Maurice Wilson’s 1934 Everest attempt was the first effort by a person to climb Everest alone. Its defining sequence—weeks of fasting, a flight into the high mountains, a deliberate crash landing, and an ascent from which Wilson never returned—later became both a ghost story and a signpost toward Alleluia Cone’s own dream of climbing without companions.

The 1934 Attempt

Wilson prepared by starving himself for three weeks, seeking what he understood as a profound union between body and soul: he believed that this would make the mountain too weak to tear them apart. He then took a light aircraft as high as it would carry him, deliberately crash-landed in a snowfield, and headed upward. He never came back. His body was discovered by a Chinese expedition in 1960, which filmed it; in Alleluia Cone’s account, Wilson’s ghost later recalled his irritation at this posthumous filming.

The Ghost and Its Afterlife

In Alleluia Cone’s recollection, the attempt returned to her not as a mountaineering record but as an encounter on the mountain. After she came through an ice-fall, she saw Maurice Wilson seated on an outcrop in the lotus position, his eyes shut beneath a tartan tam-o’-shanter as he chanted a mantra. His archaic clothing and unexpected presence led her to identify him as a spectre. He opened his eyes, nodded, and accompanied her for the rest of the day, sometimes walking beside her and sometimes hanging in the air as she climbed. On one steep slope he belly-flopped into the snow and glided uphill as though borne by an invisible toboggan. Alleluia found herself treating him like an old acquaintance, though she later could not explain why.

Wilson’s ghost spoke of the loneliness of having little company and described his posthumous observations, including the yeti’s delicate, circuitous, and fruitless mating ritual on the South Col. As he patiently recounted his own ascent and what he had seen after death, Alleluia felt that the vision was no accident: Wilson seemed a signpost, declaring a kinship between the solitary climber and herself. The encounter gave birth to her secret, apparently impossible dream of an unaccompanied ascent of Everest. It also carried a darker possibility: she wondered whether Wilson had appeared as the angel of her death.

Public Account and Private Meaning

Alleluia Cone recounted the ghost encounter to pupils at Brickhall Fields Girls’ School, whose written invitations had brought her to speak. Their questions about ghosts carried both skepticism and fascination, and she answered by describing the figure she had seen after crossing the ice-fall. She said that climbers often become embarrassed after descending from the peaks and omit such encounters from their accounts, yet admitted that ghosts existed despite her own reputation for keeping her feet on solid ground.

Her classroom story left out the most consequential meaning the encounter had acquired for her: the apparition had seemed like a sign of kinship and had helped kindle her private ambition to climb alone. The difference between what she told the pupils and what she withheld makes the ghost episode more than an anecdote about Everest. It preserves an unresolved tension between the mountaineer’s public account and the private conviction that an unexplained vision had pointed toward her future—and perhaps her death.

The Body Behind the Vision

The apparition’s significance is sharpened by the bodily cost of Alleluia Cone’s mountaineering. Before her Everest ascent, shooting pains led Dr. Mistry to diagnose fallen arches, worsened by years in unsuitable shoes; she advised toe-clenching exercises, running barefoot upstairs, and sensible footwear, warning that without care Alleluia might be crippled by forty. Gibreel Farishta later joked that she had climbed Everest with spears in her feet. Against that physical vulnerability, Maurice Wilson’s ghostly passage across the mountain makes the solitary attempt resonate not only as an ambition but as a question of what a body can endure.