A sighting of a fetch is generally taken as a portent of its exemplar's looming death, though John and Michael Banim report that if the double appears in the morning rather than the evening, it is instead a sign of a long life in store.
Since it is glossed with the Old English word mære, which denotes female supernatural being associated with causing illness and nightmares, it could be the origin of the Hiberno-English fetch.
[15][16] More recently, "The Fetch" is the malevolent narrator of Patrick McCabe's 2010 novel The Stray Sod Country, wherein it temporarily inhabits the bodies of the residents of a small Irish town, causing them to commit both psychological and physical harm to themselves and others.
In it, the eponymous "fetch" (actually described as a Scottish Cailleach or "carlin" (hag)) is a portent of impending death for the Leith family, leaving a trail of loch water behind her.
The story has most recently been anthologised in a reprint collection of Aickman's work titled The Wine-Dark Sea (London: Faber, 2014).
In Dead Heat by Patricia Briggs, Charles and Anna encounter a fetch pretending to be a preschooler named Amethyst.