What or who might be haunting the bothy then? One grim story goes that it’s the ghost of a woman that long ago was forced by a storm to take refuge with her baby in the cottage for a number of days. Driven mad with hunger she killed and ate her child and was then seen passing through Rannoch Moor “wild-eyed with despair that no one dared cross her path”  to eventually become “lost in the morasses of the place”.

Sir Robert Grieve perpetuated another story, one that had supposedly once been told within climbing circles. This was that the bothy was haunted by its original resident, a ghillie called McCook, who hanged himself off the back of the front door. 

Both of these tales were eventually debunked. Paddy Buckley explains in his aforementioned piece in the Scottish Mountaineering Journal that the first tale about the storm-crazed woman was made up by the estate stalker and his wife who both lived in the cottage in the 1930s. The reason being that they were fed up with unwelcome travellers trying to stay there. Sir Robert Grieve’s tale about the ghillie was quashed when one of McCook’s descendants, on discovering the legend, declared that he had in fact died in his bed at 85 in Newtonmore where he’d retired to see out his last days. 

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Those are the explanations, but still strange stories from the bothy circulate.

Andy Lamb was settling down to sleep in the bothy when he heard footsteps outside. “Good. People to talk to tonight,” he recalls in his autobiography, as quoted on the website Wales Outdoors. “I heard the feet wander up to the front door, but the door didn’t open. I heard the feet crunch over the frozen snow to the rear of the building. I felt sure I heard the door to the store room open. I was alone in a remote area of the Highlands but was, by now, used to this; used to long dark nights and early starts, used to sounds carried by the wind, used to hearing rock-falls and animals of various sizes moving about at night in their search for food.

“But this time, these footsteps, I was afraid. I buried my head in my sleeping bag and hid from the danger. I must have spent a good half an hour warm but shivering before slowly inching my face out of the bag and taking a look around me. All was as it had been. No more footsteps, no doors opening or closing. A couple of candles provided a warm glow. But the fear was still with me. I wrote in my diary, to take my mind away from the bothy and back to the brightness of the day on Ben Alder.”

According to Lamb, a couple of years later he was chatting to some mountaineers and they got to discussing Scotland and bothies. He mentioned his story and one of the men said that he would not stay at Ben Alder Cottage alone and knew no one who would. 

The most recent ghost story from Ben Alder, at least that can be found online, is only a couple of years old. “Woke up at 2am, loud old fashioned music playing in the room next door,” writes someone in a thread about the bothy on WalkHighlands. “Could hear shuffling like someone was having a party and dancing and jumping around… the room turned out to be empty. I’ll never return”.