Alexander Tewnion Fires Three Shots at the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui

Ben Macdui rises to 1,309 metres in the Cairngorms. Its summit sits on the boundary of Moray and Aberdeenshire. In December 1925, Professor J. Norman Collie told the Cairngorm Club in Aberdeen about a day on the mountain in 1891. Footsteps had followed him through the mist. "Every few steps I took I heard a crunch, then another crunch as if someone was walking after me." He fled four to five miles towards Rothiemurchus Forest. The legend has a name. The Fear Liath Mhor. The Big Grey Man.

October 1943. Alexander Tewnion, a naturalist and mountaineer, was spending a ten day leave climbing alone in the Cairngorms. He carried a revolver to shoot hares or ptarmigan. He reached the summit cairn of Ben Macdui. Mist swirled across the Lairig Ghru and enveloped the mountain. The air turned dark and oppressive. A fierce, bitter wind blew among the boulders. Then an odd sound. A loud footstep. Then another.

"I am not unduly imaginative," he wrote, "but my thought flew instantly to the well-known story of professor Collie…" Then the shape. "A strange shape loomed up, receded, came charging at me!" He did not wait. "Without hesitation I whipped out the revolver and fired three times at the figure." It still came on. Tewnion turned and hared down the path, "reaching Glen Derry in a time that I have never bettered."

In June 1958 the account appeared in The Scots Magazine as "A Shot in the Mist". Was it really the Fear Liath Mhor? "Frankly, I think it was." His closing line has been read both as belief and as self-doubt. "For, on that day I am convinced I shot the only Fear Liath Mhor my imagination will ever see."

The excerpts that survive give no size, no colour, no face. Only a shape, footsteps, and a charge that three shots did not stop. No bullets, blood or tracks were recorded. No photograph exists of this or any Grey Man encounter.

No police, military or government inquiry followed. The questions came later, from writers and researchers. One answer is the Brocken spectre. A climber's own shadow falls on the mist, looks huge and seems to move with him. Ross proposed it in 1974 and 1975. James Hogg met such a giant on Ben Macdui in 1791 and recognised his own shadow. Commentators note that a shadow growing and shrinking as the mist thickens could loom, recede and advance.

The footsteps have their own suspects. Rocks cracking through freeze-thaw. Deer and wildcats fleeing. Ice cracking under frost. Others point to exhaustion, isolation and "mountain panic", or to infrasound. Then there is expectation. Tewnion thought of Collie the instant he heard the first step, and mountaineer Cameron McNeish has suggested Collie was a practical joker. Nobody has accused Tewnion of inventing his story.

The mountain kept its reputation. Hugh D. Welsh heard footsteps in 1904. Peter Densham fled in 1945. Richard Frere felt a "Presence, utterly abstract but intensely real" in 1948. Affleck Gray gathered the accounts in The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui in 1970. Brian Dunning examined the case on Skeptoid in 2012, and Michele Tita returned to it in an academic paper in 2025.

The rest belongs to Tewnion. Three shots. A figure that kept coming. And the only Fear Liath Mhor his imagination would ever see.