The Wick Herring Lass

Pulteneytown, Wick, Caithness, Scotland

A gutting-knife ghost in the deserted Pulteneytown curing yards, recorded every August since the herring industry collapsed in 1937.

Pulteneytown was built south of Wick by the British Fisheries Society in 1808 as a planned town for the herring industry, and at its 1860s peak more than a thousand boats worked out of Wick harbour — the largest herring port in the world. The gutting and curing of the silver darlings was done in long open-air yards by teams of women, the gutters, working at frightening speed with short curved knives. The trade collapsed between the wars and the curing yards stand empty. The folklore is precise about its dates. Every August, in the weeks of what would have been the peak season, a single figure is seen working in the open yards behind the empty curing sheds. She is described identically across reports: a woman in a blue oilskin apron, her hair tied back, working at the gutting table with a short knife — but with no fish on the table, no salt, no barrel, and no other hands. She works fast. If approached she does not look up. If spoken to she does not respond. After a quarter of an hour she is no longer there. The sightings begin in the late 1930s — after the trade ended — and continue to the present day. Pulteneytown was made a conservation area in 1992; the curing yards are now a heritage trail. The folklore is recorded in the parish material as a curiosity and a sadness rather than a haunting in the disturbing sense. She is held to be one of the last gutters of the last good summer, doing the work she knew, in the place she knew, with the season still in her hands.