Banshee

The sound comes after midnight, when the townland is asleep and no wind is moving in the hedges. It rises and falls, rises and falls, a voice grieving for something that has not yet happened. One by one the household wakes. The youngest ask what it is. The oldest already know, and say nothing, because there is nothing to be done. Somewhere among them, in the next room or across an ocean, a life is ending, and the first to learn of it will not be the dying.

She is the bean sí, the woman of the fairy mound, named for the green tumuli that rise out of the Irish fields. Those mounds, the síde, were said to hold the old gods after they lost the country. She belongs to that buried, watchful world, but her work points only one direction, toward the living and their last hours. She brings no death with her. She kills no one. She arrives because death has already been decided elsewhere, and her single duty is to weep ahead of the news.

What she looks like depends on who saw her and lived to describe it, which is itself a problem, because she is far more often heard than seen. The most familiar shape is an old woman, unnervingly small, somewhere between a single foot and four feet tall, with white or grey hair hanging loose and a face worn down by crying. She wears a grey cloak over a green gown, and her eyes are red and raw. Other tellings refuse this entirely. To Lady Fanshawe she came robed in white with red hair and a corpse-pale face. To others she was a sweet-voiced girl, some daughter of the family who had died young and been given the task of mourning her own kin. Now and then she stands tall as a shrouded mourner beneath a tree, face veiled, lamenting. The accounts do not agree, and they have never needed to.

Often she is combing her hair when she appears, drawing a comb slowly through that long pale fall of it, and some say she can keen only while she combs. From this grew one of the more durable household rules in Ireland: if you find a comb lying on the ground, leave it. To lift a stray comb was to risk taking what belonged to her, and inviting her attention is the last thing anyone wants.

Her voice is the heart of the matter. The keen, the caoineadh, was a real and ancient practice long before it became a ghost story. At Irish wakes, women keened over the dead in a high formal lament, and the finest keeners, the mná caointe, were sought out and paid for their grief. The banshee is that custom turned spectral, the mourner who arrives before the body is cold, sometimes before the body has even fallen. In parts of Leinster they called her the bean chaointe, and said her cry could be so sharp it cracked glass. The cruelty of it is that the dying person seldom hears her. It is the family and the neighbours who catch the sound drifting near the old home place, even when their relative is dying in a city far away and no letter has yet arrived.

She does not weep for everyone. The tradition is stubborn and a little snobbish about this. She keened, it was said, only for the true Milesian bloodlines, the families whose names carried the Ó or the Mac, the old stock of Ireland rather than the Saxon or Norman who came later. Five houses were named most often as having their own banshee: the O’Gradys, the O’Neills, the O’Briens, the O’Connors, and the Kavanaghs. To possess a banshee was a strange kind of honour, proof of a lineage ancient enough to be worth a fairy’s tears. There were exceptions. A person gifted in music and song might earn her lament whatever their name, and the great Norman families who had grown, as the saying went, more Irish than the Irish themselves were heard to draw her too.

Where she came from is told two ways. In one, she is a survivor of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the old divine race driven into the hills by the conquering Milesians and faded over the centuries into fairy-folk, keeping only this fragment of their former weight. In another, she is a human ghost, often a woman who died in childbirth or was murdered, her grief outlasting her body and fixing on the family for good. The earliest written notice of her reaches back to a fourteenth-century account, the Triumphs of Torlough, where the O’Brien banshee is named Aibell and given rule over twenty-five lesser banshees who attend her.

The most carefully recorded encounter belongs to County Cork in the 1770s. The Reverend Charles Bunworth lay dying, a clergyman beloved as a patron of harpers and musicians. As his end drew near, a keening was heard outside the house, mournful enough to go straight through the listeners, and the cry settled beneath a tree that had been split by lightning. The folklorist Thomas Crofton Croker set the story down in his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland decades later, and it remains the cleanest portrait of how the thing was experienced: not a monster at the window, but a sound in the dark that no one could explain and no one could stop.

When she comes alone, one death is near. When several banshees keen together, the tradition holds that the dying is someone great or holy. Sometimes she travels with the death coach, the Cóiste Bodhar, that black headless-driven carriage of folklore, summoning it with her cry or riding beside it as it rolls toward the door.

Her power is knowledge, total and useless. She knows who will die and when, across any distance, before any messenger; her cry carries through walls and over the sea and can shatter a pane of glass with sorrow. What she cannot do is the only thing that would matter. She cannot lift the sentence she announces, cannot bargain, cannot turn the coach around. She is tethered to her chosen families and to grief itself, and outside that narrow office she has no reach at all. She is a herald who has never once been wrong, and never once been able to help.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a banshee?

A banshee is a female spirit in Irish folklore whose wailing, keening cry foretells the death of a member of the family she is attached to. Her name comes from the Irish bean sí, meaning “woman of the fairy mound.” She does not cause the death; she announces that it is coming, often before any human knows.

Does the banshee kill people?

No. The banshee is a herald of death, not its cause. Her role is to mourn and to warn, keening near the home of a family when one of its members is about to die, even if that person is dying far away. Hearing her cry means a death has already been determined, but she has no power to bring it about or to prevent it.

Why does the banshee comb her hair?

The banshee is frequently described combing her long white or grey hair, and some traditions claim she can only keen while combing it. This belief produced a well-known Irish superstition: a person should never pick up a comb found lying on the ground, because it might belong to the banshee, and taking it risks drawing her deadly attention.

Which families does the banshee follow?

Traditionally the banshee keened only for old Gaelic bloodlines, especially families whose surnames carried the Ó or Mac prefix. Five houses were most often named as having their own banshee: the O’Gradys, O’Neills, O’Briens, O’Connors, and Kavanaghs. Exceptions were made for people gifted in music and song, and for long-settled Norman families who had become thoroughly Irish.

What is the difference between a banshee and a bean nighe?

Both are death-foretelling female spirits, but the banshee belongs to Irish folklore and the bean nighe to the Scottish Highlands. The banshee announces death through her keening cry, while the bean nighe is seen washing the bloodstained clothes of those about to die. They share the same underlying tradition of a supernatural woman who knows a death before it happens.

Related Entries

Dullahan, Caoineag, Bean-Nighe, Morrigan, Leanan sidhe, Fear gorta, Cailleach, Dagda, Brigid, Cú Chulainn, Fairy, Cyhyraeth, Cŵn Annwn, Ankou, Grim Reaper