Some mountains you climb for the views, and others you climb for reasons few would understand 🖤.
In the heart of the Scottish Highlands lies Ben Alder, remote and mysterious, shrouded in mist and rocky hills, as if time slows between its deep glens and towering peaks. …and full of ghost stories 👻.
Naturally, Jenny decided to set off on her own, with her bike, her tent, and her passion for everything eerie and dark.
It was a late autumn afternoon 🍂, and I was on a train thundering south from Aviemore to Dalwhinnie 🚂. The closer I got, the worse the weather became 🌧️, and by the time I arrived and stood huddled on the platform with my little bike, the rain was absolutely torrential 💦. All the mountains were shrouded in a thick, suffocating mist 🌫️.
With few options remaining, I hopped on my bike and rode away from the small, bleak village of Dalwhinnie 🚴♀️, toward Loch Ericht – that long, narrow stretch of water that leads deep into the steep, daring valley of Ben Alder 🏔️.
It was a late autumn afternoon 🍂, and I was on a train thundering south from Aviemore to Dalwhinnie 🚂. The closer I got, the worse the weather became 🌧️, and by the time I arrived and stood huddled on the platform with my little bike, the rain was absolutely torrential 💦. All the mountains were shrouded in a thick, suffocating mist 🌫️.
With few options remaining, I hopped on my bike and rode away from the small, bleak village of Dalwhinnie 🚴♀️, toward Loch Ericht – that long, narrow stretch of water that leads deep into the steep, daring valley of Ben Alder 🏔️.
Riding along Loch Ericht with the rain battering my face was relentless and unforgiving 🌧️🚴♀️,
…but the loch was “truly Scottish” – mysterious, moody, …and full of secrets 😶🌫️. I struggled along a winding gravel path for 15 km before I felt the darkness gradually pulling me in 🌑.
When the rain eased, I set up my tent by a small stream 🏕️. The spot was beautiful, but the glen was vast, remote, and hauntingly desolate 🏞️. The mountains were still shrouded in thick mist 🌫️. In that moment, I felt incredibly small compared to the immense, powerful landscape around me 🌌.
I was on a solo mission to explore Ben Alder deep in the Central Highlands of Scotland 🇬🇧. At an elevation of 1,148 m (3,766 ft), The mountain’s name, “Beinn Eallair,” roughly means “Hill of the Rocky Place” 🪨, …but the fog was so thick it didn’t let me figure out the reason afterward.
What had brought me to this remote Munro in the first place was a morbid curiosity about the mountain’s strange and eerie history 🖤. I had heard that Ben Alder was haunted 👻.
And as I stood there alone in the glen at dusk 🌅, all the stories I had heard came back to me just as strongly as the first time I heard them.
In 1996, a French hill walker was found dead on Ben Alder with a gunshot wound to his chest – strangely, from a Wild West–style Remington revolver 🤯. Although it was officially deemed a suicide, the deceased’s family believe he was murdered, claiming that the pencil-drawn map of the mountain found nearby had been planted and wasn’t created by him ✏️.
No forms of identification were found (it took 18 months to identify the body), and all clothing labels had been cut out, adding to the mystery of this disturbing death 😶🌫️.
A century earlier, in 1746, after the Jacobite defeat at the Battle of Culloden ⚔️, the chief of Clan MacPherson, Ewen MacPherson, fled to the slopes of Ben Alder and lived in hiding in a cave for nine years 🏞️. His extraordinary tale of evasion inspired a passage in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped, in which the protagonist David Balfour and the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart take refuge in the same damp, wind-lashed cave – now known as Cluny’s Cave – immortalizing it as one of Scotland’s most haunting real-life hideouts 👀.
The next morning, setting off into the rain and clag 🌫️, thoughts of murderers and men in hiding sent a chill through me, yet at the same time I felt exhilarated, and my love for Scotland burned stronger than ever 🔥🇬🇧.
It was a long slog with stone-cold hands gripping my compass 🧭 until I reached Carn Dearg, my first Munro of the day. The views came and went, each time leaving me in awe of the vastness of the glen 🌄. But the cold chilled me to the bone, so I kept plodding on without stopping ❄️.
Directly south of Ben Alder’s summit, I spotted Ben Alder Cottage on the shore of Loch Ericht 🏡🌊. It dates back to 1871, and it’s said to be the most haunted cottage in Scotland 👻.
The first legend says that the old ghillie (a Gaelic term for a servant or hunting/fishing guide) who lived there, named McCook, hanged himself on the back door of the bothy 😱.
The second gruesome tale speaks of a mother and her child who took refuge in the bothy for a few days during a long storm 🌧️. Eventually driven mad by hunger, the mother is said to have killed and eaten her child 😨. She was later seen wandering the mountains, lost and despairing.
Although both of these stories have since been debunked, the visitor book is full of tales of strange and unnatural happenings in the bothy 👀. I took some time to read them: mysterious footsteps, old music playing for no reason, and objects flying across the room as if moved on their own 😳.
Although it’s a deeply intriguing bothy, it was somewhere I had absolutely no intention of staying alone on that stormy evening 🌩️!
I squelched my way across several more mountainous kilometres, still seeing no other human around 🏔️. On the summit plateaus, there was no sign that anyone had ever been there before. I felt completely alone in the mountains, and it was a little unnerving 😶🌫️.
I descended from Beinn Bheòil, my final peak of the day, into the glen where I could finally see Rannoch Station and the mountains on the west coast of Scotland 🌄.
Back towards Dalwhinnie, there was a long, narrow track gradually descending between the mountains 🛤️, and I ran down it feeling light and fast after hours of grueling uphill walking 💨.
Reaching my campsite once again, I threw my tent into my pack and pedaled back toward civilisation 🚴♀️, craving human company after the joy — and eerie strangeness — of so much time spent alone.
Unfortunately, I missed my train 😩, so I had to endure a few more sore hours of cycling with my heavy pack on my shoulders 🚴♀️. By the time I finally staggered through the front door at the end of the day, I was a bedraggled, exhausted, but deeply satisfied mess 🥵. .
That night, I went out for a meal with friends 🍽️. After a shower and putting on clean clothes, no one could even tell I had spent the last 24 hours in the mountains, battered by wild weather and immersed in the supernatural stories of Ben Alder 👻. .
Back among the chatter and warm glow of civilisation ✨, it felt strange how quickly the mountains faded from my memory – like a vivid dream vanishing upon waking 🌌.
Yet, something lingered. Ben Alder had left its mark 💀, a quiet sense of awe intertwined with unease that no brightly lit restaurant could entirely erase.
Areas and Postcodes:
📍 Aviemore
Postcode: PH22 1RH
Note: A major starting point for trains and mountain adventures 🚂
📍 Dalwhinnie
Postcode: PH19 1AA
Note: A small, harsh-weather village near Loch Ericht 🏘️
📍 Loch Ericht
Postcode (nearest inhabited area): PH19 1AA
Note: A long loch leading up to the Ben Alder valley 🌊
📍 Ben Alder / Beinn Eallair
Postcode (nearest point): PH19 1AA
Note: A remote Munro with a mysterious atmosphere and stunning peaks ⛰️
📍 Carn Dearg
Postcode (nearest point): PH19 1AA
Note: The first summit of the journey with breathtaking views 🌄
📍 Beinn Bheòil
Postcode (nearest point): PH19 1AA
Note: The final summit, an experience of isolation and pure nature 🏞️
📍 Rannoch Station
Postcode: PH17 2QF
Note: A prime viewing point for the mountains of western Scotland 🚉
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