The Seaforth News, 1953-07-16, Page 2Who The Mysterious
v<tt
Long Grey Man"?
We have all heard of the Abo-
minable Snowman that stalks the
higher reaches of the Himalayas,
But what about Ferias Mor, or
The Long Grey Man of Ben
Macdhui—Britain's second high-
est mountain?
In legend, Ferias Mor has
'haunted the desolate peak in the
Cairngorms, nearly 4,300 feet
high, for centuries. But it is
only fairly recently that The
Long Grey Man has emerged
into something startling near
to fact.
The first reliable report came
from Professor Colie about twen-
ty years ago. An experienced and
level-headed mountaineer, he
was leaving the summit of Ben
Macdhui one night, when he
heard crunching noise in the
snow. They came regularly--
about one to every three or four
of his own footsteps, He tried to
dismiss them as nonsense, but
the eerie crunch . , . crunch fol-
lowed him through the mist.
HEADING FOR PRECIPICE
He was seized with uncontroll-
able terror, although he was
quite accustomed to being alone
en the hills. Floundering and
slipping among the boulders that
strew the high plateau of the
mountain, he ran as fast as he
could until he reached Rothie-
murcus Forest, three thousand
feet below.
A similar story is told by Mr.
Densham, another experienced
climber. Just after the war, he
'was alone at the top of Ben
Macdhui, admiring tlfe view and
eating his sandwiches. A mist
tame down and he heard some
strange noises, but he dismissed
them, being quite sure that the
tales of the Grey Man were all
imagination.
After a bit, however, he heard
crunching noises and began to
get alarmed. This soon developed
into terror and an overwhelming
desire to get off the mountain.
He took to his heels before he
knew what he was doing and
realized only just in time that
he was 'wading straight for the
Thoughtful—Many a male would
give a penny for the thoughts
of pretty Deborah Kerr, seen
above, relaxing and pensive on
ct Hollywood set. Miss Kerr will
b,e seen soon in the movie role
at on Army captain's wife.
Lurcher's Crag• --a precipice sev-
eral hundred feet high,
He found it extremely difficult
even to deflect his course, felt es
if someone was pushing him to
the top of the Crag --and then
over It into space. He just man-
aged to avoid it, but didn't stop
running,
TEN FEET TALL
It may be that sounds eau be
accounted for and that an eerie
atmosphere may frighten the
best of us. But what about those
who have seen' the Grey Man?
One June midnight, the famous
mountaineer Dr. Kellas was
climbing Ben Macdhui with his
brother. As they neared the
eairn, Dr. Kellas waited behind
and was surprised to see a tall
lone figure walk up from the
Larig•—a steep wide ravine on
one side of Ben Macdhui—and
wander round the cairn where
his brother was sitting.
He was even more startled to
see that the figure was as tall as
the cairn—about ten feet high. A
bit later, the figure turned round
and walked off towards the
Larig. Dr, Kellas was intrigued
to know about this solitary clim-
ber and asked his brother who
he was. The brother had seen
nothing.
DOG WAS TERRIFIED
During the war, Denham had
another strange experience on
the mountain. He was at the
cairn with a friend when he no-
ticed that the man semed to be
talking to himself out loud. On
closer examination, he decided
that his friend was talking to
someone at the other side of the
cairn, and went round it. It was
some time before be realized that
he had joined in the conversa-
tion, and that the two of them
had been talking apparently in-
telligently to someone or thing
invisible. But afterwards they
could not remember what he'd
been said.
Many climbers have Spoken of
a feeling of intense depression,
with an awareness of a presence,
on the upper slopes of Ben Macd-
hui. One, accompanied by his
dog which showed every sign
of terror, described it as an evil
foreboding. Another found it
came on as he heard a piercing
and intensely high singing note,
that seemed to come from the
soil of the mountain.
Although there is a wide vari-
ety of such experiences, they
have two things in common:
they have happened to level-
' headed and experienced mount-
aineers, and they happen only
occasionally. All those who have
reported strange things on Ben
Macdhui have been on the moun-
tain many times without any-
thing unusual occurring.
What are we to make of it all?
Sir Hugh Rankin sees no mys-
tery in it, He says that he and
his wife have met the Grey Man,
who conversed in a foreign ton-
gue. He was very_like Gandhi,
only much larger. His appear-
ance was accompanied by a pecu-
liar buzzing music, which, Sir
Hugh says, was the music of the
Buddhist Heavenly Host,
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Korean War Highlights—Above newsmap shows the important
stages of the Korean War, from June 25, 1450, when North
(Careen Reds touched off hostilities by crossing the 38th Paral-
lel, to this present truce taiks at Panmunjom.
Pit To Be Tied—Representative George Bender (R.), displays some of the 8,000 miles of World
War II surplus rope stored in U,S. government warehouses, He said it is of poor quality, can-
not be sold and is evidence that the Truman administration "ran hog -wild with taxpayers'
money."
Ile affirms that The Grey Man
is a Buddhist Bodhisatva, who
run the destinies of the world
from the highest mountains of
the areas where they live. Some
people prefer to blame the
. Druids, saying that it is signifi-
eoat that the cairn may have
been a Druid altar for human
sacrifice; others say the whole
thing is a lot of nonsense.
Professor Collie sums up his
opinion as follows: "What you
may 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 myself."
Perhaps the most disturbing
comment came from a group of
gamekeepers and stalkers whose
work takes them frequently on
the mountain. They were aslcecl
what the ythought of the tales
about The Grey Man. They didn't
reply for a moment, then one of
them said: "We don't talk about
that," —From "Tit -Bits."
" Evidence" Of Shark
PratesConvicted On
Sharks are the garbage cans
of the sea. Outdoing even billy
goats, they will swallow any-
thing. Lumps of co al, bottled
beer, scrap -iron and even broken
glass have been recovered from
the bellies of captured sharks.
On at least two occasions they
h a v e furnished evidence f o r
courts of law, leading to the death
of notorious pirates at the yard-
arm and to a trial for murder.
In 1771 the captain and crew
of t h e American brig N a n c y
were captured by a British man -
n' -war off the coast of Haiti. Be-
fore his ship was boarded, the
skipper of the Nancy tossed his
incriminating ship's papers over-
board.
The trial of the pirates at King-.
Ston, Jamaica, was collapsing for
lack of evidence, when a British
naval vessel arrived with the
papers. They had been retrieved
from the maw of a shark cap-
tured by a member of the crew
of a British ship near Jacrnel.
The pirates of the Nancy were
convicted by this shark -salvaged
evidence. The papers today are
in the Jamaica Institute, and the
head of the shark is in the Bri-
tish Museum,
Grim Biscovcry
The Australian shark "arm" case
was even stranger. On April 18th,
1935, two Sydney professional
fishermen, Bert and Ronald Rob-
son, caught a 14% -foot tiger
shark and released it in the Coo -
gee Aquarium at the beach of
that name:
The first day the 1,800 -lb.
shark lay to all appearances life-
less. The owner of the aquarium.
aerated the water with an oxy-
gen pnnp. On the second day
the shark revived and ate some
fish that were thrown to it.
Eight days after its capture
the shark, which had been swim-
ming in aimless circles round the •
pool, suddenly began to flay the
water and disgorged some bones
and the left arm of a man. De-
tectives hurried to Coogee and
attempted to take fingerprints.
The hand was in a fair 'tate of
preservation. On t h e forearm
were the tattooed figures of two
boxers.
Two slashes at the end sug-
gested that the arra had been cut
away from a body and not biten
off by the shark. What was most
striking was the fact that the
arm was not digested; and looked
as if it had been in the water
only a few clays.
There was plenty of conjecture.
It was suggested that the arm
might belong to a mental patient
who had escaped from an asylum
and been drowned in Long Bay,
It was also thought at first that
the arm might have been one
used in dissection by medical stu-
dents and that the formalin cr
some a the r preservative had
protgestiveeotedjuices, it from the shark's. di-
killed.The shark was Nothing
that offered a clue was foundi
its stomach but it was proved,
beyond doubt, that the arm had
come from the shark and had
not been tossed secretly in the
pool.
The experts argued about the
effects of the shark's digestive
juices, One said that normally
the strong acids of the shark's
stomach would digest anything
within thirty-six hours, but that
its capture and the bright sun-
light in the aquarium might have
upset it. Sharks, he said, were
very sensitive to light.
Then, on May 5th, a Sydney
Sunday newspaper came out with
large headlines announcing that
by one chance in 'a million an
alleged murder had been reveal-
ed, and asserting that the victim
w.a s Jame s Smith, a billiard
marker, of Gladesville, a Sydney
suburb. This was later supported
by police fingerprint specialists
—James Smith's prints were in
the police records,
The police searched the sea by
'plane and launch and on land
for the rest of the body. On May
17th they charged a man named
Patrick Brady with murder.
The inquest was set down for
June 12th, Early that morning
one of the chief witnesses was
found murdered in his car under
one of the approaches to Sydney
Harbour Bridge. Two men were
charged with this c r i m e, but
found not guilty.
The police case against Brady
rested mainly on medical evi-
dence that the arm had been cut
ofi' and not bitten off by a shark,
and that the arm could not have
been cut from its owner's body
without causing his death.
An application was made to
Court to restrain the coroner from
continuing the i n q u i r y. The
grounds of the application were
that a single limb could not be
considered a corpus delictr (liter-
ally, "body of the crime" — that
is, the essential acts and facts
which constitute a crime and
breach of the law), and that the
coroner could not hold an inquest
because he had not viewed a
dead body. The application was
granted. In September Br ad y
was acquitted of all charges.
So ended the "Case of the Tat-
tooed Arm and the Tiger Shark,"
a story so bizarre and incredible
that no writer of detective tales
would have dared to include such
a coincidence as the one that
brought it all about — the sca-
vaging by a shark of a human
arm from the sea.
'fhe chance of your marrying
a girl you went to school with
is only 1 to 70. The odds are 1,-
300 to 1 against your being ex-
pelled from school, It's 140,000
to 1 you won't marry your teach»
er and if you go to college it's
2 to 1 against your going to one
distant from your home town,
The chances of your flunking
any particular subject are 19 to 1
that you won't. If you are a
public school student and play
hookey the odds are 3 to 1 you
will he caught in the act. I give
70 to 1 you will not adopt the
profession or job you intended
to when you were 13 or under
and 1,500 to 1 against your going
back to school once you have
officially stopped going, The
otlds ar 3 to 1 you have had mord
.. . 730 to 1 yell de not know
Can Hypnotist Make
You Commit Murder?
Psychologists have u s u al1,y
maintained that no one could be
hypnotized to commit a -crime or
to perform any act they wouldn't
do in their normal state.
Recent experiments by medical
hypnotists have shaken this idea.
Under hypnosis people have been
induced to perform anti - social
acts on waking.
More important, some people
have been hypnotized against
their will, though resisting in
every way, even putting their
fingers in their ears and keeping
up a string of patter to disconcert
the hypnotist.
in a recent issue of the 'British
Journal of Medical Hypnotists
Dr. John G. Watkins, the Chief
Clinical Psychologist of a Chi-
cago mental clinic, describes an
experiment he carried out on a
nurse,
The twenty-one-year-old nurse
boasted that she could not be
hypnotized against her will. Dr.
Watkins took up the challenge.
The nurse closed her eyes, put
her fingers in her ears, and be-
gan to talk and shout loudly.
Dr. Watkins thought he had no
hope of succeeding, but started a
series of suggestions in a strong,
firm voice close to her ear: "My
voice will gradually reach you,
and you will hear it in spite of
your shouting. You will begin to
feel very uncomfortable. There
will be a pain in your head which
will grow and grow. It becomes
stronger, much stronger, After a
while it will become excrutiat-
i ng. It will be unbearable, and
everything in you will cry out
for relief, But the only way out
of this intense pain will be to
enter a deep sleep, etc. . . ."
Resistance Beaten Down
He continued these suggestions
for six minutes. The nurse resist-
ed. Then, after a further three
minutes, he b e g an to succeed.
She would pause, take her fin-
gers out of her ears, exclaim,
"My, but it hurts!"
A few minutes later she gave
in and passed' into a deep trance.
Waxen awakened the girl said
she had experienced an unbear-
able headache, and t h a t s h e
wanted to escape from the agony
so much that nothing could have
induced her to resist any longer.
In other experiments by the
same doctor, men and women
were induced to divulge informa-
tion they had undertaken to keep
set.
Tcrehe doctor told one girl: "You
are -going to tell" me that mes-
sage. It is rising in your throat
and you will not be able to keep
it down. It is getting higher,
higher, higher. Now it is on the
back of your tongue. Now it is
--a
on the tip of your tongue Now
it Is escaping from your teeth.
You will endure the most ex-
treme suffocation until you re-
lease It and speak the message.
Speak it! Speak it!"
Induced Ta Steal
During all this time the giris
anxiety kept increasing. Her faux
turned a vivid red. She writhed
and made grimaces.
Finally, the message virtually
"exploded" from her, When she,
was brought out of the trance
she exclaimed, "You didn't have
to choke it out of mei"
in tests by other doctors, men
and women were induced to steal
money after coming out of the
trance, to pick up what they be-
lieved was a rattlesnake (actually
a coiled rope), and to use insult-
ing words to someone they ]iked.
Also, persons under hypnosis
were made to throw sulphuric
acid at the doctor, who was pro-
tected by glass.
Other tests in America, Ger-
many and England have shown
opposite results. During hypnosis
and after, people could not be
induced to carry out anti -social
acts. How, then, can one explain
such seemingly contrary results?
In this way. When psycholo-
gists asserted in the past that
people could not be induced en-
der hypnosis to do anything they
would not do in normal circum-
stances, they were right - to
some extent, But they did not
carry the investigation f a r
enough, Most of us wouldn't steal
in ordinary circumstances, but °
we night If given suftieient pro-
vocation -- if our children were
starving or if we thought we had
been treated very badly by the
person or persons from whom
we were stealing. Thus, in the
recent tests when people used
insulting words and threw sul-
phuric acid at the doctor, the idea
w a s first carefully implanted
that they had a legitimate griev-
ance.
Only Slight 'tisk
le there a danger, then, from
unscrupulous people practising
hynotism and persuading people
to commit crime? There is, hap-
pily, only a slight risk. The hyp-
notist with evil intentions would
have to get the right conditions
and these are not easy to achieve
—a degree of concentration and
some co-operation from the sub-
ject. Nor would he necessarily
succeed if he did get these con-
ditions.
Where a hypnotist might suc-
ceed, think • some doctors, would
be in persuading a person to sign
legal documents. There some of
the conditions might be right —.
quietness, the subject's concen-
tration, and so forth. But there
would still be the witnesses to be
fooled,
Unless hypnotists make even
more alarming discoveries, we
can all sleep con t en t in the
thought that there is far more
danger in crossing the Queen Eli-
zabeth Highway than in being
hypnotized to commit murder.
Fashto a1 Note
L. Superior
4
Five locks at Sault Ste, Maria
Michigan -Ontario, are busier
than the Suez, Panama, and Kiel
canals combined. As many ns 80
ships par dpy pass through.
M d
Down bound In 1951
85,197,433
tans of iron ore
4,105,061
tons of wheat
_....;�rytvf4 }:'�''• 1,. Ontario
Up bound bi 8933,23 1951
4
tons of coal
1,050,859
tons of limestone
189,787 fans
acorn'
54 of oats ns and 18,000,000 gallons
>MI H,i::•:
3b703 '•Y.•i,;.„:,, of water needed to
, 9trineof }?;:` fill thelacke
y. barley and rye ' v
Between 12,000,000
The five locks of the Sault Ste. Marie Canal are the world's
busiest, according to reports tabulated by the Corps of bngin-
eers, operators of the locks. Great bulk of the cargos are ship-
ments of iron ore bound for the steel mills of America's indus-
trial lower -lake sections other cargos are listed on the above
map. On a record day, as many oe 56 ships were re -levelled in
one eight-hour shift,