I was charmed by the recent Destination Truth episode in which the team went mermaid-hunting.  So often in cryptozoology there is a distinct split between "animals that could be real" and "the work of fantasy."  Unicorns, for example (actual unicorns, not just goats with one horn or narwhals) are obviously fantasy animals, right?  No cryptozoologist worth their snuff would go off hunting unicorns.

I would have put mermaids in the "purely fictional" category, except that the small Israeli town of Kiryat Yam reports that a mermaid is stalking their waters.  I use the word "stalking" because even though she hasn't hurt anyone, she is said to have a giant mouthful of razor-sharp teeth.  Scary!

In truth, although we think of mermaids as being pretty fish-tailed lasses combing out their tresses on the rocky shore, a lot of mermaids have historically been kinda scary.  For example, mermaids in the Slavic tradition were called rusalki (the singular is "a rusalka").  They danced charmingly onto land in the middle of the night, and lured men to their drowning deaths.  

Many rusalki were said to be the ghosts of women who had died near bodies of water, and haunted the night waters seeking revenge.  (In the original Hans Christian Anderson version of The Little Mermaid, mermaids are said to drown people because they forget that people can't breathe underwater.  And they just want to show us the sights down there!  Which is even creepier than just straight-up murder, if you ask me.)

Of course, many mermaids exist as "evidence."  There was quite a cottage industry in creating taxidermy mermaids during the Victorian era.  (The Victorians were both gullible and fond of collecting oddities.  They went nuts over the things.)  Most taxidermy mermaids are the back half of a fish stitched to the upper body of a small monkey.  Creepy, right?  I have seen one, and it was both ridiculous and terrifying at the same time.  You never think of mermaids as being hairy, but there you go.

It seems that every human society has had mermaid myths.  Even societies which were not bounded by the sea had lakes and rivers in which to imagine a human fish hybrid.  And anyone who has gone swimming in a large body of water has pictured cold hands grabbing their ankles and pulling them down into the depths.  Or wait, is that just me?  Maybe that's just me.

Not all mermaid lore belongs to the dusty tomes of ancient history.  In the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, photos circulated of a "mermaid" that had supposedly been found washed up on the beach.  The photos show a humanoid face with a shock of white hair like a troll doll, and a collection of scraggly little teeth.  The hands are terrifyingly clawed, and the back half is rather sharp for a fish.

This mermaid seems to be about a foot long, and perfectly designed for scratching out your eyeballs.  Also, it has a creepy little mustache.

Needless to say, this tsunami mermaid is no more real than the P.T. Barnum versions of yore.  Which frankly I'm grateful for, considering how spiteful it looks!

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user Temari09