Beautiful and enigmatic, White Ladies are phantoms associated with particular geographical sites, usually bridges or bodies of water. In Wales and the Welsh borders, she has a vivid white flame. White Ladies are usually are omens or bringers of death. White has long been associated with death. If the White Lady is a ghost, she continues a long tradition held by many cultures that the dead come to fetch the living when it is their time. But the motif appears to have another dimension too: that of the pre-Christian mother/agriculture godesses.
But the white lady is undoubtedly most at home in Celtic Lands and most authorities agree that the archetype owes its origins to fairy lore. Pre-Christian Celts regarded features of the landscape, and especially water features such as lakes and wells, to be gateways to the otherworld which were populated by their preturnatural inhabitants.
Peg o' Nell of the River Ribble near Clitheroe was probably originally the nymph of the river who later became identified as the ghost of a resentful servant from Waddow Hall which stands on the river's banks. The malevolent spirit needed a sacrifice at least once every seven years, and if a dog, cat or human had not fallen in by accident within that time, she sought a drowning. Luideag (lootchak), whose name means "the Rag" was a murderous, foetid old demon woman of the Loch of the Black Trout in the Isle of Skye.
Even to the present the legends of King Arthur have undergone revisions and each incarnation of the story has, as you would expect, been a vehicle for the most important motifs of the day. But in essence, Arthur seems to be the merging of a Celtic god tradition and a sixth century chieftain. The pre-Christian Celts believed in reincarnation, so these two strands are not at all incompatible; they would have had no difficulty identifying a warrior hero as an incarnation of an heroic ancestor/god.
King Arthur was surrounded by fey women, all intimately concerned with his fate: from his sister Morgan le Fey to the Lady of the Lake, an archetypal white lady, queen of an enchanted isle where there is no winter and no sorrow. Guinevere his wife was also conspicuously faerie: her name translates into 'white apparition/phantom'. In the Welsh triads there seem to be three Guineveres at the court of Cawdor where she grew up, all of whom were in some sense royal, a triad which evokes the Celtic triple godess. And Arthur and Guinevere's son Llacheu had the power of clairvoyant vision just as the fairy folk did.
The Lady of the Lake is more conspicuously faery even than Guinevere. The lady seems to vary from story to story leading some to speculate that the lady was an office rather than an individual. But her enduring quality is the favour she shows to Arthur, giving him Excalibur, interceeding to save him and taking him back to her isle when he was dying.
Banshees are a specific sub-class of death messanger associated with emminent or aristocratic Celtic families. The word comes from the Gaelic Bean Si which means fairy-woman. She is most often believed to be an ancestress or spirit of the bereaved family and she most often wears white, grey, red, and brown or black. Banshees are often seen washing and sometimes it is revealed that she is preparing a shroud for the soon-to-be-dead.
The Beane Nighe or Washer-by-the-Ford was a more democratic version of the same creature - a bad omen to anyone who saw her. Washers sat by fords, rinsing the bloodstained clothes of those about to die. They usually portended death or at the least evil, but the quick witted could turn a meeting with one to his advantage. If he managed to get between her and the water or suck at her breast and convince her that he was a foster child, she could grant wishes or at the very least look upon the person favourably. Such a tack was not recommended with the Caointeach, a more aggressive variety found in Islay. She was liable to flick her washing at the legs of those who approached, leaving them crippled. Washers were the spirits of women who had died in childbirth, condemned to their activity until the day of her natural demise.
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