Baobhan Sith

The baobhan sith (from Scottish Gaelic, «fairy woman» or «evil fairy») is a female supernatural being from the tradition of the Scottish Highlands, considered a kind of vampire or succubus of Gaelic folklore. It is not properly a reanimated dead, but a creature of the fairy people (the sìth), linked to the solitary places of the moors and mountains. Its stories, collected by folklorists of the 19th and 20th centuries, present it as a nocturnal predator that stalks travelers and hunters who venture alone through the highlands. Like many figures of Celtic folklore, it embodies the dangers of the wild nature and of the encounter with the supernatural at the limits of the human world.

The baobhan sith usually appears as a young woman of great beauty, dressed in a long green dress, a color that in Gaelic folklore is associated with fairies and death. Under that seductive appearance she hides, according to tradition, hooves of a roe deer or goat instead of feet, a trait that reveals her non-human nature and that she sometimes hides under the skirt. Sharp nails like claws are also attributed to her, with which she wounds her victims. Her beauty is a lure: the creature uses it to attract men before revealing her true predatory nature. In some versions she can transform into a raven or other birds, a frequent motif among the supernatural female figures of Celtic folklore.

The most widespread tale presents a group of hunters or shepherds who spend the night in a cabin or solitary shelter and evoke, in jest, the company of some women to dance. Shortly after some beautiful young women dressed in green appear who begin to dance with them; during the dance, the baobhan sith sink their nails and drink the blood of their partners, leaving them exsanguinated. In the classic version, one of the men is saved because he had taken refuge among the horses: the iron of the horseshoes keeps the fairies at bay, unable to approach. This narrative scheme, the seduction that turns mortal, functions as a cautionary tale about the dangers of desire and imprudence in the night of the moors.

The main weakness of the baobhan sith is iron, the metal before which the fairies of Celtic folklore retreat: horseshoes and iron objects repel them. As a nocturnal creature, it must disappear with the arrival of dawn. Tradition also attributes to it the inability to cross running water, a common limit to many supernatural beings. The baobhan sith belongs to the broad family of vampiric and seductive fairy beings of European folklore, related to the leannan sìth and to other «green ladies», and is often cited as one of the Scottish examples of folkloric vampirism, precursor of the female vampires of modern literature.