The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

GHOST TALES AND HAUNTED PLACES
" But zvhcre is your father staying? " continued the carHn.
" In the house which I have just come from."
" And where have you just come from? "
" From my father's house," answered the simple lad.
" But where is your father's house? "
" Just where my grandfather built it," answered the
simple lad.
And in this wise the unmannerly question and the deft
answer went on, the one on the heels of the other, until the
cock crew.
The old people say that a godly man went purposely one
night to meet the carlin, and that, before she could ask him
any questions, he shook the Bible in her face, and that
Gaoth a Bhiohaill, the Wind of the Bible, drove her away
forever from the Isle of Eigg.
The Washer of the Death- Shrouds.
One of the strangest of all apparitions in the hcan-nighe,
or washing-woman. For one to see the washing of the
death-shrouds by the bean-nighe in some lonely and remote
loch, or in the eerie pool of a river, and sometimes even at
a fording-place, was regarded as one of the commonest
warnings of death in the Highlands and Hebrides. The
bean-nighe might be observed by a ford, diligently washing
the linen of persons about to be overtaken by death, or
folding and beating the linen as it lay on a stone almost
entirely submerged in the water.
In Perthshire the washing-woman is described as a
creature, small and rotund, and clad in flimsy raiment of
emerald hue. The person seeing her, it was held, must not
hurry away, but should try to steal up behind her, and
surprise her by asking for whom she was washing the
death-shrouds.
In Skye, however, she has been likened to a squat creature
resembling a small, pitiful child. If caught when " dreeing
her weird," she related to her captor what fate awaited him.
She responded to all his questionings, if assured that her
captor would answer truthfully all questions she, in turn,
put to him.
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