Season 09 Episode 11: The Grey Zone

to Crimewave at seed dot com for more information. Tickets will go on sale on Friday, February thirteenth, so listen out for more announcements there. Further to that, I'm also hugely excited to say I'll be attending crime Con US and UK this year. So for the US we're going to be in Las Vegas twenty eight to the thirty first of May. Go to Crimecon dot com to buy ticket and use voucher code unexplained for ten percent off.

And in the UK we'll be in Birmingham on April the twenty fifth and London on the third and fourth of October. These are all really special events that do a lot to put survivors of crime front and center, and I'm really honored to be taking part for crime Con UK. Go to Crimecon dot com UK to buy tickets and again use voucher code Unexplained for ten percent off. You can also find all the links on my website at Unexplained podcast dot com. Forward Slash events, The small

room was filled with a shocked silence. The audience were gathered in the back room of an inn for the nineteen twenty five annual General Meeting of the Cairn Gorm Club in the Scottish Highlands to listen to tales of new hikes and climbs in the Cairn Gorm Mountains. But they were not expecting to hear a story like this. The speaker was Professor John Norman Collie, an experienced mountaineer

and man of science. Everyone listened intently, some open mouthed, as Colligue spoke of his memories from a fateful day decades earlier. While hiking on Ben mcdowey, a thick mist

had suddenly enveloped Collie in it. He experienced something so terrifying that he hadn't spoken a word about it for thirty five years Collie described how, after reaching the large stone cairn that marked the mountain's summit, he was cautiously navigating his way back down the path when the mist ascended, Swirling thickly by turns, it revealed, then swallowed up the

dark gray, almost monsterlike shapes of rocky outcrops. With no visual cues to guide him other than the thin line of rocky path beneath his feet and its compass bearing, Collie proceeded slowly. Taking a wrong turn could send him towards one of the precipitous cliffs that flanked the peak. The crunching of his boots on the trail was the only sound to be heard. Then, Collie said, he began to think he could hear something besides his own booted feet.

For every few steps he took, he thought that he heard another set of feet making that crunching sound behind him, almost like an eerie echo, except that someone or something was taking only one giant stride for every three or four of his own. Summoning the most rational part of his scientist's mind, Collie told himself it was nonsense, he'd just imagined it. But to be sure, he then stopped and listened. Then he heard the sound once again, then again.

The timing suggested a very large stride, which paused as if waiting for Collie's next move. Trying to pull himself together, Professor Colly resumed walking and once more came that eerie crunch, crunch, crunch, coming from behind him. This time all reasoning left the normally rational Collie seized with terror. As he described it to his audience, he started to run, staggering and stumbling over the rocky ground as fast as he could for

almost five miles. He continued on, bumping and ricocheting between the boulders that flanked the trail until he finally reached the comparative safety of the rothy Murker's forest below. Concluding his story, Professor Colly told his stunned audience to make of it what they would. All he could say was that there was something very strange about the top of Ben mcdowey, something that had so frightened him that he would never go back there again. You're listening to Unexplained

and I'm Richard McLean Smith today. If you go hiking in the Scottish Highlands, you're unlikely to have the mountain paths and peaks to yourself, even in the dead of winter. Walking the mountains, along with winter sports like ice climbing and skiing, are popular pastimes for locals and tourists alike,

but it wasn't always this way. In the late eighteen hundreds, walking Scotland's mountains for fun was mostly a pastime for a small group of wealthy and educated Victorian gentlemen, men like Sir Hugh Munroe, who combined his delight in cataloging nature, including his collections of butterflies and fossils, with his new

found hobby of ascending Scottish peaks. He drew up a list of all two hundred and eighty two Scottish mountains with an elevation of three thousand feet or more, first published as Munro's Tables in the Journal of the Scottish Mountaineering Club in eighteen ninety one. The list gave rise to a new sport reaching the top of all of them, known as Monroe bagging. Sadly, Sir Hugh never quite managed to summit all two hundred and two himself, dying during a flu epidemic at the end of World War One

with only three peaks left unclimbed. John Norman Collie was born in eighteen fifty nine near the city of Manchester in the north of England, but he had strong Scottish roots. His father was from Aberdeenshire in northeast Scotland, so the family moved back there when Collie was still a boy. Like Monroe, Collie fell in love with the outdoors and

Scotland's wild, mountainous country. He would go on to become a professor of medicine, conducting pioneering work on the use of X ray photography, but he always found time for hiking expeditions into the Scottish mountains, especially the Cullins of Sky, where he helped establish new routes along with local mountain guide John Mackenzie. In eighteen ninety five, he was part of the first ever attempt on Nanga Parbat, a twenty

four thousand foot high peak in the Himalayas. Collie was already and experienced and respect figure in Scottish mountaineering when he went walking in the Cairngaum Mountains in eighteen ninety. Back then, such ventures were much more of an expedition than the comparatively easy day trips of today. At the time, the Cairn Gorms were relatively remote and in some places still relatively unexplored. Rail and good road links had not

yet been built. You could often be out among the rocks and heather all day and not see another human soul. The cair Gorms consists of a high plateau reaching almost four thousand feet above sea level, pierced here and there by domed summits the eroded stumps of once much grander mountains. The highest of these is Ben mcdowey, at four thousand, two hundred and ninety five feet above sea level. It is the second highest peak in Britain, behind Ben Nevis,

on Scotland's northwest coast. The landscape that surrounds Ben mcdowey's summit is desolate and bolder strewn scattered here and there are free standing rocky outcrops. The Arctic alpine vegetation is sparse. It's a place where, apart from the howl of the wind and patter of rain on the rocks, the occasional calls of birds like ptarmigan, snow buntings and red grouse are the only sounds. The weather can change rapidly one moment benign, the next harsh. It's a landscape in which

clouds descend or mists rise. The visibility can fall to just a few feet, making it easy to become disorientated and lost. Had the tale that Collie told the ken Gorm Club that evening in nineteen twenty five been told by another man, it might not have been believed. But with his status as an experienced mountaineer and rational man of science, the story made a great impression on those present that day and those who heard of it later. This was not a man to imagine phantoms or likely

to panic on a summit. In time, the sinister being was given a name m for Leah Moore in Scott's Gallic in English, the Big Gray Man of Ben mcdowey, or simply the gray Man, and so for over a century something described as a presence or as a creature has been said to haunt the summit and surrounding passes

of Ben mcdowey. The Big Gray Man has joined a list of creatures, some of which have existed for centuries in the legends and folk talk of mountain peoples around the world, like the Yetti from the Himalayas, Bigfoot from North of America and the y Ren or wild Man of China. Welsh mythology also has its own version of the being, called Brennan the Leward in English, the Gray King, described as a silent, semi corporeal figure who hides in

the mountain mists, preying on unsuspecting travelers, especially children. When Colly's account was reported in the local press, the professor soon discovered, to his immense surprise, that he wasn't the only one who'd been terrified on those very same slopes. One letter after another arrived through his door, detailing accounts from climate who had previously been too afraid or too

ashamed to share their experiences. Just like Collie, several confessed as similar feelings of terror caused by a being that they had sensed was with them on the mountain. Hugh Welsh was hiking to the summit with his brother in nineteen oh four, where throughout the day and night they heard footsteps that sounded to them as if someone was walking nearby through soaking wet gravel. Both men were utterly

convinced that something was stalking them. Only in a few of the cases reported to John Colly did people report actually seeing something. Those who did claim to glimpse a large, dark shape looming towards them. Others described a very thin being over ten feet tall, with long arms and broad shoulders, either with dark skin and hair, or else an olive complexion or covered with short brown hair. Occasionally some said they'd seen an unusual looking footprint, but more often the

apparent creature seemed to stay hidden in the mist. The reports dried up for a time until after the onset of the Second World War, several more vivid reports of the specter began to surface. From nineteen thirty nine to nineteen forty five. Peter Densham was the leader of the Cairngorms Royal Air Force Rescue Team. One day towards the end of his service, Densham was participating in a rescue

exercise on Ben mcdowey. As he neared the summit, he heard what he described as strange noises on the mountain side, although at first he felt sure that they were merely caused by stone shifting. Then, around dusk, as the light began to fade, a dense mist closed in on his location. Suddenly, Densham reported feeling a sensation of pressure increasing around its neck, followed by another crunch in the gravel to his left. Densham couldn't articulate what was happening in that moment. All

he knew was that he had to leave immediately. Overcome by terror, he began running down the mountain, only to find that he was heading straight towards a precipitous ravine. As he later told his son, it was as if someone was deliberately pushing him in that direction. It was with no little effort that he found he had to force himself to correct course before continuing his way down the mountain safely. Some weeks later, Densham experienced an even

eeria encounter. This time he was accompanied by a climbing partner, Richard Frere. As the two men neared the mountain summit once again, the landscape became shrouded in a dense fog. The fog became so thick that the two men quickly lost sight of each other. As Densham steadily continued on his way, he heard the faint sound of Frere's voice

and another voice to talking to each other. Assuming his friend had bumped into another climber, Densham joined in the discussion from a distance The conversation continued for a while until the other voice dropped out, at which point Densham asked Frere who he'd been talking to, but Frere was confused the whole time. He thought he was just talking to Densham. Three years later, and Richard Frere was back

on the mountain standing alone. At one point he heard the eerie sound of what he took to be someone singing a single, high pitched note. On hearing Peter Densham and Richard Frere's stories, a mutual friend who wished to remain anonymous, confessed that around that same time he had been camping on Ben mcdowey one night when he suddenly awoke with an inescapable feeling of dread. He opened his

tent and looked outside. There he saw a large figure with dark hair, standing silhouetted in front of the moon. In nineteen fifty eight, the naturalist and mountaineer Alexander Tunian published an article in The Scots Magazine in which he described a solo climbing trip in the Cairngorms from nineteen forty three. One afternoon, he wrote, just as he reached the summit of Ben mcdowey, a mist swelled up from

a famous pass below known as the Larry Grew. Tunian pulled on some extra layers as the weather conditions rapidly became dark and oppressive, and a fierce wind sprang up, feathering and whistling among the boulders around him. Then he heard a loud footstep pierce the mist, then another and another. Straining his eyes toward where the sound came from, Tunian claimed that a strange shape suddenly loomed up out of

the mist. As he attempted to make out what exactly it was, the figure appeared to recede for a moment, only to emerge from the mist yet again, and this time to charge at the climber. Managing to keep his composure, Tunian whipped out a revolver and fired three times at the ghostly figure, but this failed to make it retreat. At this point, like several men before him, his nerves got the better of him and he turned and ran, not stopping for breath until he reached the valley of

Glenderry below. Tunian commented in his article that he'd never traveled that path so quickly before or since. He believed that what he'd seen was the big gray man. During the early nineteen twenties, former president of the Moray Mountaineering Club Tom Crowley was descending from a peak to the west of Ben mcdowey when a huge, gray, mist shrouded figure with pointed ears, long legs, and fingerlike talons on

its feet came into view. There's no record of whether Crowley turned and ran Meanwhile, in his book one hundred Strangest Unexplained Mysterets, writer Matt Lammy describes the experience of three men who claimed to have come face to face with an eerie, dark, human shaped figure in a forest in Aberdeenshire, on the eastern side of the Cairngorms. They claimed to have seen a face looking at them from between tree branches, which was, in their words, human but

not human. One of the men claimed to have thrown a stone at it, causing it to disappear into the trees. A few weeks later, the same trio were driving in the area when the men alleged that the same bipedal creature suddenly appeared from out of the trees and pursued their car, running it up to forty five miles per hour. After some time, it eventually gave up and apparently stood in the middle of the road, just watching as the

car and its frightened occupants sped away. Despite the various reports, no photographs of the so called Big Gray Man have ever been taken. Photographer John Rennie did take shots of a series of footprints measuring nineteen inches long and fourteen inches white, that he found in the Spey Valley below the mountain, believing them to be those of the creature. It was only later that he discovered they weren't footprints at all, but caused by a natural process that occurs

when rainfall melts the snow. Some skeptics are of the firm belief that there is no Big Gray Man, and that he is in stead dead, a manifestation of a well known mountain phenomenon. Born in seventeen seventy, James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist. In seventeen ninety one, the author was walking on Ben mcdowey when he encountered what he described as a giant blackamore, an archaic term for Muslims from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, at

least thirty feet high. Hogg wrote that it had all the appearances of a giant, long limbed, gray silhouette of a man, which seemed to stand against the backdrop of the clouds behind it. At first, the author was struck powerless with astonishment and terror, but his terror began to subside when he realized that the figure was aping his gestures. When Hogg raised his arm, the gray man raised his. When he held its leg to one side, the apparition did the same with the exact same timing, took off

its hat at the same moment he did. With a flash of relief and comprehension, Hogg realized that the gray Man was just his own shadow. These days, this atmospheric phenomenon is well known to hikers and mountaineers. It's called a Brocken specter, named after the brock And Peak in Germany's Hartz Mountains, where as on many Scottish peaks it's

a frequent occurrence. It's caused when a low angled sun's rays filter through low cloud or fog to produce the shadow of a person, which appears elongated, almost like something coming out of the mist on which it's projected. The giant, gray humanoid shape is often surrounded by a rainbow hued halo,

giving it a ghostly, almost angelic appearance. Non Believers in the Big Gray Man have also pointed out to the strange sounds that some climates have heard, that the wind can make extraordinary sounds as it howls and whistles over

exposed rocks, outcrops, and boulders. One mountain on the eastern side of the Grampians, called Loch Nagar is even named the Lock of the Outcry, or in Gallic, Loch Nagara, due to the frequent moaning and howling of the wind among its rocks, while a past to the south is called baloch and Scarnia, or rocks that make noises. And yet experienced mountaineers who've reported hearing the creature would almost

certainly be familiar with just such a thing. And if the Big Gray Man is merely an optical illusion, what of the alleged encounters that have happened after sunset, not to mention the inexplicable sounds of footsteps and the sudden sense of panic that is said to accompany them. Mountain panic, more formally known as high place phenomenon, can affect people

in different ways. Physiologically, is thought to be caused by the brain misinterpreting a survival safety signal to back up instead, sometimes leading to a desire to jump from a high place, which only intensifies the sudden onrush of anxiety. It can be induced by a lack of oxygen, stress, and fatigue. The symptoms, like the feeling of losing control of a situation, dizziness, or shallowness of breath, can vary, but a universal symptom is a sense of impending doom, which can strike when

you least expect it. Magazine editor Sarah Collins was alone on a chairlift at almost four thousand feet above sea level while on holiday in the Canadian Rockies when the thought suddenly came into her head to jump. Surveying the magnificent array of mountain peaks around her, Collins was gripped by a sense of dread and the feeling she was

about to lose control of her body. A former sufferer of obsessive compulsive disorder, she'd successfully developed techniques for suppressing recurring intrusive thoughts and had considered herself cured, but on this occasion she was experiencing a combination of jet lack and the sense of being in an unfamiliar environment. Now,

she became overwhelmed by a full blown panic attack. Collins gripped tighter and tighter onto the metal bar in front of her, the only thing between her and the abyss below. For ten long minutes, she had the feeling that at any moment she might give in to the impulse to launch herself off the chair. Eventually, the calming voice of mental health professional that she'd been treated by years ago

came back to her. Collins described the antidote as being akin to allowing yourself to just float rather than thrash the water when you think you're about to drown. Gradually, she persuaded herself to relax her grip on the bar and lie back in the chair. She survived the ride. Could it be that mountaineers who have seen the Big Gray Man have often been suffering from mountain panic, experiencing symptoms recognized by psychologists as often brought on by a

combination of isolation and exhaustion. Even experienced and well trained adventurers can succumb to hallucinations under the combined assault of fatigue, low oxygen, the cold, and a desolate landscape. There are many accounts of hill walkers and climbers experiencing the high place phenomenon across the British Isles, in places as far afield as the Isle of Sky, the Grampian Highlands and

the mountains of England and Wales. Almost all accounts of the Big Gray Man include a sense of being overtaken by feelings of dread, sometimes so much that some on Ben mcdowey have reported being drawn towards the precipitous drop at a place called lurch Ats Crack, almost prepared to throw themselves over the edge. So intense is the feeling. And then, of course there is infrasound. It has been known for some time that infrasound can affect human physiology

and psychology. There have even been clinical experiments to test it. In two thousand and four, at the School of Mechanical Science and Engineering at Waalsong University in wu Han, China, a study was carried out to honor to the changes of blood pressure, heart rate, and the subjective feelings of subjects exposed to infrasound. The study adopted two different infrasonic treatments based around the sound wave frequency of two herts

and four herts. During the experiment, One group was exposed to infrasound of two herts at a volume of one hundred decibels for one hour, while a second group was exposed to four herts at a volume of one hundred and twenty decibels for one hour. Any noise with a frequency over twenty hertz, the lower limit of human hearing

was minimized. To avoid any interference with the results. A blood pressure meter and cardio tachometer were used to measure any changes in the subjects blood pressure and heart rate. It was found that exposure to both frequencies of infrasound made the subjects feel headachey, fretful, and tired. When exposed of four hurts over an hour, the blood pressure and heart rate of most participants rose. In natural settings, infrasount

can be generated by the wind. You may remember in season seven, episode twenty one, Wild is the Wind, we told the story of the Reverend James Pike and his wife Diane, who some suspect was driven mad by the wind while on a research trip in the Judean Desert. Pike died in mysterious circumstances on the expedition. Wind generated infrasount has been implicated in causing feelings of uneasiness, anxiety, and paranormal sightings for some time, and mountains are frequently

windy places. In nineteen ninety eight, in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, researcher Vic Tandy published a study showing how a nineteen hertz standing airwave just below the human ability to hear it may, under certain conditions create sensory for no nomina in humans suggestive of a ghost. In the paper titled the Ghost in the Machine, Tandy advised researchers of paranoral experiences to try and rule out

this potential natural explanation for their investigations. All that being said, As recently as twenty twenty two, Scottish newspaper The Daily Record ran a story about a guest staying at mar Lodge in the cair Grants who'd left a post on a wildlife sighting board at a ranger's hut. Most posts on the board reported things like the sighting of adders or eagles, or bemoaned the appearance of biting midgie's, But on the twenty seventh of September one spoot guest wrote

something a little different. According to them, they had spotted a creepy gray silhouette standing at the summit of Ben mcdowey. Whether it was in fact a Brocken specter, just the mind playing tricks on them, or indeed a real living thing lurking in the mist, just like the mystery of m for Leah Moore, the big gray Man of Ben mcdowey that remains to this day unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard McClain Smith.

Diane is an audio producer and sound recordist in her own right. You can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in the sound Field. Thank you as ever for listening Unexplained as an Avy Club production podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book

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