Peg Powler is the water-hag of the River Tees, a bogey invoked across the dales to keep children back from the dangerous banks. She is pictured as a woman crowned with long green tresses — the green hair that marks a river spirit in English folklore — with, in the words of the Victorian folklorist William Henderson, 'an insatiable desire for human life'.
The story
Like her sisters Jenny Greenteeth and Nelly Longarms, Peg Powler lurks at the water's edge and seizes those who stray too close, dragging them down to drown or be devoured. In some tellings she lures men and boys by pretending to be a beautiful young woman in difficulty, so that her would-be rescuers wade in to their doom.
Her presence is written into the river itself. The masses of foam that gather on the higher reaches of the Tees are called 'Peg Powler's Suds', and the thinner scum that rides the surface is 'Peg Powler's Cream' — everyday names that kept the old warning alive long after anyone truly feared the green hag beneath the current.