Samuel DenHartog's Blog: The Road to 1,440 - Posts Tagged "big-grey-man"

Long before hikers brought their cameras and climbers charted safe routes through the Cairngorms, stories whispered of something far older than the stones underfoot. The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui has haunted Scotland’s highest slopes with a presence that defies explanation—seen by few, sensed by many, and feared by all who linger too long in the mist. It’s this chilling blend of myth, psychology, and raw wilderness that inspired the newest addition to my cryptid series.

Told entirely from the creature’s point of view, this story dives deep into the lonely soul of something that is not quite man, not quite ghost. Part relic hominid, part force of nature, the narrator is a being shaped as much by fear as by flesh. It remembers when the world was quiet, when the mountains kept their secrets, and it watches as people begin to forget how dangerous silence can be. Its transformation—from flesh and blood to something more shadow than skin—is as slow and inevitable as snowfall over stone.

I wanted the story to feel intimate but vast, rooted in the terrain yet untethered from time. The creature doesn’t simply lurk in the fog—it becomes the fog, the wind, the presence that makes the air too still. Readers step into the mind of a being that was never meant to be understood, only felt. And through its voice, the mountain speaks.

If you’ve ever stood alone on a ridge and felt the hair on your neck rise without reason, this book was written for you. The line between fear and awe is thin up there, and no legend embodies that tension more than "The Big Grey Man."