The earliest account is George Waldron's, in his Description of the Isle of Man of 1744. He had never met anyone who took mermaids for more than the poets' Tritons until an old Manxman who had used the sea many years told him, with a thousand oaths, that he had frequently seen them, and when Waldron mentioned this at Port Erin in his first fishing season on the Island the people there wondered at his incredulity and gave him a story. In the time that Oliver Cromwell usurped the Protectorship few ships resorted to the Island, and the solitude of the sea gave the mermen and mermaids, who are enemies to any company but their own, frequent opportunities of visiting the shore, where on moonlight nights they were seen to sit combing their heads and playing with each other, and jumped into the water the moment anyone came near. People who lived near the coast spread large nets of strong cord on the ground and watched, and caught one, a female, lovely above the waist and all fish below with fins and a spreading tail. They kept her three days, tenderly, but she would neither eat nor drink nor speak, and fearing some calamity if she died among them they opened the door, and she glided on her tail to the sea and was met there by a great number of her own kind, one of whom asked what she had observed among the people of the earth. Nothing very wonderful, she answered, but that they were so ignorant as to throw away the water they had boiled eggs in.

Waldron heard the strangest of the stories at a creek between two high rocks on the same coast. A very beautiful mermaid became so enamoured of a young man who tended sheep on the rocks that she would sit by him and bring him coral, fine pearls and shells so glorious in colour that they dazzled the eye, with smiles and pattings of the cheek and every mark of a sincere and tender passion. One day, when she threw her arms about him more eagerly than usual, he feared she meant to draw him into the sea and struggled free and ran, and she resented it so highly that she threw a stone after him and glided into her own element and was never seen on land again. The youth, though only slightly hit, felt from that moment so excessive a pain in his bowels that the cry was never out of his mouth for seven days, at the end of which he died. The poet Collins, in a note to his Ode to Liberty of 1746, gave a third: a mermaid enamoured of a young man of extraordinary beauty, whose proposal was received with horror, punished the whole Island by covering it with mist, so that all who tried to trade with it never arrived or were wrecked on its cliffs, which is one of the explanations of the mist of the Island beside Manannan's.

A. W. Moore, in 1891, gave the Manx name. The mermaid had no special name in Manx, being called simply ben-varrey, woman of the sea, and had the same form, half fish and half woman, as in the tales of other countries. John Rhys confessed in 1891 that mermen and mermaids disported themselves on the coasts of Man but that he had made no careful inquiry about them. William Cashen of Peel had it from the Dalby fishermen that mermaids were very fond of crabs, and told of Joe Clinton, fishing for crabs among the rocks at the Niarbyl at low water, to whom a mermaid came up and said in Manx, give us a crab and I will tell your fortune, and dived away with it calling that so long as he lived on the land he would never be drowned in the sea. Sophia Morrison, in 1911, told the Mermaid of Gob ny Ooyl, who had her haunt up Bulgham way and was a friend to the Sayle family at the bottom of Cornaa gill, so that they were always in luck's way and got their living mostly by the sea.