Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle Scotland’s Fear Liath. Come back Monday and Wednesday for the rest of the story.

Leave it to Scotland’s Fear Liath to meet any (or all!) of your horrifying cryptozoological encounter needs. A sudden sense of creeping psychic dread followed by inexplicable panic and unprovoked activation of your fight-or-flight response? Leave it to the Liath! A more traditional, rampage-style assault, up to and including wild pursuit of a moving car? He’s on it! Or maybe a subtler, mysterious encounter – a huge, lumbering figure glanced through the fog… a giant footprint in the mud… a stolen picanic basket? Greyman’s got it!

“What is the Fear Liath?” you ask.

Some folks refer to it as Scotland’s Bigfoot, and in some ways that’s accurate. Hiker’s who have seen the Fear Liath (also known as “The Greyman”) have described it as a burly giant with a strikingly inhuman face and a head-to-toe coating of thick, ash-colored fur. What makes the Fear Liath a taxonomical oddity, however, is the effect it’s said to have over people in its vicinity. Supposedly, travelers of the Cairngorm Mountains, and especially visitors to Ben Macdui, the range’s highest peak and suspected site of the Greyman’s lair, have experienced bizarre sensations of terror that come out of nowhere and, often, send the suddenly stricken mountaineers screaming into the mist.
John Norman Collie, an experienced British mountaineer famous for performing pioneering climbing feats in the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, authored the most famous account of this strange phenomenon.

In 1895, while hiking near Ben Macdui’s peak, Collie sensed that he was not alone. After listening for several moments, he discerned a distinct and frightening crunching sound trailing him up the mountain: “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 the length of my own.” Collie desperately struggled to identify his stalker through the thick curtains of mist that shrouded the rock formations, but perceived nothing but drifting fog and the slow, crunching persistence of the phantom interloper’s progress. Eventually, consumed by fear, Collie took off running, scrambling up and around an estimated five miles of boulders and out-cropping rocks.

Other hikers and adventurers have descended Ben Macdui with similarly eerie tales. Some report finding giant footprints stamped into the mountainside. Many claim to have seen a giant grey figure, plowing through the fog or, sometimes, looming behind them as their strange sense of terror reached a crescendo. In the ‘90s, one guy even called out Fear Liath for chasing his car through a nearby forest.

From a logical standpoint, it’s fairly easy to explain away all the varied symptoms of a standard Fear Liath encounter. For example, scientists have suggested an easy explanation for the towering silhouette sighted skulking up the mountain – the same blankets of fog that make the mountain look like the set of gothic melodrama on closing night, when all the leftover dry ice gets poured into the bucket, create perfect conditions for the Broken Spectre effect; angled sunlight casts a trail-weary hiker’s shadow onto a nearby fog bank and ACH! Giant grey figure. That combined with the standard cast of cryptid rationalization factors – the natural anxiety provoked by lonely, fog-draped surroundings; exhaustion; cultural memory of the entire gamut of cryptid encounters as dutifully recounted in books, by television and on this website, etc. – make the Greyman shrug-offable as any other hirsute missing link.

From a folkloric standpoint though, there’s a lot more here than just a tam-topped, haggis-devouring Sasquatch. There’s a reason that the Fear Liath seems to share traits of both classically simple ape-men (like Yetis and Skunk Apes) and creepy, sense-meddling phantasms (like maybe a magic ghost or something). It turns out that “Scotland’s Bigfoot” has a history that pre-dates all Bigfoots, dating back to a time when men were men, and furry ape-men were, like, feral elf spirit monster things.

Wednesday: Fear Liath, Wudewas and other words guaranteed to be useless in Scrabble

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