The Good Wife of Laggan

Laggan, Badenoch, Scotland

A cat let in from a storm swelled into a witch who named her sisterhood of enemies before the hunter's own hounds — freed from a hidden binding — tore into her, and she fled the hut as a raven.

Among the tales collected in Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales is the story of the Goodwife of Laggan, set in a hunter's shelter in the forest of Gaick, in Badenoch. A hunter, sheltering from a storm with his two hounds, his gun, and his dagger, allows a drenched cat into the hut out of simple mercy. The cat does not stay a cat. It swells and transforms into the Goodwife of Laggan, who reveals herself as one of a wider sisterhood of witches and names Macgillichallum of Raasay among her enemies before turning on the hunter himself. What she does not know is that the hunter's hounds have secretly been freed from a binding — a hair tied around their necks that had, until that moment, kept them from acting against her. Unleashed, the dogs maul her savagely; she drags herself free still gripped by them, and escapes the hut by transforming a second time, into a raven, and flying off into the storm. The story does not end at the hut. The hunter later visits a woman known locally as the Goodwife, said to be gravely ill and confined to her bed — and finds wounds on her body that match exactly what his hounds inflicted, confirming to him and to the tale's listeners that she and the witch of the storm were one and the same.