The Ghost of Toni Kurz
Will Hempstead, April 2023“Tap, tap, tap”
What could be making that sound?
“Tap, tap, tap”
To me, the sound was distinctive and unmistakable. I was utterly convinced that the sound was of somebody tapping an ice axe against the rock, only several meters from where I lay.
I tried to work rationally through my surroundings. I was lying on a flattened section of snow chopped out from a narrow ridge. My end of the rope was clipped into a belay in some rocks to my left, Iain’s end snaked off to his chosen ledge around ten meters away. Our gear was all clipped into the belay along with my axes, stove, rucksack, and outer boots. It must have been very late at night, maybe three am, but I had no real idea. I had just been lying looking up at the milky way slowly turn above, unable to sleep.
Why couldn’t I sleep? It was night two on the hill. Overnight the temperature had sunk to below minus twenty degrees and there was a savage wind whipping across the summit ridge. In these temperatures, the gas that powers our stove had frozen leaving no way to melt snow for water. We went to bed dehydrated, fatigued, and basically unacclimatised at just below four thousand meters.
“Tap, tap, tap.”
I could not come up with a logical explanation for the sound. Could it be some hardwear knocking against the belay in the wind? Could one of my axes have somehow worked free from the snow? These explanations all seemed unlikely – it was windy, but not that windy. Besides, I couldn’t shake my immediate conviction that the sound was somebody deliberately tapping an ice axe against the rock.
Inevitably, my thoughts began to wander. The history of the alpine face we lay on top of crept into my mind. For me, mountaineering and the media aspect of it especially tend to be full of macho exaggeration and ridiculous over-dramatisation. But, really, how many people had lost their lives trying to get to this small bit of crumbly rock on top of the ridge? How many had lost their lives trying to get down?
In nineteen thirty-six, Toni Kurz set out from his native Bavaria for an attempt at the unclimbed Eiger North Face. Disaster struck Toni and his talented team of climbers when one of the party fell high on the face. The impact of the fall, transmitted through their static hemp ropes, killed three of the team leaving Toni suspended. Rescuers tried to reach him but could not ascend to where he hung. Toni unbraided his hemp rope, making it three times as long, and managed to abseil towards help but it was not enough. After two days of effort, Toni Kurz died aged twenty three. He had made it so close to the rescue team that they could tap his boots with their ice axe.
“Tap, tap, tap.”
The conviction I felt at that moment was truly bizarre. The utter conviction that Toni Kurz was stood on the summit of the Eiger just a few meters from me, tapping his ice axe against the rock. And I didn’t feel at all threatened by him – I had an overwhelming feeling that he was happy. Happy that we had made it to the top of this particular piece of rock and ice which meant so much to so many people.
“Tap, tap, tap.”
So, did I really meet a ghostly apparition on the summit of the Eiger? Well, probably not. In hindsight, I find it entertaining that I ruled out all of the logical explanations because they ‘seemed unlikely’, and decided that therefore it must be a ghost. But this genuinely made so much sense at the time. I think that there is something extremely emotive about Toni’s story which has captured so many climbers imaginations. When you start to strip everything back, maybe it’s these powerful stories which stick. Maybe this is just what happens when you only consume a litre of water and half a pack of jellybabies, and don’t sleep at all in fifty hours – the mind ends up in a suggestive state, vulnerable to the supernatural.
Or, maybe, Toni really is up there waiting to greet climbers on the summit. If you want to find out, I suppose you’ll just have to go up there yourself.
Climbing ‘this historic piece of choss’ (Iain’s words) was a fantastic, iconic experience and I am really fortunate to have climbed it with Iain. I feel that we really complimented one anothers personal stengths and weaknesses – Iain is a really skilled mountaineer with great technical knowlege and solid grasp of the nuances of decision making in the mountains. I am slightly better at doing pull ups than him. Here’s to many more good routes together in the future!