He Saw Something on Mount Everest That Shouldn’t Exist

It's little wonder that Mount Everest, Earth's highest mountain, has an abundance of supernatural phenomena, including ghost sightings and other unexplained occurrences. Some bizarre and terrifying accounts have emerged of the hauntings and strangeness that surround this treacherous peak. Spirits begging for food. Pemba Dorji, a Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer, has climbed Mount Everest twice, and he and his partner were the first to marry atop the peak in 2005. During his climb the year before that, he reported witnessing very strange apparitions in the form of black shadows which seemed to be approaching him for help. He noted that during a rest break when he paused at a mound of rocks, he observed shadowy figures coming towards him. The shadowy shapes were stretching out their hands and begging him for something to eat. He described the figures as spirits in the form of black shadows coming towards him, and theorized that the apparitions were possibly the spirits of mountaineers who had perished during past climbs. His theory makes sense because sometimes either tradition or safety concerns have required that a deceased climber's body be left on the mountain. Rescue missions on Everest can be determined as extremely dangerous, with stranded climbers sometimes left exposed to the elements for so long that they don't survive. Ghosts possess local villages. In the village of Bemni, a local Himalayan hamlet 9,000 feet up, possession is an everyday tradition sometimes used to explain moods and emotions. The real fear of villages is of being possessed by an evil spirit, by the ghosts that dwell in the surrounding forest. It's believed that these spirits can make them ill or completely incapacitate them. This is what made the experience of resident Mohan Singh all the more terrifying. One winter's evening in 2009, he was collecting wood in the forest when an unknown man approached him and asked, why are you cutting that tree? Mohan later said that the sky suddenly went black, it was as if he had been struck partially blind. The man then grabbed at his shirt and Mohan was shocked to observe that the palm of the ghost's hand was on one side of his body, but the specter's fingertips reached right across to the other side. Bizarrely, the ghost's hair fell to his waist and the hank was as thick as a child's arm. Even more terrifyingly, during Mohan's struggle with the ghost, it changed dramatically in size, one minute being nine foot tall and the next the height of a chicken. Mohan felt as if he was fighting for his life, but finally he managed to break free of the ghost, who instantly vanished. However, he returned home with a severe fever and believing that he had been possessed by the spirit. The fever only passed after he had performed a special exorcism ceremony arranged by a Hindu priest. A visiting BBC journalist in 2013 was told that such experiences are not uncommon, with the surrounding forests full of danger and the village itself only protected from ghosts by its many temples. Another village resident claimed to have encountered a fox with a human head, while others had met talking snakes guarding pots of gold. Helpful phantom climbers. There have been many reports of accompanying presences, sometimes called a guiding hand or benevolent entity, assisting and even conversing with the climbers scaling Mount Everest. In 1975 Dougal Haston and Doug Scott made a groundbreaking climb on a new route up the southwest face of Everest. This included surviving an enforced bivouac in the freezing low oxygen conditions on the way down. The astonishing aspect was that Haston and Scott claimed to be accompanied by a quote third climber who aided their survival during that particularly brutal night. The phantom mountaineer chatted, cracked jokes and laughed with the two men, they said providing extra company and encouragement. Haston and Scott claimed that this third ghost climber helped them make it through the night, enabling their descent the following day. Baba Harbhajan Singh was an Indian army soldier who perished in 1967 after slipping and drowning in a glacier. He had been leading a column of mules carrying supplies to a remote outpost in the Himalayas. His body was recovered three days later and cremated with full honours, however it became known that the search party had been led by Singh's own ghost. It was reported that he had entered soldiers dreams and informed them of his death, but more eerily he would also randomly materialise on horseback directing the search party to his body. Even to this day soldiers posted at the Napa La Pass are convinced that Singh's ghost protects them, even maintaining that his spirit warns them of any impending attack at least three days in advance. It's reported that during flag meets even the Chinese army sets a chair aside to honour Singh. The water from a shrine built in his memory is reputed to heal ailing soldiers, while accounts of his ghost visiting the camps at night regularly emerge. His spectre is said to wake up soldiers who fall asleep while on watch and some even say that Singh's ghost still protects India's border against any intended attacks. The Still Missing. In the harsh Mount Everest conditions avalanches, slippery inclines and extreme temperatures can prove fatal with unidentified corpses often abandoned or frozen in the snow. In 2001 French snowboarder Marco Sofredi was the first person to successfully snowboard down the iconic site, then returned in 2002 to descend the mountain's steepest slope, Hornbine Couloir. Having reached the summit in waning daylight with a cloudy sky, he ignored his trusted Sherpa assistance advice and departed immediately on the dangerous descent. Sofredi was not seen alive again, but as the Sherpas later packed up gear at the camp they looked down to see the mysterious figure of a man stand up then slide silently down the mountain on a snowboard. They knew that nobody else was on the mountain with the climbing season long past. When they investigated the area where they had sighted the figure there were no snowboarding tracks to be found anywhere. In 2017 four bodies were discovered in a tent at the highest camp on Everest just a few thousand feet from the summit. Analysts concluded that the campers passed away due to altitude sickness. The high strangeness of this discovery was that none of the local climbing agencies reported any climbers missing, so those found have never been identified. Over 340 people have died in attempts to climb Mount Everest. Ghost, UFOs and Yetis. Frank Smythe is generally regarded as the first professional mountaineer and may have reported the earliest recorded UFO sighting on Everest. He attempted the climb three times in the 1930s and also snapped controversial photos of Yeti footprints on the way. In a June 1933 descent from one of the mountain's notorious death zones, Smythe suddenly sensed that he was not alone. During a rest break he encountered the presence of an accompanying man. Smythe then divided his mint cake and turned to share half of it with the phantom companion. Later Smythe observed what he described as two curious looking objects floating in the sky. The two dark bulbous UFOs hovered above him, one with what he called squat underdeveloped wings and the other a beak-like protuberance. Twice he tested his eyesight but the mysterious objects remained pulsating above him until they finally disappeared behind a passing mist. Yetis wander freely. Huge simian creatures living around the Himalayas have been observed and reported in western circles since 1832. Explorers were informed of the ferocious creatures by their local porters and warned that humans could be abducted as a food source. They were told that the best way to escape the Yetis was to run downhill as the creature's long hair would fall over their eyes and obscure their vision. The best evidence of real Yetis eventually came from photographs of numerous large footprints discovered in snow on Mount Everest. Some of these images were snapped last century by Himalayan mountaineer Eric Shipton. He described finding the strange footprints of at least two of the creatures on one of the glaciers of the Minlang Basin at a height of about 19,000 feet. He stated that the imprints seemed to be very fresh, probably no more than 24 hours old, and that his team had no doubt whatever that the so-called Yetis or wild men had made the tracks. Previous expeditions had viewed in the distance the large dark creatures moving against the snow of the Laptala Pass. Shipton's 1951 photograph caused a sensation because it had been taken by a member of a scientific team. Despite many attempts to debunk the existence of the Yeti, no one has ever been able to attribute its distinctive tracks to any other animal.