The Deerness Mermaid: Our Best Attested Nineteenth-Century Cryptid May 6, 2025
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Dear friends, this month’s podcast is on the Deerness Mermaid: the Best Attested Nineteenth-Century Cryptid Background. What is the DM? Between 1887 and 1899, something strange haunted the waters off Deerness, Orkney. Locals called it a mermaid; newspapers across Britain ran breathless headlines. It had a black head, long white neck, and a white body with two waving arms. It swam like a human, often on its back, and once appeared with a smaller version of itself: its baby. Hundreds saw it. Some tried to shoot it. One of the DM’s most endearing feature was its habit of not dying… Descriptions were surprisingly consistent across twelve years: the creature had no whiskers, a mane or dark ridge of hair, and was entirely aquatic, at least it was never seen on land. Note its strange head shape. Suggestions ranged from manatees and dugongs (implausible, given geography) to seals. But it didn’t match any known seal species. No known seal swims routinely on its back or has a long, obviously articulated neck. A hybrid seal is a tempting theory, though even this stretches credibility given the apparent arrival of a baby. That also means that a breeding population had to be found nearby.
(Note ‘obscure’ line is Hybrid/Abnormal Seal. If problems reading try ‘open tab on next line’)
This wasn’t a blurry photo or a lone witness. This was a widely observed, repeatedly described animal that confounded naturalists and delighted journalists. The Deerness ‘mermaid’ remains one of the best-attested zoological anomalies in British history, and one of the strangest. Whatever it was, it played its part, perfectly, in the Victorian silly season.
I’ve included here a link to the source book for the Deerness Mermaid (UK, US), about 20,000 words worth of nineteenth-century writing on the problem and a short essay by me.
Above is a table showing you a simple tick/cross approach to the problem. Note ‘the breasts’ are controversial! The photo that heads this post is my AI attempt to show you what the Deerness Mermaid looked like on the basis of our many descriptions. The black and white slightly blurred take is just to annoy Chris!
I’m thinking in the next weeks to set up a substack entitled ‘For a British Mythology’ on Welsh, Scottish and English supernatural traditions and my attempt to reconstitute the ‘prior-mythology’ of the island. If I could get a hundred people to kick off I’ll probably go ahead. Please let me know if there is any interest: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
I’ve also not been announcing podcasts on here. There is now a large backlog. We’ve done almost fifty! Chris is AMAZING!
We seem to be entering choppy water internationally. As posts are intermittent I wish all readers good luck and safe journeys in the rapids of the 2020s!
