaelic when she heard it on the mountain.

Shortly before his death, F.W. Holiday, author of a classic book on the Loch Ness monster (see Chapter 18), advanced the startling theory that the Grey Man, like the Loch Ness monster and the Surrey puma, and possibly the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, is a member of “the phantom menagerie”, creatures who belong to some other world or dimension. In
The Goblin Universe
(chapter 6) he cites various stories about the
Fear Liath More
(the Celtic name for the Grey Man), and goes on:

The late John Buchan reported the same effect in the Bavarian Alps. He describes how in 1910 he was returning through a pinewood on a sunny morning with a local forester when panic struck them out of the blue. Both of them fled without speaking until they collapsed from exhaustion on the valley highway below. Buchan comments that a friend of his “ran for dear life” when climbing in Jotunheimen in Norway. The Pan effect may be worldwide.

Holiday connects “the phantom menagerie” with Unidentified Flying Objects, and cites the authority on UFOs, John Keel, who began by assuming that UFOs are some kind of unknown aircraft, perhaps from other planets, and ended by accepting that they come from “another dimension”, and that they seem to have a distinctly supernatural element. In one of his books,
The Mothman Prophecies
, Keel speaks of a gigantic winged figure sighted again and again in West Virginia, and
describes his own feeling of “panic” on a road close to one of the sightings. Like Lethbridge, Keel found that the area of “panic” seemed to be sharply defined, so that he could walk in and out of it with one stride. And the area of sightings of “Mothman” also has many sightings of UFO phenomena.

Oddly enough, Affleck Gray is willing to consider the “space visitors” theory as an explanation of the Ben MacDhui phenomena. He points out that in 1954 an ex-taxi driver named George King inaugurated the Aetherius Society in Caxton Hall, London. King claimed that he had met the Master Jesus on Holdstone Down, North Devon, and been made aware that he had been chosen as the primary mental channel of certain Space Intelligences. He was told to travel the world, his task being to serve as the channel for “charging” eighteen mountains with cosmic energy. One of these mountains was Creag an Leth-Choin, three miles north-west of Ben MacDhui, and King asserts that there is a huge dome-shaped auditorium, a retreat of the Great White Brotherhood, in the bowels of Ben MacDhui. Another group of “seekers”, the Active Truth Academy in Edinburgh, also believe that Ben MacDhui “has become the earth-fall for space beings”. But it is clear from Gray’s chapter on Space Beings that he regards this explanation with skepticism.

If we wish for a “scientific” explanation of the Ben MacDhui phenomena, then the likeliest seems to be that the answer lies in Ben MacDhui itself: that the “panic” is caused by some natural phenomenon, a kind of “earth force” which may be connected with the earth’s magnetic field. There are areas of the earth’s surface where birds lose their way because the lines of earth magnetism somehow cancel one another out, forming a magnetic vortex. “Ley-hunters” also believe that so-called “ley lines” – which connect sacred sites such as churches, barrows and standing stones – are basically lines of magnetic force. Many are also convinced that places in which this force is exceptionally powerful are likely to be connected with “supernatural” occurrences – in fact, that such places “record” human emotions, producing the effects that are described as “hauntings”. This explanation would account for Frank Smythe’s experience of the “haunted” valley where the massacre had occurred.

The non-scientific explanation may be sought in the belief of most primitive peoples that the earth is alive, that certain places are holy, and that such places are inhabited by spirits. The Western mind is inclined to dismiss such beliefs as superstition; but many travellers who have been in close contact with them are inclined to be more open-minded. In
The Lost World of the Kalahari
Laurens Van der Post tells how, when he was seeking the vanished Bushmen of South Africa, his guide Samutchoso took him to a place called the Slippery Hills. The guide insisted that there must be no hunting as they approached the hills, or the gods would be angry. Van de Post forgot to tell his advance party, and they shot a warthog. From then on they ran into an endless stream of bad luck. When Samutchoso tried to pray Van der Post saw that he was pulled over backward by some unknown force. All their technical equipment began to malfunction. Then Samutchoso “consulted” the spirits and began to speak to invisible presences. He told Van der Post that they
were
angry, and would have killed him if he had tried to pray again. Van der Post suggested that they should all write a message of apology, and that this should be buried in a bottle at the foot of a sacred rock. Apparently this worked; the spirits were propitiated, and suddenly the equipment ceased to malfunction. Through the guide, the “spirits” told Van der Post that he would find bad news waiting for him when he reached the next place on his route. In fact his assistant found a message saying that his father had died and he had to return home immediately. After all this, Van der Post had no doubt of the real existence of the “earth spirits” worshipped by primitive people.

F.W.Holiday’s view was that the explanation of such phenomena as the “Grey Man” lay somewhere between these two sets of explanations: the scientific and the “supernatural”. But he believed that the Western mind will be capable of grasping the answer only when it has broadened its conception of science.

20

Kaspar Hauser

The Boy from Nowhere

The case of Kaspar Hauser is perhaps the greatest of nineteenth-century historical mysteries. But it is rather more than that. The unfortunate youth was the subject of a cruel experiment in what would now be called “sensory deprivation”, and the results of this experiment were in some ways more interesting than the admittedly fascinating enigma of Kaspar’s identity.

On Whit Monday, 26 May 1828, the Unschlitt Square in Nuremberg was almost deserted, most people being in the surrounding countryside enjoying the
Ausflug
(or holiday excursion). At about five in the afternoon a weary-looking youth dragged himself into the square, and almost fell into the arms of the local cobbler, George Weichmann. He was well built, but poorly dressed, and walked in a curious, stiff-limbed manner. Weichmann took the letter that the youth held out to him, and saw that it was addressed to the captain of the 4th Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment. The lad seemed to be unable to answer questions, replying in a curious mumble – Weichmann suspected he was drunk. He led the youth to the nearest guardroom, and the sergeant in charge took him to the captain’s home. When Captain Wessenig came home a few hours later he found the place in a state of excitement. The youth seemed to be an idiot. He had tried to touch a candle flame with his fingers, and screamed when he was burned. Offered beer and meat, he had stared at them as if he had no idea what to do with them; yet he had fallen ravenously on a meal of black bread and water. The grandfather clock seemed to terrify him. The only words the boy seemed to know were “
Weiss nicht
” – I don’t know.

The envelope proved to contain two letters. The first began: “Honoured Captain. I send you a lad who wishes to serve his king in the army. He was brought to me on October 7, 1812. I am but a poor labourer with children of my own to rear. His mother asked me to bring up the boy . . .
Since then I have never let him go outside the house”. The letter had no signature. The other note stated: “This child has been baptised. His name is Kaspar; you must give him a second name yourself. His father was a cavalry soldier. When he is seventeen take him to Nuremberg to the Sixth Cavalry regiment: his father belonged to it. He was born on April 30, 1812. I am a poor girl; I can’t take care of him. His father is dead”. This was presumably the letter that had accompanied Kaspar when he had been handed over to the “poor labourer”.

Taken to the police station, the boy accepted a pencil and wrote “Kaspar Hauser”. But to other questions he answered “Don’t know”.

It all seemed straightforward enough – an illegitimate child left on someone’s doorstep and brought up by a kind stranger. But in that case why keep him indoors for seventeen years? The boy’s feet were so tender – he was bleeding through his shoes – because he was unaccustomed to walking on them. His skin was pale, as if he had been confined in darkness. Moreover, on close examination it became clear that the two letters had been written by the same hand at about the same time, not sixteen years apart. The clothes he was wearing looked as if they had been taken from a scarecrow, and they were obviously not his own. Someone was trying to draw a red herring across the trail.

The boy was locked in a cell, and his gaoler observed that he seemed perfectly contented to sit there for hours without moving. He had no sense of time, and seemed to know nothing about hours and minutes. It soon became clear that he had a small vocabulary. He could say that he wanted to become a Reiter (cavalryman) like his father – a phrase he had obviously been taught like a parrot. To every animal he applied the word “horse”, and he seemed to be fascinated by horses. When a visitor – one of the crowd who flocked to stare at him every day – gave him a toy one he adorned it with ribbons, played with it for hours, and pretended to feed it at every meal. The audience caused him no concern, and he caused amusement by performing his natural functions quite openly, with no sense of shame. He did not even seem to know the difference between men and women – he referred to both as “boys” (
Junge
).

One of the most curious things about him was his incredible physical acuteness. He began to vomit if coffee or beer was in the same room; the sight and smell of meat produced nausea. The smell of wine literally made him drunk, and a single drop of brandy in his water made him sick. His hearing and eyesight were abnormally acute – in fact, he could see in the dark, and would later demonstrate his ability by reading from a Bible in a completely black room. He was so sensitive to magnets that he could tell whether the north or south pole was turned towards him.
He could distinguish between different metals by passing his hand over them, even when they were covered with a cloth. (A few years later, the American doctor Joseph Rodes Buchanan would stumble upon the faculty he called psychometry (see Chapter 43) when he learned that many of his students could do the same thing.)