A murderous mermaid

Fish-tailed female held responsible for double drowning in Zimbabwe

• At around midday on 19 February, two boys from Village 7, Gokwe, Zimbabwe, were seized by a “mermaid” near Pachemumvuri Dam, dragged under the water and drowned. The creature had allegedly been seen on the banks of the dam several times before. “It is reported that on the fateful day the two boys who were in Form One and Two at Ganye Secondary School were herding cattle when they saw the mermaid at the dam,” said Chief Nemangwe, whose jurisdiction the area falls under. “According to a friend of the deceased boys, his companions jumped into the dam and tried to grab the mermaid because they believed it was just a big fish. But the mermaid pulled them down into the water.” The friend then ran home to alert the elders, who arrived at the dam to find the boys lying on a rock, alive. The elders were “counselling” the boys when their parents arrived on the scene. “When their parents got to the dam they panicked, believing their children had died and started crying,” said Chief Nemangwe. “A whirlwind suddenly engulfed the place before the mermaid swiftly appeared from the water and grabbed the boys for the second time, but this time their lifeless bodies resurfaced later.”

According to local belief, when someone is seized by a mermaid, the last thing people should do is cry, as this can lead to dire consequences, such as the death of the victim. The Chief again: “Two other people that I am aware of were also killed at the same dam in similar circumstances. As a community we have since performed some rituals to calm down the water spirits. During the ceremony we slaughtered a beast and the meat was consumed without salt.” Acting Midlands Provincial police spokesperson Assistant Inspector Ethel Mukwende said investigations were in progress to ascertain what really transpired.

Work on the pumps at Sengwa 2/Gwehava Dam in Gokwe once stopped after terrified workers complained of machines breaking down under mysterious circumstances, and blamed mermaids. The work later resumed after traditional healers brewed beer and carried out some rites to appease the water spirits. zimbabwenewsonline.com, 5 Mar 2017.

Talk of dams and mermaids reminds us of a story from 2012. Chinese engineers working on the Bui dam in Ghana found that the functioning of their excavating machinery was obstructed by some force they regarded as supernatural, so they consulted “spiritualist scientists” in a Shanghai temple. These talented chaps “immediately spotted in the spiritual realm a mermaid (Mame Water) being the cause of the impediment to the smooth sail of events on the dam site.” One of them travelled to the Bui River and managed to capture “a weird beast in the form of a snake with the head and hands of a woman”. A local priest explained that it was not the sort of entity that is normally visible to us. “It is not good to see this kind of Mame Water physically,” he said. “They are spiritual creatures which always remain unseen and the moment they are physically seen it means there is something gone wrong.” [ FT293:20].

Another African ‘mermaid’ was encountered near a bridge in the Buffelsjags River in Western Cape, South Africa, on 12 January 2008. Daniël Cupido saw a figure “like that of a white woman with long black hair thrashing about in the water”. Thinking to save her, he waded into the water, but stopped when he noticed a reddish shine in her eyes. The sight sent “shivers” down his spine, yet he was pulled forward as if hypnotised. He shouted to his friends to come and take a look. Martin Olckers said he saw a female figure swimming near a low water bridge and then standing on the bridge before diving back into the black water. It made “the strangest sound”, like a woman crying. The villagers recognised the creature as something known locally as the Kaaiman, last seen in 1993 and more than 20 years before that. As Martin Olckers said he saw it standing, it presumably didn’t have a fish’s tail like a “conventional” mermaid. Some people held it responsible for drownings. [ FT238:19]

For a wave of mermaid sightings in Israel in 2009, see FT254:4. That issue of FT also has several features on mermaids in general.