What largely sets BGM apart from the various giant ape-humanoid creatures around the world is his supernatural powers – he has the ability to control the fog, choosing usually to cloud himself in it, and can manipulate emotions at will, inducing fear, despair, and driving both humans and animals to jump to their deaths from the mountain in order to escape him. Sadly this never seems to feature in the artists’ impressions. Some sightings even reportedly have him wearing a tophat, presumably taken from a Victorian gentleman climber who became an unfortunate victim. The Big Grey Man also walks up straight, unlike a stooped ape, and perhaps more like Bigfoot (at least in the Patterson footage Bigfoot, anyway). He has pointed ears on a disproportionately large head and neck, and usually with long finger-like toes. From what we have learned though, most the descriptions have him as extremely tall, usually around 10ft, sometimes 20ft, and covered in a thick fur, which is, of course, grey. It’s Collie’s story that is regarded as the sometimes the first, but almost always as the most authoritative telling of the Cairngorms monster – the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui.Īlthough there have been many reported encounters with the BGM, few reports, much like Collie’s tale, mention the creature in the flesh. He described the unsettling feelings he had when on the mountain, and vowed never to return alone. For 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 to length of my own… as 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.

I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps.

But it’s a speech at the AGM of the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen in 1925 that Collie is most known for, when he told of his 1891 climb on Ben Macdui – located in the Cairngorms Mountain Range, and the second tallest peak in the UK – as it’s from here that the story of a mysterious creature inhabiting the peak of Ben Macdui is most often credited to.

J Norman Collie was a respected scientist – responsible for the first ever medical x-ray – and experienced mountain climber a man with a couple of mountain’s named in his honour, and who apparently inspired some traits in Sherlock Holmes (namely Collie’s life-long bachelor status and solicitor roommate, apparently).

Brocken spectre 1990