Vampires from the Deep?

Mermaids

Among my favorites is a legend which has lamias swimming the sea in like mermaids. They grasp the bow of a boat with their hands and ask the crew if Alexander the Great is dead. If the crew replies that he is still alive, the lamias, rejoicing at the tiding, gladly conduct the ship to its destination. If the crew replies that he is dead, they conjure up a storm which sinks the ship. The crew then drown. Since the lamia has a vampiric reputation going back to pagan Greek times, it doesn't seem to be a long stretch to suppose that the fate of the doomed crews involved more than merely drowning. And of course the most popular image of a lamia is the one in which she has the upper body of a woman and the lower body of serpent. I don't know if in this tale the lower body had the tail of a fish or not. Anyway, both fish and serpents have scales.

I find the malicious side of mermaid lore well expressed by Gwen Benwell and Arthur Waugh in their book, Sea Enchantress (c. 1961), p. 13:

"...the mermaid is the femme fatale of the sea; she lures man to his destruction, and usually he goes unresisting to his doom."

In many Scottish tales, mermaids were gentle creatures. But this is not always the case. In the story of "The Laird of Lorntie", a lord was returning to his castle with a servant when he heard the cries for help from a beautiful woman in a nearby loch. She appeared to be drowning and the lord rushed off to save her. But the servant recognised the reality of the situation and rescued his master from his folly in the nick of time. After the servant explained his forceful rescue, the mermaid then admitted:

"Lorntie, Lorntie, Were it na your man, I had gart your heart's blood Skirl in my pan."

There are also tales in which mermaids caused shipwreck by luring sailors into dangerous waters with their charm and beauty and devoured them as they drowned.

Good examples of this are among the folk tales of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, near the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. Here the mermaids play the role of sirens – they would sing from rocks and their enchanting song would lure sailors to come dangerously close to these rocks. Then suddenly a terrible storm would arise and force the ships to crash into the rocks. The mermaids would then carry the sailors down into the depths of the sea and devour them.

The Channel Islanders called these mermaids 'seirenes'. But at least according to the testimony of one islander, a school teacher who saw six of them on a beach, they had the upper body of a woman and the lower body of a fish.

On the west coast of France there are also many places that have tales of siren-mermaids. It seems often the case here that the siren-mermaid led her victims to death for the sake of fiendish fun rather than to satisfy her appetite. But in one old song sung in Poitou, a diver searching for the golden keys of a princess is lured to his death by such a siren. The princess later tells the siren that she has reason enough to sing – she has the sea to drink and the princess's lover to eat.

There are also tales where a mermaid lures a man into the sea and then marries him, and they then live together beneath the sea and have children. In the legend of Matthew Trewella told in Cornwall, a beautiful mermaid came up a stream from the sea and heard Matthew singing as a church chorister. She lured him down into the sea. He was never heard again, but he could be heard singing in Pendour Cove to his mermaid bride. In another version, the mermaid took the complete form of a woman and attended the services of the church at Zennor for many generations before being enthralled with Matthew's singing. The congregation was already wondering about her since she had never aged through the years. And there is a sequel tale in which the skipper of a ship dropped anchor off Pendover Cove. The mermaid rose from the sea and complained to the skipper that his anchor was laying across the door to underwater home where she, Matthew, and their children lived. The skipper obligingly raises his anchor. When he returned to Zennor, he informed the people about the fate of Matthew Trewella.

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