When the tide pulls back farther than it should, old things rise from the sea. In the windswept folklore of the Orkney Islands, that warning is tied to a single creature: the Nuckelavee (a skinless, relentless being said to crawl out of the ocean on the darkest nights), bringing with it illness, fear, and the sense that something ancient is watching from the shoreline.

In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, we begin with a story inspired by the legend: a solitary coastal cottage, a tide that retreats too far, and a creature that can sense you even when it cannot see. Once the tale concludes, we step into the psychology behind it.

We’ll explore why deep water unnerves us, and how the ocean at night becomes a perfect psychological threat environment. We look at the instinctive disgust triggered by exposed flesh and bodily distortion, the fear circuits activated when something hunts with senses other than sight, and the profound panic that comes from realizing you’re being located by a predator you can’t detect in return.

We also examine how creatures like the Nuckelavee emerge from cultural memory acting as warnings about storms, disease, and dangerous tides, and why such folklore continues to feel eerily relevant today.

This is a journey into fear, folklore, and the shadowed corners of the human mind where ancient legends meet modern psychology, and where what the tide reveals says as much about us as it does about the monsters we imagine.