The bean-nighe (Scottish Gaelic for “washerwoman”) is a female spirit of Scottish folklore, regarded as an omen of death and a messenger from the Otherworld. A kind of ban-sìth — banshee — she haunts lonely streams and pools, washing the blood from the linen and grave-clothes of those who are about to die. She is also called the Washer at the Ford, or nigheag, “the little washer.”
Some said the mnathan-nighe were the spirits of women who died in childbirth, doomed to their task until the day they would naturally have died, and that the fate could be avoided if all the dead woman’s clothes had been washed. Her form varies by place. On Mull and Tiree, whoever crept up behind her, took her breast in his mouth and claimed to be her foster-child could learn what he wished, and could stop the washing if the clothes were his own or a friend’s. On Skye she was squat, like “a small pitiful child”; catch her and she would reveal your fate, but if she saw you first you would lose the use of your limbs.
In one Highland story a maiden from Cromarty saw a tall woman at Loch Slin beating clothes on a stone beside more than thirty blood-smeared smocks and shirts — shortly before the roof of Fearn Abbey fell in during worship. The abbey roof did historically collapse in 1742. In French these night washerwomen are best known as les lavandières.