John T. Reid's account of Papa Stour, quoted in the Folk-Lore Society volume of 1903, says that islanders told him about a hundred years earlier there was a species of supernatural beings on the island so numerous and even dangerous that a person could not go beyond the town dyke after twelve o'clock noon. At Yule and at weddings they collected in such numbers that they checked the progress of the strongest men and sometimes bruised and killed them.
The same source says that when a cow on Papa Stour took ill, the idea was that the trows had shot her, and a valued cure was to take a cat, hold it by the tail and scratch the cow with its claws from tail to head. A modern retelling adds that a man on Papa Stour could see the trows dancing before his house by holding his wife's hand or putting his foot on hers.
Noon and midnight were the dangerous hours in Shetland trow belief, and the hostile crowd at Yule and weddings is like the trow stories from other islands. The account is second hand and undated.
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