The Baobhan Sìth (pronounced roughly baa-van shee, meaning 'fairy woman') is one of the most distinctively Scottish creatures in the supernatural canon — a beautiful, predatory spirit who, centuries before Bram Stoker, was already drinking the blood of young men in the Highland glens.
She appears at night, always in the wild places, always alone. She is described as breathtakingly beautiful, dressed in a long green gown that conceals a single secret: she has the hooves of a deer instead of feet. Spot the hooves under the hem and you might just live. Most men do not look down in time.
The classic story is told around Inverness and the Northern Highlands. Four young hunters take shelter in a remote bothy. They light a fire, eat their supper, and one of them remarks that the only thing missing is four pretty girls to dance with. Within minutes, four young women appear at the door — beautiful, green-gowned, smiling — and ask very politely if they might join the gathering.
Three of the men begin to dance. The fourth, more cautious, picks up his fiddle and plays from the corner of the room. As he plays, he glances down. Blood is pooling on the floor. His friends are dead, and the women — who are not women — are draining them.
He runs. He spends the rest of the night hiding among the horses (the iron in the horseshoes is what saves him; the Baobhan Sìth, like all fae, cannot abide cold iron). At dawn the spirits vanish, and he returns to find his three companions white and bloodless on the bothy floor.
The Baobhan Sìth is fascinating because she predates almost every European vampire tradition by several hundred years. The Highland storytellers who described her had no contact with the Slavic vampire myths that would later sweep Europe — and yet here she is: a beautiful undead woman, drinking blood at night, repelled by iron, vanishing at dawn. Folklore arrives where it needs to arrive.
Our Veiled Baobhan Sìth design honours her in her natural setting: the moonlit glen, the green gown, the hooves half-hidden in the heather. Beautiful things are not always safe. And in the Highlands, especially, the most beautiful things in the dark almost never are.