[citation needed] The blue men of the Minch (also known as Storm Kelpies) were said to occupy the stretch of water between Lewis and mainland Scotland, looking for sailors to drown and stricken boats to sink.
Resembling a capsized boat, sightings of it swimming have been reported for one and a half centuries, with local legend being that lambs were once offered annually to it.
The ship, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) off the coast, reported a sea serpent around 40 metres (130 ft) in length, with several bumps protruding from the water along its back.
[1] In traditional Hebridean folklore, the Sithchean, or fairies, are a morally-ambiguous supernatural race of small humanoid creatures that inhabit knolls and places of special significance across the Hebrides.
The Sithchean are thought to be the distorted folk memory of the Iron Age Pictish peoples, who inhabited the Hebrides before they amalgamated into the Gaelic and Viking societies that became dominant after their end.
Sithchean men are described as being roughly 4 ft (1.2 m) in height, and wearing clothes not exclusively (but most commonly) dyed red with "crotal" lichen.
The Bean Shith (banshee) (literally "fairy woman") is noted as having no nostrils, webbed feet and long sagging breasts that cannot suckle her young.
Craig Hasten, a castle-like knoll to the south of the village of Baile Mòr in Paible, North Uist, is known locally as a dwelling place of fairies.
[5] On the Isle of Harris a Cu Sith (fairy dog) is said to leave oversized pawprints on the sand that disappear halfway across the beach.
In South Uist, a woman walking with two friends in the pitch dark watched as a self-illuminating dog, the size of a collie but with a small head and no eyes, ran towards her.