Not all sea monsters instill fear in people. There are those who lure people into a death trap with their beautiful looks and charming singing. These mysterious creatures are mermaids - the heroines of many scary stories and legends. Mermaids are beautiful women with long thick hair and fish tails instead of legs. According to some stories, mermaids with human legs are found. They emit laughter, frightening people, and also know how to tickle the victim to death.
In pagan times, people considered mermaids to be something like water goddesses, as well as enchantresses and keepers of great treasures hidden at the bottom of the sea. Such creatures are found in legends and myths of almost all peoples. If the country had no outlet to the sea, then a lake or river became the habitat of mermaids. The belief in mermaids has not only existed in ancient times. Even in the 18th century. in the Age of Enlightenment, people sincerely believed in them.
First of all, mermaids are dangerous for sailors, as they lure them into a trap with their beautiful singing. There are many legends about how sailors, fascinated by the singing of beautiful maidens, led their ships directly to the underwater reefs and died at sea. But it's not just about their singing. Their body allegedly emanated a unique smell, attractive to any man. As if in a trance, the person himself goes into the arms of the mermaid, and she tears his body with sharp green teeth.
Since mermaids are the keepers of sea treasures, they do not let ships close to them, destroying them and dragging sailors to the bottom. Among the sailors, there was a sign according to which a meeting with a mermaid was a bad sign: the one who saw her was doomed to death.
On the one hand, the mermaid seemed to be a kind of ideal creature, an inaccessible beautiful creature, unlike mere mortal women. She is seductive, incomprehensible, charming, but at the same time cold and inaccessible.
Mermaids, on the other hand, are vengeful and cruel creatures, unforgiving. In Scotland, there is a legend about a young man with whom a mermaid was in love. She presented him with gold and precious stones, which she took from the sunken ship, and the young man gave the jewelry to his beloved. In addition, he promised the mermaid several dates, but he never came to them and thereby incurred her jealousy and anger. Once he was sailing on a boat, and the mermaid showed him the way to the cave, which contained many treasures from all the ships that sunk in the bay. Having reached the cave, the young man fell asleep, and when he woke up, he was already chained to the wall of the cave with golden chains. Indeed, there were many treasures in the cave, and the young man could touch any of them. He became their owner, and the mermaid fulfilled all his desires, but at the same time he remained her captive forever.
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The most famous mermaid is the Little Mermaid from the fairy tale of the same name by H. X. Andersen. She gave her voice in exchange for legs to be next to her beloved, and turned into sea foam, because she could not destroy him.
It seems that all the legends about mermaids are fairy tales and legends of distant antiquity or the inventions of sailors who, during their long voyages, tired without a female company, revive their fantasies. However, stories of encounters with creatures resembling mermaids are also shared by people far from marine professions. Thus, William Monroe from the Scottish county of Catness, a teacher by profession, in 1890, walking along the beach on one of the stones protruding from the sea, saw something resembling a seated naked woman. The stone was at a decent distance from the shore. It was very dangerous to swim for him.
Therefore, the teacher thought that he was not seeing an ordinary woman. Taking a closer look at her, he made out the long brown hair that the woman was combing with her hands. The lower part of the body was hidden under water, and the upper part was not hidden by any clothes. The creature calmly went about its business for several minutes, and then slid off the stone and disappeared into the water. As it seemed to Monroe, he even saw something resembling a fin, like at the end of a fish's tail.
Only 12 years later, Monroe decided to send a note about the meeting with the mysterious woman to the London newspaper Times. The description of the observer is very dry and restrained: “On the head there was hair of the above color (brown), slightly darker at the crown, the forehead was convex, the face was plump, the cheeks were ruddy, the eyes were blue, the mouth and lips were naturally shaped, similar to human ones; I could not make out the teeth because my mouth was closed; chest and abdomen, arms and fingers the same size as that of an adult human; the way this creature used its fingers (when brushing) does not imply webbing, but I'm not sure about that. " He further states that other people have seen the creature before him, whose words are trustworthy. But he could not believe them in any way, until he himself met with a mysterious woman. Only this meeting made him believe in the existence of a mermaid. In his letter, Monroe expressed the hope that it would help prove "the existence of a phenomenon hitherto almost unknown to naturalists, or to reduce the skepticism of those who are always ready to dispute everything that they are unable to comprehend …"
In an interesting article by D. Vinogradov "Mermaids - who are they?" there are many cases of observation of sea maidens that have occurred in our days. One of such meetings is the event of the night of August 25, 1974. At about one in the morning, a village resident Alexander Kataev was returning home along the bank of the Chusovaya River when he heard a flop in the water. Then there was a strange murmur, not human. When he came closer to the water and hid in the bushes, he was able to see a man and a woman, who, according to him, did not belong to people. Their bodies were completely gray, the woman had red hair, she was pregnant. They ate something from a birch bark box, waved their arms and legs, the woman had a metallic laugh that was not inherent in humans, their words resembled something similar to "well-well" and "ky-ky". They entered the watersilently swam the river and climbed over a steep cliff on the other side, hiding in the darkness.
This story is just one of the few that describe encounters with aquatic creatures that resemble humans and sea inhabitants that have occurred today. Everything suggests that perhaps some kind of creatures, endowed with reason, unknown to science, lives next to us.