Wraith

The word 'wraith' is first attested in Scots in 1513, and appears to derive from Old Norse vörðr, meaning 'guardian'—suggesting an original function as a soul-guardian or fetch rather than purely a death-herald. The most authoritative early definition comes from King James VI's Daemonologie (1597), where he distinguishes wraiths from demonic apparitions: 'When they appeare vpon that occasion, they are called Wraithes in our language.' He recorded the tradition as something known and accepted across Scotland.

The Scottish wraith belongs to a family of 'fetch' traditions widespread across the British Isles, but has a distinctive emphasis: it is seen by others rather than by the dying person themselves, and it appears in the likeness of a living person—not a corpse—moving silently through a location they do not normally frequent. In some accounts it appears simultaneously with the person; in others it is glimpsed on a road or in a field at an uncanny distance. Witnesses with second sight (an fiosaiche in Gaelic) were considered especially liable to see wraiths, and their testimony in communities that valued the gift carried genuine social weight. The tradition distinguishes the wraith from two other Scottish death-omens: the Bean Nighe, a supernatural washerwoman who washes a shroud at a ford, and the Banshee, who wails. Those are beings in their own right; the wraith is specifically the double of a named living person, making it a more intimate and individually targeted form of omen.

In Orkney and Shetland a closely related figure appears under the Scandinavian name vardøger—an 'echo-person' who arrives ahead of their living counterpart, so that household members hear familiar footsteps and sounds in the house minutes before the person themselves walks in. The vardøger is more benign than an omen of death, but both traditions share the same underlying notion of the soul's double existing independently of the body.