THE LITTLE black elf was sitting on the wing, facing him. With one hand it was playing with the canard, threatening to pull it in the wrong direction and send the plane into a downward spiral. Don’t worry, it assured Dick Rutan. You’ve already died. You fell asleep and crashed into a mountain. You’re in transition between life and death; this is normal. Relax, go to sleep now, come with me.
Rutan had been flying for over twenty-four hours, shuttling back and forth over Owens Valley in the Sierra Nevada in a tiny experimental plane, trying to set a closed-course distance record. It was his first long-range flight. After working on the plane for most of the night, he had set off at dawn. The plane had no autopilot, so he was required to maintain a state of constant concentration. He had ten more hours to go.
Part of his brain urged him to lay his head on the control panel, close his eyes, and let the elf take over. Another part ordered him to take control. He wiped his face with a cold rag, he sniffed smelling salts, but the elf remained. And soon he had more company.
“I saw a spacecraft,” recalls Rutan in our conversation. “It was big and complicated with little grey men looking at me from its windows. When I turned my head to see it better it would pull up and go away. If I looked straight ahead I could see the spacecraft in my peripheral vision, with all its intricate details. There were airplanes as well, dogfighting me from behind, and a big battle going on down on the ground. I could hear beautiful loud organ music. I had no idea what the hell was happening.”
This occurred in 1979. Has he come up with an explanation since then?
“I don’t believe in any spiritual crap,” he says bluntly. But his journey, he notes, took exactly the same number of hours as Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 non-stop transatlantic flight, which he describes in his book The Spirit of St. Louis. During that solo flight, Lindbergh was also visited by what he described as “phantoms.”
“When I’m staring at the instruments,” Lindbergh writes, “during an unearthly age of time, both conscious and asleep, the fuselage behind me becomes filled with ghostly presences—vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane . . . These phantoms speak with human voices . . . they are friendly, vapour-like shapes without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there . . . I feel no surprise at their coming. . . Without turning my head I see them as clearly as though in my normal field of vision.”
Lindbergh believed these visions were “emanations from the experience of ages, inhabitants of a universe closed to mortal men.” They spoke to him, helped him with his navigation during the hardest part of the flight, then disappeared.
It turns out that many explorers and adventurers, pushed to the edge of their limits, have had experiences they find difficult to explain once they return to their ordinary lives. And that such experiences are more common than people—or science—imagine.
One of the earliest accounts of a spirit friend was penned in the fifth century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus. He wrote that when the Persians invaded Greece, landing at Marathon, an Athenian herald called Pheidippides ran for two days to Sparta, a distance of 150 miles, to request help against the enemy. Near the top of Mount Parthenium he saw an apparition of the god Pan, who told him to remind the Athenians of how he had assisted them in the past, and to ask them why they had forgotten him. This vision spurred Pheidippides to run even faster to reach his destination and deliver Pan’s message.
Long distance runner Marshall Ulrich has covered a similar distance—135 miles, on the Badwater Ultramarathon across Death Valley and up Mount Whitney, California—thirteen times. He’s run it in daytime temperatures that hit 130°F. His fastest speed, in 1993, was thirty-four hours. During that race, as he neared the top of Mount Whitney, he saw hundreds of green lizards flowing down the path like a river. In 1999, on the second day of the race, he saw a woman rollerblading a hundred feet ahead of him.
“She was wearing a sparkling silver string bikini,” he told me, “and she was skating her ass off. She kept turning to wave at me—she was gorgeous. I didn’t even blink—I was thinking, I’m liking this! I kept that hallucination going for over ten minutes.”
His attempts to conjure her up again failed, but two hours later a one-winged 747 airplane pulled up so close to him that he could see passengers waving at him through the portholes.
Hallucinations and visions are usually attributed to some kind of temporary or permanent neurological malfunctioning. People who suffer seizures within the prefrontal or temporal lobe sometimes report “sensed presences” or flashes of mystical rapture. Medical historians have suggested that religious visionaries such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Joan of Arc, Saint Paul, and Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, suffered from seizures. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky has written about a rare form of temporal lobe epilepsy he suffered from termed “ecstatic epilepsy.” During the last twenty years of his life, he kept detailed records of 102 seizures, describing the ecstatic feeling of being in “full harmony” with himself and the whole world that he experienced a few seconds before each attack. Such ecstasy came at a cost, as his post-fit symptoms, which lasted up to a week, included pains in the head, “nervous laugh and mystical depression.”
The Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Michael Persinger, head of the Behavioural Neuroscience Program at Laurentian University, has tried to prove the connection between hallucinations and temporal lobe activity. He developed a helmet that shoots electric currents into specific regions of the brain, generating a low-frequency magnetic field and creating micro-seizures. When currents are aimed into the temporal lobes of his research subjects, they sometimes report dreamlike hallucinations and sense a “spectral presence” in the room.
In his original experiment, conducted under double-blind conditions, forty-eight men and women were subjected to partial sensory deprivation and exposure to weak, complex magnetic fields across the temporal lobes. Subjects who received greater stimulation over the right hemisphere or equal stimulation across both hemispheres reported more frequent incidences of presences, fears, and odd smells than did the subjects who received greater stimulation over the left hemisphere.
As the left hemisphere of the temporal cortex is, according to Persinger, the seat of our sense of self, he posits that the spectral presence is actually a transient awareness of the right hemispheric equivalent of the left hemispheric sense of self. While such a “transient awareness” is rare in normal life, he believes it might be caused by periods of distress, psychological depression, and certain drug-induced and meditation states. The experience of a presence, he has stated in one scientific article, is “a resident property of the human brain, and may be the fundamental source for phenomena attributed to visitations by gods, spirits, and other ephemeral phenomena.”
IN 1989, Lou Whittaker, a veteran North American mountaineer, was leading the first American expedition to climb Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas. At base camp, he told me, he kept getting the feeling that someone was in his tent with him.
“I’d look around and think, Who’s here? Then I would feel the presence of a Tibetan woman. There were no Tibetan women at base camp. But she was there every night. She was middleaged, and dressed traditionally. It wasn’t a strong image, more a sensation. There was nothing sexual about it. She was a friendly spirit, able to share my concerns. I felt she was communicating, without words, that everything was okay.”
While he was on the mountain, his wife, Ingrid, was also in the area, leading a trek as far as his base camp. Eager to see him, she persuaded her group to skip the last resting stage of the trek and go straight from 12,000 to 16,000 feet in one day. It was a mistake. By the time they reached the base camp, Ingrid was suffering from altitude sickness. For the next three days she had such an appalling headache that she never left Lou’s tent. But she wasn’t alone there. In the daytime, when Lou was climbing, she was kept company by a Tibetan woman.
“I always felt this local woman with me,” she recalled to me. “She was wearing a headscarf and a long dress. She was shadowy and two-dimensional, like a silhouette. It was a good presence, very comforting. She would put her hand on my forehead and help me roll over. She was just kind of hovering around and helpful the whole time. She didn’t speak but there was always a feeling of kindness, that this was a good person who was going to take care of me. It was like we were communicating mind to mind, without words. I thought, Oh my God, I’m really sick, I’m hallucinating, I’m losing it, I’ll probably die. I didn’t tell Lou about it; I was in such a lot of pain, we hardly spoke to each other the whole time I was there.”
Once she managed to stagger down to a lower altitude, her symptoms abated. Two months later, when Lou returned to North America after the expedition, they talked about her visit to base camp. Hesitantly, Ingrid told Lou about the presence in the tent.
“That’s weird,” he replied. “I had the same feeling. This woman was there with me in the tent for the whole three months.”
They are both convinced that it wasn’t a hallucination. It was a real presence. Nothing like this has ever happened to them again and they have told few of their friends about it.
“Most of them would think we were making it up,” says Lou.
HEARING THE Whittakers’ story, Dr. Pierre Mayer shrugs and says, “Hypnagogic dreams.” Mayer, an expert in respiratory medicine and sleep disorders, has taken part in several mountaineering expeditions to the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas. As director of the Sleep Disorders Investigation Centre and Clinic of Montreal University Hospital, he is conducting research into dreams and hypoxia. At altitude, he explains, it is common for sleep cycles to be irregular and disturbed, something that in Ingrid’s case was compounded by illness. Such disturbances made her and Lou more prone to having hypnagogic dreams, which are often reported as hallucinations, varying from poorly formed shapes to vivid images of people and animals. They happen mostly at the onset of sleep or during periods of relaxed wakefulness. Similar dreams, known as hypnopompic states, occur at sleep offset. Both can be experienced in successive sleep cycles.
But this doesn’t explain why the couple both sensed the same Tibetan woman. Lou Whittaker has his own theory about the visitation.
“There is such old history on Kanchenjunga. I think she was a strong spirit that had enough influence to break through our reserves and make us feel that she was there.”
LIKE LOU AND Ingrid Whittaker, many mountaineers have sensed unexplainable presences in the high mountains. In 1983, the Australian mountaineer Greg Child was high on Broad Peak in Pakistan when his climbing partner, Pete Thexton, became seriously ill. For hours, through darkness and a storm, Child struggled to get Thexton down the mountain. Throughout the ordeal he had the sense of a presence behind him, gently guiding him in the right direction. “I kept turning around, puzzled to find only darkness behind me,” he writes in his book Thin Air. “But there was definitely someone, or something, there.”
Five years later, the British climber Stephen Venables became the first person to ascend Everest by its Kangshung Face. He was forced to spend a night just below the summit, where he was kept company by an old man. As he began his descent, in an exhausted state, the man encouraged him to keep going. Together they crawled down to the South Summit, where they were joined by Eric Shipton, the long-dead explorer, who helped to warm Venables’s hands.
According to a close friend of Steve Swenson, from Seattle, during a night he spent close to the summit of Everest in the 1990s, Swenson saw several “disembodied heads.” He was nagged to stay awake until sunrise by the heads of a Japanese woman and a Punjabi man, who then encouraged him to hurry as he broke camp. Finally, a third head gave him directions as he climbed down the mountain.
During an expedition on Kanchenjunga in 1978, Joe Tasker climbed alone to a snow cave on the mountain, where he sat waiting for the arrival of “an indistinct group of people I imagined were also on the climb with us.” His climbing partners, Doug Scott and Peter Boardman, admitted to the same sensations. After reaching the summit, when they were heading back to the cave, Boardman was at the back of the group, convinced that there were others following him.
“It was not a thought that needed verification,” writes Joe in his book Savage Arena. “He was simply aware of the presence of someone behind him, just as firmly as he knew we three were in front of him.”
On Everest, in 1975, Doug Scott sensed a presence that spoke to him and guided him while he was climbing difficult sections. Nick Estcourt, who would dream his death on K2 three years later, had a more dramatic experience. Early one morning, he was moving up the fixed ropes between Camps 4 and 5. When he was about 200 feet above Camp 4, he got a feeling that he was being followed. Turning around, he saw another climber. He assumed it was one of the team, trying to catch up. He stopped and waited. The climber was moving extremely slowly. Estcourt shouted down to him, but got no reply. Eventually he decided to press on. Several times he turned around. The figure was still there.
“It was definitely a human figure with arms and legs,” he recounted to Chris Bonington, the team leader, who wrote about the incident in his book Everest the Hard Way. “At one stage I can remember seeing him behind a slight undulation in the slope, from the waist upward, as you would expect, with the lower part of his body hidden in the slight dip.”
After a time, Estcourt turned around to find the slope below him empty. He could see all the way back to Camp 4—it was impossible that the person could have retreated without him knowing. And if he had fallen, he would have seen traces of that as well. When finally he returned to the rest of the team, he quizzed them as to who had been on the rope behind. No one, they told him.
At the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience in Lausanne, Switzerland, scientists have been studying the link between mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience. They point out that the fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—occurred on mountains, and included such components as feeling a presence, seeing a figure, hearing voices, and seeing lights. These similarities of experience suggest to the scientists that exposure to altitude might affect functions relying on brain areas such as the temporoparietal junction and the prefrontal cortex. Prolonged stays at high altitude, especially when linked to social deprivation, can lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions, which are commonly found during ecstatic experiences. Also, the physical and emotional stresses of climbing at altitude release endorphins, which are known to lower the threshold for temporal lobe epilepsy, which in turn might evoke such experiences.
In their book High Altitude Medicine and Physiology, British doctors Michael Ward and Jim Milledge reported that tests conducted on climbers during Himalayan expeditions indicate that above 18,000 feet thought function and perception become increasingly impaired, and above 28,000 feet, hallucinations are common. Dr. Charles Houston, a legendary American mountaineer and the co-discoverer of highaltitude pulmonary edema, told me such hallucinations could be caused by miniature temporal lobe seizures, triggered by fatigue, low blood sugar, personal crisis, or anxiety. They could also be the result of hypoxia, in which there is a diminished supply of oxygen to the brain. By scanning the brains of hospitalized patients suffering from hypoxia due to other causes, scientists have shown neural irregularities, including fluid pockets and swelling of the brain, or edema. When the brain is hypoxic, control of the cortical function is weakened, which impairs the climber’s judgment, but also creates a type of euphoria that makes difficult tasks seem easier. This euphoria is similar to the state of enhanced ability and senses brought about by the flood of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, and adrenaline during high stress.
Greg Child has a simpler theory. “Going to blow-yourmind high altitude creates a world inside of ourselves. When you’re down here you’re not so tuned into the same things as when you’re up high or in some extreme circumstances, wondering if you’re going to make it through the next few hours.”
British mountaineer Adrian Burgess, in our interview, put it even more succinctly: “The higher you go, the more weird things get.”
MOUNTAIN GHOSTS have appeared at lower altitudes. One winter in the late 1960s, Dougal Haston, a Scottish climber, was staying with a friend in an alpine hut in Argentière, near Chamonix, France. They were its only occupants. At around 2:00 A.M. Haston was woken by the sound of someone walking heavily across the floor of the room above them, then clumping down the wooden stairs. The latch to their room rattled. The footsteps went back up the stairs again. Then, silence. Haston believed in ghosts, but didn’t want his companion to think he was crazy, so he said nothing. In the morning, however, his friend asked him if he had heard strange sounds in the night. They decided to search the place but found no trace of anyone having been there.
Bad weather forced them to spend another night in the hut. At 2:00 A.M., the footsteps returned. The door latch rattled. This time, the men were ready. They sprang up and yanked open the door, but there was no sign of anyone in the hallway. Despite being brave mountaineers, neither could face going upstairs. They left the hut early the next day. Just before heading out, Haston checked through the visitors’ book, in which climbers recorded the routes they had completed on surrounding mountains. He was shocked to find a note about the hut guardian being killed in an avalanche. It was a fate that would befall Haston himself, a few years later.
Adrian Burgess stayed in the same hut in 1972. He didn’t know about the ghost, and only learned about it a few years later. The hut was about to be demolished, and there was a lengthy discussion about whether its replacement should be built on the same site or relocated because of the resident spirit.
Burgess is skeptical about the idea of ghosts and spirits on mountains. “In some places I climb,” he told me, “if the ghosts of dead friends were coming to visit me there would be so many of them it would be pretty crowded. I mean, if it was true, the entire alpine hut system would be crawling with howlers. Anyway, thankfully none of them have ever tapped on the tent door. I’d be scared shitless.”
MANY CLIMBERS are reticent about admitting to paranormal experiences, for fear their peers will think them crazy. Not so the Mexican climber Carlos Carsolio, who in 1996, at the age of thirty-three, became the fourth and then-youngest person to climb all fourteen of the world’s highest peaks. We had a long conversation about his experiences. He never used supplementary oxygen on his climbs and he’s had many hallucinations, including the “third man” syndrome, which he says is a normal phenomenon up high. What he calls his “moments of extended reality” are quite another matter. They are, in his words, “a step more.”
One of Carsolio’s most profound experiences was in 1988, after his solo ascent of Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain. By the time he began his descent, night had fallen, and the wind was very strong. He was extremely weak, struggling with the beginning of pulmonary edema and beginning to freeze. His headlamp faded, the windblown snow covered his tracks, and he was soon lost. He had been in this kind of situation before; he knew what he must do to survive.
“I stopped fighting the cold,” he recalled. “I became one with it. Then I became part of the mountain and I didn’t get frozen. I used my energy in a positive way.”
He started to talk to the mountain and the different entities it was revealing to him. “Some of the seracs were female, some of the rocks were male. They were guiding me, telling me where to go. But some of the presences were evil and wanted me to die. The two sides were fighting over this. I was talking with them. With the friendly ones in a friendly way, with the bad ones in a fighting way.”
These conversations went on for hours as Carsolio struggled down through the storm, searching blindly for a narrow snow bridge that he knew was the only safe route through a section of dangerous crevasses. Suddenly he felt a strong presence. He recognized it as a climber he’d known who had died on Makalu—later, he would discover that the man had perished in the very area in which he sensed the presence of his spirit. Eventually, he came across the snow bridge, and from there reached his high camp. This would have been impossible, he believes, without the help of his climbing friend’s spirit and the friendly entities.
“I cannot understand how else I found the bridge, in such a huge place with the wind and the dark night and no lamp and frozen glasses and my exhaustion. It was like finding a needle in a haystack.”
He collapsed inside the tent, still wearing his crampons. Two hours later, when the sun woke him, he could barely breathe and was coughing up blood.
He had a tape recorder in the tent. He managed to record a brief message, saying goodbye to his family and friends. As he signed off, however, he decided he didn’t want to die in a tent on the side of a mountain. He would prefer to die fighting. He started crawling and sliding down the mountain. After several hours, a Polish team passed him on their way up the mountain. He called to them, but they thought he was so close to death that they simply carried on without offering help. By now, his team at base camp could see him through binoculars. They watched his torturous progress—descending a few feet then lying down for half an hour. Finally some Spanish climbers came by. They gave him oxygen, water, and food, and stayed with him until he felt strong enough to carry on alone to the safety of base camp.
Carsolio counts such harrowing experiences among the most memorable and treasured of his life.
“It’s not about the adrenaline,” he insists. “These extended moments are different. They take me to another dimension. They are why I wanted to climb alone and to do such hard routes, so that I could reach them.”
FOUR YEARS LATER, Carsolio went to Kanchenjunga with a team that included Wanda Rutkiewicz, a legendary Polish mountaineer. They arrived at base camp in mid-March, but by early May they had made little progress on the mountain, and the team was ravaged by frostbite and illness. Only he and Rutkiewicz, twenty years his senior, were fit enough to continue on and attempt the summit. Rutkiewicz set out two days ahead of him, but she was slowed by age and a nagging injury from a previous trip and he soon caught up with her. They spent a night at Camp 4, at 7,900 feet, and left at 3:00 A.M. the following morning. Determined to make the summit in a fast, light push and get back the same day, they took a minimum of food and water and no bivouac gear.
After a few hours of climbing, Rutkiewicz slowed to a crawl. She urged Carsolio to go ahead, insisting she would catch up with him after a rest. He climbed all day, regularly looking back at her figure growing ever-smaller on the slopes below him. It was 5:00 P.M. before he reached the summit. The sun was setting, and already the cold of the night was seeping through to his bones. His food and water had run out. It was essential for him to descend as quickly as possible. Carefully, he picked his way down the icy slopes, conscious that exhaustion, hunger, dehydration, and hypoxia could easily add up to a fatal mistake. After three hours, when he was less than a thousand feet below the summit, he came across a familiar rope and followed it to where Rutkiewicz was huddled in a tiny snow cave. Like him, she had nothing to eat or drink. Worse, she was inadequately dressed in a light down suit designed for lower altitudes. She asked Carsolio for his jacket, but he knew he would freeze without it. He encouraged her to descend with him to their high camp but she insisted she wanted to spend the night in the snow cave. She would wait for the sun to come up and warm her, she said, and then she would go for the summit.
Carsolio was horrified. But he was too much in awe of her to argue. She was one of the world’s best Himalayan climbers. She had years of experience behind her, and far more expeditions than he had undertaken. Rutkiewicz was a legend, and he was her acolyte. He sat with her for fifteen minutes until he realized that he was becoming dangerously cold. He stood up. He bid her farewell.
See you later, Wanda.
It was a decision he’d always regret.
“I knew she was in a state of exhaustion and cold but I had not the guts to tell her to go down.”
He waited for her all that night and for much of the next day at their high camp. Eventually he could wait no longer.
“As I was climbing down to Camp 2,” he recalls, “suddenly I knew, right at that very moment, that Wanda was dying. She said goodbye to me. I was climbing down, the terrain was hard, I was much focused, but suddenly my mind was filled with her presence, her femininity. I felt it very strongly.”
A storm forced him to stay at Camp 2 for much of the next day. When finally he set off, he left behind food and water for Wanda, even though he knew there was no hope. Wrung out by grief, physically spent after a week on the mountain, he started to descend a huge, steep wall of ice and rock. On the way up with Wanda, they had fixed this section with ropes, so it should have been straightforward. While moving from one rope to another, however, sorrow overwhelmed him; he lost his focus and forgot to tie a crucial figure-eight knot. Presuming he was secure, he stepped back into thousands of feet of air. The fall was short; his arm caught in a loop of the fixed rope. He was hanging, in shock, when he heard Wanda’s voice.
Don’t worry. I will take care of you.
“I have no doubt that it was real,” he insists. “I was not hallucinating and I’m not crazy. I’m sure it was her. I received it as a message; it was not exactly in words, it was another dimension, a feeling, a presence. I started to cry because I felt guilty about not having told her to come down. I did not take care of her and now she was taking care of me.” He tried to gather himself, to start rappelling again, but huge sobs racked his body. “I was crying and crying, and then I felt her presence again. It was very peaceful. It was like a mother hugging her child.”
Finally, he reached the glacier, where the rest of his team was waiting.
“I was back in the real world, the normal world,” he said. “But this experience—it was very deep. When a climb was not so demanding I never had such experiences. But when it was really extreme, especially when I was on the edge of dying, somehow in that moment, poof! The channel was open.”