Kelpie
Some accounts state that the kelpie retains its hooves when appearing as a human, leading to its association with the Christian idea of Satan as alluded to by Robert Burns in his 1786 poem "Address to the Devil".
The origins of narratives about the creature are unclear, but the practical purposes of keeping children away from dangerous stretches of water and warning young women to be wary of handsome strangers has been noted in secondary literature.
The first recorded use of the term to describe a mythological creature, then spelled kaelpie, appears in the manuscript of an ode by William Collins, composed some time before 1759[2] and reproduced in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh of 1788.
[5] The late 19th century saw the onset of an interest in transcribing folklore, and recorders were inconsistent in spelling and frequently anglicised words, which could result in differing names for the same spirit.
Folklorists who define kelpies as spirits living beside rivers, as distinguished from the Celtic lochside-dwelling water horse (each-uisge), include 19th-century minister of Tiree John Gregorson Campbell and 20th-century writers Lewis Spence and Katharine Briggs.
"[12] But the distinction should stand, argues one annotator, who suggests that people are led astray when an each uisge in a "common practice of translating" are referred to as kelpies in English accounts,[13] and thus mistakenly attribute loch-dwelling habits to the latter.
The kelpie is usually described as a powerful and beautiful black horse inhabiting the deep pools of rivers and streams of Scotland, preying on any humans it encounters.
[16][19] An Aberdeenshire variation portrays the kelpie as a horse with a mane of serpents,[20] whereas the resident equine spirit of the River Spey was white and could entice victims onto its back by singing.
Gregorson Campbell considers the creature responsible to have been a water horse rather than a kelpie, and the tale "obviously a pious fraud to keep children from wandering on Sundays".
[27] Kelpie myths usually describe a solitary creature, but a fairy story recorded by John F. Campbell in Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860) has a different perspective.
[32][33] Kelpies have the ability to transform themselves into non-equine forms, and can take on the outward appearance of human figures,[34] in which guise they may betray themselves by the presence of water weeds in their hair.
It tells of a "tall woman dressed in green", with a "withered, meagre countenance, ever distorted by a malignant scowl", who overpowered and drowned a man and a boy after she jumped out of a stream.
[16] Robert Burns refers to such a Satanic association in his "Address to the Devil" (1786): When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord An' float the jinglin icy boord Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord By your direction An' nighted trav'llers are allur'd To their destruction.
When a kelpie appeared in its equine persona without any tack, it could be captured using a halter stamped with the sign of a cross, and its strength could then be harnessed in tasks such as the transportation of heavy mill stones.
[41] Just as with cinematic werewolves,[42] a kelpie can be killed by being shot with a silver bullet, after which it is seen to consist of nothing more than "turf and a soft mass like jelly-fish" according to an account published by Spence.
A fable attached to the notoriously nasty creature has the Highlander James MacGrigor taking it by surprise and cutting off its bridle, the source of its power and life, without which it would die within twenty-four hours.
[23] The intervention of demons and spirits was possibly a way to rationalise the drowning of children and adults who had accidentally fallen into deep, fast flowing or turbulent water.
[56] Folklorist Nicola Bown has suggested that painters such as Millie Dow and Draper deliberately ignored earlier accounts of the kelpie and reinvented it by altering its sex and nature.
