Over in England circa 1934, a very peculiar man had a very peculiar plan. The man was Maurice Wilson, a God-fearing Yorkshire lad chock full of self-belief and unrealistic expectations, and the plan was to ascend Mount Everest with little climbing experience, rubbish equipment, and a whole lot of faith. He was quite a character, and we know everything we know about his attempt and his various eccentricities because his diary was found along with his body a year later.

Wilson had wanted to ascend most of the way in a second-hand bi-plane, despite not knowing how to fly. This didn’t work out, even if he did manage to fly all the way to India, and he set off up the mountain on foot instead. Incredibly, on his second attempt, he passed 21,000 feet before his Sherpa companions refused to continue and begged him to turn back. He pushed on alone, and his body was found wrapped in a tent a little higher up. An optimist right up to the bitter end, his final diary entry was “Off again. Gorgeous day”.

In 1960, the plot thickened when a Chinese expedition came across both a tent and a woman’s shoe at 21,000 feet. Together with the women’s garments supposedly found in Wilson’s rucksack and the fact that, according to the diary, he worked in a women’s clothing store, these items were posited to have belonged to the ill-fated climber. So he might not have reached the summit, but he gave it a hell of a go — and probably looked fabulous the whole time.

Everest and mysteries go together like coffee and donuts. Questions of who did this, who saw that, and when, and how, and with whom, and why should they be believed, all abound when discussing Everest’s tallest tales. The mountain is a breeding ground for this kind of speculation, and the question of whether or not Andrew Irvine and George Mallory were the first to reach the summit has endured as one of its greatest mysteries. 

Some believe that Mallory and Irvine were the first to conquer Everest in 1924, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s famous 1953 expedition. And there’s little doubt that Irvine and Mallory at least came very close. In a letter to his wife written six weeks prior to the climb (via the New York Times), Mallory was convinced that it was going to happen, writing “It is almost unthinkable…that I shan’t get to the top; I can’t see myself coming down defeated.” It’s entirely possible that they did indeed reach the summit before dying during their descent. 

Irvine’s body remains missing, but Mallory’s was discovered at almost 28,000 feet in 1999, 75 years after their attempt. The discovery of his body, eerily well-preserved and naturally mummified, reignited people’s interest in the mystery — but fell just short of solving it. The final piece of the puzzle is thought to be Mallory’s camera, which he almost certainly had with him. It still hasn’t been found, though it’s highly sought after for the secrets it might hold.

Of the numerous corpses lying in plain sight on Everest’s slopes, some achieve a greater level of morbid infamy than others. The most well-known among these is probably the poor soul known as “Green Boots.” So named for the bright neon green climbing boots still attached to its feet, Green Boots has become kind of a grim landmark for those attempting the climb from the north face. Almost every climber passes the Green Boots on the way to the summit, and most stop to take a rest at the adjacent cave.

The man is believed to have been Tsewang Paljor, an Indian climber who perished in an infamous blizzard in 1996, and his family are understandably none too pleased with the Green Boots moniker nor the macabre spectacle that has been made of his remains. Some solace came in May 2014 though, when Paljor’s corpse was actually reported to be missing, despite the presumed difficulty of moving it at that height.

The yeti has been firmly rooted in Himalayan legend for a long time. Mostly confined to superstitious whisperings and folkloric tall tales at first, the notion of the yeti (lesser known as “snow-bigfoot“) started earning more serious treatment after 1951, as CNN tells it. That’s when mountaineer Eric Shipton came across a large, oddly-shaped footprint he believed belonged to that most abominable of snowmen. The photographs he took were printed in newspapers around the world, and yeti-fever started to spread like a snowstorm. The U.S. State Department even laid down some rules to be followed in the event of a yeti encounter in 1959.

Since then, other tantalizing discoveries have included thick tufts of black hair supposedly found at 19,000 feet on Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary, and there was even a scalp found in a Nepalese woman’s home in 1960, thought to have once belonged to a yeti (mistakenly, as it turns out), and now housed in a nearby monastery.

Pesky science hasn’t gone and disproved the yeti’s existence outright just yet, though it has come close. In 2017, a study of nine DNA samples thought to be from yetis or yeti-like animals found that they mostly belonged to bears from the region. The legend lives on, though. And let’s be real: if you were just a simple yeti trying to make your way in the world, and that world obsessed over every morsel you left behind and still insisted on calling you abominable, you’d probably want to stay hidden too.