The Isle of Muck mermaid on a herring box (1947)

The Isle of Muck is one of the Small Isles of the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. It covers 559 hectares. Its harbour and main settlement is Port Mòr. The only other settlement is the farm at Gallanach. The MacEwen family has owned the island since 1916.

Mermaids are no strangers to Scottish waters. They were reported at Reay in Caithness in 1809, and at Deerness in Orkney at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1947, Muck added one more.

The witness was an old fisherman of the island. Muck's own heritage page calls him an 80-year-old fisherman. His name was never recorded. He saw a mermaid in the water, about twenty yards from the shore. She was "sitting combing her hair on a floating herring box used to preserve live lobsters." He watched. Then she turned. "As soon as she looked round, she realized that she had been seen, and plunged into the sea."

That was all. No description of her tail, her colouring or her face survives. No source says which shore, or how long the moment lasted. It ended the instant she knew she was being watched.

The fisherman wrote nothing down. His account reached the wider world through Calum I. MacLean, a folklorist of the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. In 1958 MacLean told the story to a meeting of the British Association at Glasgow. The fisherman had died shortly before. MacLean had questioned him, and no questioning could shake the old fisherman's conviction: "he was adamant that he had seen a mermaid."

Two years later Arthur Waugh, President of the Folklore Society, put the story into print. It appeared in his presidential address, "The Folklore of the Merfolk", published in the journal Folklore in June 1960.

There was no official inquiry. There are no photographs, no drawings, no tracks. The only scrutiny on record is MacLean's own questioning of the witness. In 2018 Patrick Gross catalogued the case in URECAT and classed it as an invention, not UFO related. The story was second hand. It surfaced eleven years after the event. The witness was already dead. Gross also suggested MacLean may not have believed it himself. No one has alleged a deliberate hoax.

In the same 1960 article, Waugh discussed sea animals as an explanation for mermaids in general. No source applies that idea to Muck directly.

From 1976 the story spread through books. Francis Thompson retold it in The Supernatural Highlands, where the single floating box became the fisherman's lobster boxes, plural. It appeared in Albert Rosales's catalogue of humanoid encounters, in Richard Hammond's Great Mysteries of the World, and in collections for children. It even inspired a novel, Bullfish.

Some retellings name the witness as Alexander Gunn. That name belongs to a different case, the mermaid of Sandwood Bay in 1900. Gunn died in 1944. He cannot have been the man MacLean described. The fisherman of Muck remains unnamed, and his story survives as a second-hand folklore report, carried by the people who heard it.