Strange sounds from cracks to whines and even heavy footsteps believed to belong to the 'Grey Man', have haunted climbers up a Scottish mountain.
A towering pointed-eared, 8ft giant has been reported skulking around the eerily misty summit of Ben MacDhui in the Cairngorms, for decades.
Expert Andy McGrath and author of Beasts of the World: Hairy Humanoids has weighed into the chilling sightings to pose that if a freakish wild man was to live anywhere in the UK, it would be in the eastern Highlands.
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One theory Andy puts forward, however, is the Grey Man could be the result of a 'rare alien atmospheric anomaly'.
The figure is said to have been spotted lurking in fog on eight occasions between 1891 and 1943, with descriptions ranging from a 20ft broad shouldered humanoid, to being half the height with talons for toes.
Keen mountaineer, Professor Collie gave a speech in 1925 at the 27th Annual General Meeting of the Cairngorm Club, recalling his panic 34 years earlier.
He said: "I was returning from the cairn on the summit in a mist when I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps.
“As I walked on and 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 nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest.
“Whatever you make of it, I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben MacDhui and I will not go back there again by myself I know."
It doesn't explain the noises but Andy has explained the Brocken spectre effect could have created sightings of the Grey Man, rendering the beast nothing more than a meteorological hallucinations.
The author said: "According to some sceptics, a common atmospheric anomaly called a Brocken Spectre Effect, is responsible for eyewitness accounts and not a flesh and blood monster.
"This rare alien atmospheric anomaly is produced when the sun hits the mist and magnifies a person’s elongated shadow on clouds, mist, and fog."
Andy continued: "This, the sceptics say, gives the illusion of a giant humanoid form looming out of the mists towards the justifiably terrified witness; who is blissfully unaware of this literal trick of the light that is being played upon him.
"This effect, which is also sometimes accompanied by a ‘Glorie’ (a rainbow-like halo) adds to the otherworldly experience which the witness believes that he is undergoing."
Hallucinations caused by a lack of oxygen high up in the Cairngorms has also been proposed as a scientific de-bunking of what mountaineers claimed to have witnessed.
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He did point out though that those who believed they were being stalked would have been used to the effects of high altitude.
Andy added: "It should be noted that many of the witnesses were rational men of science and experienced climbers, neither inexperienced in the strange effects of the terrain nor subject to the atmospheric burdens of the climb.
"And yet they are seeing something."
- Bigfoot
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