Nov 21, 2024
The towering Am Fear Liath Mòr. A walking terror atop Ben Macdhui, the big grey man, while sometimes compared to the likes of Sasquatch or Yeti, is an enigmatic spirit.
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The towering Am Fear Liath Mòr. A walking terror atop Ben Macdhui, the big grey man, while sometimes compared to the likes of Sasquatch or Yeti, is an enigmatic spirit.
european folklore | creatures ii
Sahkil, Fear Liath
Image © MonstrumAthenaeum.org, accessed here
[Commissioned by @wannabedemonlord, based on Am Fear Liath Mor, the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui. The amount of cryptozoologists who want this to be a Bigfoot type creature is frankly staggering, when it’s clearly a more magical being in the stories. The identification of its real world inspiration as a Brocken Spectre seems like a pretty good one, and inspired the fog and illusion based SLAs of my version.]
Sahkil, Fear Liath CR 12 NE Outsider This hazy gray shape is roughly humanoid, but easily twice the size of a normal man. Its features are indistinct, and seemingly shift from moment to moment.
The fear liath, or “greyman”, is an environmental sahkil, a creature that embodies the fears and hazards of a particular type of terrain. Fear liaths haunt the mountains, personifying falling and freezing, isolation and altitude sickness. They delight in appearing to lonely travelers, sometimes stalking them for miles at a distance, allowing themselves to be glimpsed from afar before appearing right next to their prey in a terrifying instant. A fear liath is a patient hunter, prolonging the game of fear for hours or even days at a time before striking.
Mere proximity to a fear liath is hazardous to mortal bodies, as they create a deadly altitude sickness, drawing the air from their victim’s lungs in mere seconds. They typically shroud their battlefields in magical fog, but any sighted creature has difficulty drawing a bead on a fear liath. A fear liath often chooses hazardous areas, such as the edges of ravines, slippery ice or deep snow, in order to make its attacks, and pushes its enemies around like toys as it sees fit. They cooperate well with other sahkils, especially rabatoks.
A fear liath stands about twelve feet tall and weighs nine hundred pounds. Despite their mass, they move across treacherous surfaces with supernatural ease.
Name: Fear Liath
Alternate Names: Am Fear Liath Mor, Big Grey Man, Greyman
Mythology: Scottish Folklore and Cryptid
Size: Large to Huge, depending on the story
Environment: Mountains where fog is common
In Mythika: Being alien variants of the Sasquatch, Fear Liath ended up on earth probably because Grey Aliens took them there. Fear Liath are among the most powerful psychic creatures in Mythika, their telepathy is powerful and they can induce a victim with a terrifying feeling of dread and despair. They love to follow other creatures (especially intelligent creatures) through the high mountains, summoning thick fog to hide their big bodies and troubling their victims sight, then they release their telepathy upon their quarry, turning it insane and making it doubt its own sanity. Fear Liath can stalk victims for days in this way, they love their brains (favorite food) with lots of stress in it, sometimes victims die by frustration or heart attacks instead of from their fist and bite attacks, the Fear Liath seldom has to fight itself, the victim will often end his own life by falling off a mountain. Fear Liath sometimes work together with other mist creatures such as Ceffyl Dwr, Brollachan and Asdeev Drakes.
Juvenile Fear Liath are known as Satori (Japanese Mythology), they are much smaller and look very different from their parents, it takes a lot of years for it to mature, satori look much like macaque apes. Satori have the same psychic abilities as their parents, they also love to turn their victims mad with maddening whispers inside their head and cries for help from nowhere. Satori often even show themselves to humans and use their mimicry ability to release their darkest secrets upon their team members, turning them against each other. Satori can’t summon fog.
Wiki Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am_Fear_Liath_M%C3%B2r + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satori_(folklore)
Cryptid: Fear Liath
The Fear Liath:
In the Matt Lamy book 100 Strangest Unexplained Mysteries, Lamy notes a sighting in the early 1990s in which three men caught sight of a bipedal creature with an eerie, inhuman face in a forest near Aberdeen. Several weeks later, whilst driving through the area at night, the creature appeared again and ran alongside their car even at speeds of 45 miles per hour, seemingly trying to enter the vehicle.
Fear liath
Am Fear Liath Mòr also known as The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui or simply The Greyman) is the name of a presence or creature which is said to haunt the summit and passes of Ben Macdui, the highest peak of the Cairngorms and the second highest peak in Britain. It has been described as an extremely tall figure covered with short hair, or as an unseen presence that causes uneasy feelings in people who climb the mountain. Evidence of the existence of this creature is limited to various sightings and a few photographs of unusual footprints.
It was traditionally seen as a supernatural being, but Am Fear Liath Mòr has been compared to the Yeti of the Himalaya and the Sasquatch or Bigfoot of North America. References to wild 'Greymen' in Scotland and similar creatures elsewhere in Europe, sometimes called Wudewas or 'Wood Men', date back to the 13th century, and are believed by some to represent relict hominids.
In 1925, the noted climber John Norman Collie recounted a terrifying experience he had endured while alone near the summit of Ben MacDhui some 35 years before. "I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps. 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 was unable to make out the source of the noises because of mist, and continued "... [as] 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." Other climbers have also reported similar experiences, many describing uncontrollable feelings of fear and panic, some actually seeing a huge grey figure behind them, and others only hearing sounds or even succumbing to inexplicable feelings of terror while in the area.
In the Matt Lamy book 100 Strangest Unexplained Mysteries, Lamy notes a sighting in the early 1990s in which three men caught sight of a bipedal creature with an eerie, inhuman face in a forest near Aberdeen. Several weeks later, whilst driving through the area at night, the creature appeared again and ran alongside their car even at speeds of 45 miles per hour, seemingly trying to enter the vehicle.
Similar panic responses have been reported in many North American Sasquatch encounters, and explanations involving infrasound or pheromones have been advanced. Cryptozoologist Karl Shuker has expressed belief that the creature is the guardian of an inter-dimensional portal in his 1997 book, The Unexplained. However, hallucinations and panic brought on by isolation and exhaustion, or an optical illusion similar to the Brocken spectre, are very plausible explanations for the Big Grey Man legend. A Brocken spectre, or 'glory', can occur in certain atmospheric conditions when the sun is at a particular angle. The subject's shadow can be cast onto low lying clouds around them, creating the illusion of a large shadowy humanoid figure. This is the most commonly advanced theory to explain the reported sightings.
Snow | Fiction | There's Something Nasty Lurking In The Glacier
People flee into snowy places. There’s no other reason to venture there. That seems to be our main literary thesis. Frankenstein’s monster, Frankenstein himself, and Robert Walton are all running away to the wastes of the North Pole (the Creature himself, of course, finds a smaller, less well-fortified wilderness earlier in the book in the Alps) but the latter two both convince themselves falsely that they’re not fleeing so much as chasing something.
The other obvious association is that snowy places are dwelling-places for the uncanny. Frankenstein is an amusing exception to the rule, because while our first suspicion during Walton’s framing device is that something weird lurks in the fog and the ice, the Creature actually originates from a seat of learning and culture in the midst of European civilised society. For most of our uncanny literature, though, that theme is played straight. Consider the presence of ice and snow in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' as the gateway to the otherworld, the natural torment that leads to unnatural torments. In one sense, this is simply practical; the snowy landscape is, as should be made clear by the number of Stephen King novels set there and the number of B-movies and B-novels in which an alien craft crashes there, a perfectly isolated and frightening setting for horror. But consider the way the uncanny seeps into otherwise realistic thrillers as soon as they venture into the snow-filled wilds – Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, for example, or Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights (and for those of you keeping track of just how ridiculous a piece of literary genre fiction can get while still being acclaimed – SPOILERS -, that’s one count of ‘alien parasite inside a fallen meteorite’ and one count of ‘talking apes at a Soviet research facility.) All of this intrigues me in part because of the upcoming movie version of Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness – for my money, the best story by old H.P., which is going to be made by James Cameron and Guillermo del Toro and has, therefore, both the most suitable and utterly unsuitable team behind it that anyone could hope for. Suitable because both of them know how to make damn good, memorable sets, and you think they’d be able to capture the weirdness of an ice-filled land effectively. Unsuitable because…both of them really, really like monsters, and they like to try and capture those monsters visually, which is the wrong approach for any Lovecraftian tale and especially for Mountains, which barely contains any visual monstrosities at all, especially not living. The horror has to come from the alien purity of the snow itself, the twisted reflections of the ice, the white fog that conceals the world around you, the empty flats and the bottomless crevasses. (All right, and the penguins. The horror partly comes from the penguins.)
The black pit! The carven ring...the proto-Shoggoths, the windowless solids with five dimensions!
No, if an adaptation of Mountains is going to work, it requires the spirit of my favourite cryptid – certainly the one with the best name – Am Fear Liath Mor, the Gaelic term for the sense of unease experienced by lonely climbers in harsh mountains; the belief that one is being followed by an unseen presence, or even the flitting glimpse of a humanoid figure. Fear Liath has been, very obviously, connected with the legend of the yeti, and it’s been attributed to loneliness, exhaustion, the effects of high altitude or low temperatures, or the reflection of sunlight off snow or low-lying mist. It could, conceivably, be an explanation for the fascinating Dyatlov Pass Incident from the late 50s, when nine skiers in the Ural Mountains were discovered to have torn themselves forcibly out of their tent in the middle of the night, as if in a sudden panic, and ran out into the woods in their underclothes. They scattered into the trees, refusing for some unknown reason to return to the shelter of their tent, until eventually they died from the cold. No footprints were found other than theirs. Chilling details began to emerge later, such as that one of the women had had her tongue removed, and that several of the men were heavily bruised, as if they’d been struck by an unknown force. There were plenty of obvious explanations – small carnivores are plentiful, the men could have tripped and injured themselves – but it remains one of the 20th century’s most genuinely intriguing real-life cases of the uncanny.
The slashed tent.
This, perhaps, is snow’s appropriateness for horror – a landscape designed as if by nature to confuse and unsettle us, playing sensual tricks on us, distorting our perceptions, in much the same way that dilapidated old ‘haunted houses’ sometimes have carbon monoxide leaks. A natural world that appears very much to be unnatural, the sense that we are not alone in the loneliest of places. The horrid state of mind, in fact, that connects the Ancient Mariner with Frankenstein, encapsulated by the lines which purportedly caused Percy Shelley to faint in utter terror; “Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.” A very happy Christmas to you all. Jon Ware Fiction Editor