Blakemere Pool sits on Morridge, the long ridge of high moorland running north from Leek, a small, unremarkable-looking stretch of water that local folklore has transformed into something considerably more dangerous than its modest size suggests. The mermaid said to live there bears none of the romantic connotations the word usually carries; she is malicious rather than alluring, and the traditional telling has her surfacing at midnight specifically to comb her hair on the bank, an image of quiet vanity that turns lethal the moment anyone actually approaches to watch her do it, since anyone who draws too close is said to be dragged beneath the water and drowned.
Older versions of the tale offer a darker origin for her, identifying the mermaid as the transformed spirit of a woman who was murdered and thrown into the pool, her death itself the thing that stripped her of her humanity and left something less than human, and considerably more dangerous, surfacing in her place each midnight. Which version, the malicious mermaid or the murdered woman transformed, actually came first is not clear from the sources that continue to repeat the story, and it may well be that the two have simply merged together over generations of retelling.
The same stretch of moor has produced an entirely separate, much more recent report that has nothing to do with the mermaid at all: a Jacobean-style horse-drawn carriage, said to have sped silently across the landscape near the pool for several minutes in November 2013, witnessed by people with no apparent connection to the older legend. Between the midnight mermaid and the silent modern carriage, Blakemere and the surrounding moorland have clearly accumulated more than one distinct strand of local strangeness over the years, rather than settling into any single, consistent legend.
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