The Deerness Mermaid: Our Best Attested Nineteenth-Century Cryptid May 6, 2025
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
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!
Are Mermaids Fairies? July 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Medieval, Modern
Chris starts our new podcast episode (Mermaid 101) with this question (see title) and I answer ‘yes’. Mermaids (which have featured for over a decade on this site) are social supernatural beings who happen to live in the water rather than on land. They are essentially marine fairies. But there is an important difference in […]
Early Modern Fairy Sex Spell June 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month’s podcast is on sex and the supernatural. The most extraordinary text I ran across in preparing for our hour ride is the following spell from an early modern English text, edited by Frederika Bain in her ‘The Binding of the Fairies: Four Spells’, Preternature 2 (2012), 323-354. It describes the ritual you should […]
Karl Banse: The Man Who Made the Case for Mermaids May 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Just a quick post as we move towards the summer. The podcast goes on with me and Chris recently talking about fairy artifacts, the Philip experiment (‘how to invent a ghost’) and this month ‘spectral evidence: the supernatural in court’. I, meanwhile, am diving into mermaid-lore, a love that started many years ago on this […]
Victorian Urban Legends: Fine Art February 25, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : UncategorizedA couple of fine art urban legends. We live in a world where painting no longer has the same social value: what would be the modern equivalents of these? Drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com A man who was furnishing saw in Wardour-street an old portrait which he admired, but for which the dealer asked, as […]
Headingley Monster February 24, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Here is a weird and disturbing story from the Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 16 Apr 1912: Leeds Family Terrorised; Woman Bitten. For three months past, a strange little beast has been alarming a Headingley household. It has been variously held to be weasel, a rat, or some strange creature from the East. On several, occasions the animal […]
The Wood Diva February 5, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
***I’ve been absent for a couple of months because I was locked out of the account! Just to let you know that Chris and I continue to do our podcasts and there has been an episode on medieval x-files and now bird spirits. This is a fragment of an article on Fairy Census 2 I’ve […]
The Dancing Fairies of Sennen Cove: December 12, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month Chris and I have been enjoying, on the Boggart and Banshee podcast, a fascinating fairy encounter at Sennen Cove, a hamlet, in Cornwall. In 1888 two young women go out to the well at midnight, up on the hill behind their house. I’ve put on this Victorian OS map a red line for […]
The Modern Western Ghost and Its Zombie Origins November 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern
This month’s Boggart and Banshee podcast is on ghosts and shrouds (Shrouded in Mystery: The Origins of the Iconic Sheeted Ghost). As often with Chris’s choices I didn’t at first get the point: I can only get so excited about textiles… But my attention picked up as I realised (ever the slow learner) that the […]
Horse Spirits: Colt-Pixy or Pixy-Colt? October 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
The latest episode of Boggart and Banshee is on horse spirits and Chris and I disagree on, well, just about everything… There is also a fun accompanying book with seventeen different tales of horse spirits (UK, US). However, you can listen to the podcast for that. I’ve, instead, been caught up with one very simple […]
The When of Levitation in the West September 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Fun and games on the latest Boggart and Banshee podcast with almost an hour given over to questions of levitation and teleportation. As always when I talk to Chris there were revelations, things I’d not realised before. The point that really blew me away was the chronology of levitation. I had assumed that people had […]
The Fairy Census: End Game August 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite
In 2014 (inspired by Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, which I had just edited) I started the Fairy Census. The aim was to gather together first-hand encounters with fairies; or unusual supernatural experiences that could be understood in fairy terms. It took me to 2017 to get to 500 encounters, which were then published freely online. […]
Immortals and Itinerants July 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month’s Boggart and Banshee Podcast concerns the immortals in our midst: the men and (in some rare cases) the women who are supposed to live for ever. I’ve long been interested in the most famous of these, the Wandering Jew: the individual cursed by Christ who traipsed from place-to-place imparting wisdom or (in some […]
Devil at the Wedding (Ritual) June 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Chris twisted my arm this month to do a podcast on wedding superstitions. I was rather pessimistic about how interesting this would be (dresses, jilting…), but after a couple of weeks of reading I’d changed my mind. As one folklorist explained things to me ‘it’s all about sex and death’. Here just to give you […]
The Voodoo Soldiers of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh May 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
In 1836 some children discovered a hidden niche on the edge of Arthur’s Seat. In this niche were three shelves, two with eight and one with one miniature coffin and body. Each ‘unit’ had four elements: a coffin, a coffin lid, a doll and clothes. These coffins are the subject of this month’s Boggart and […]
