Banshee

The banshee (in Irish bean sídhe, «woman of the mound») is a female spirit who wails before a death and who does not wail for just anyone: she follows one particular family. What the sources dispute is which. Thomas Crofton Croker, who published the first legends in 1825, quotes O'Brien's Irish dictionary: no family that is not «of an ancient and noble stock» enjoys that fairy privilege; and in introducing the MacCarthys he puts it differently again, «being an old family, and especially being an old Catholic family, they have of course their Banshee». Lady Wilde, in 1887, gives a different and more generous criterion: she attends «only certain families of historic lineage, or persons gifted with music and song», because music and poetry are fairy gifts. Yeats, in 1888, sums it up in one line: she follows «the old families, and none but them».

None of the three says what is usually repeated, that she wails only for surnames beginning with O' or Mac. That formula is a later summary, and the sources themselves contradict it: Croker's most famous banshee legend is that of the Reverend Charles Bunworth, rector of Buttevant in County Cork, a Church of Ireland clergyman with an English surname. The sentence about surnames is indeed printed in Lady Wilde's volume, but two hundred pages from the banshee chapter, inside an essay by Sir William Wilde on which Irish families descend from the Milesian chieftains; no spirits are discussed there.

Her lament is called caoineadh, and it is worth putting in order. She did not invent it: it was a human funerary practice, attested in Ireland from the seventh century and already penalised in the penitentials, performed by keening women (the mná caointe) often paid for the task. The banshee, as a death-messenger bound to a house, is documented some six centuries later. Yeats recorded the belief that the peasantry's keen imitated her cry, but he wrote «is said to be»; later ethnography reads the relation the other way round, and in some counties it was told outright that the banshee was the soul of a woman who in life had been a keener.

The banshee manifests in three distinct ages according to the versions: beautiful young woman, mature matron or decrepit old woman. She is heard more than seen, and her shrill lament pierces Irish nights announcing imminent death in the lineage. Some traditions attribute to her a silver or bone comb that she drops to tempt the curious; picking it up brings misfortune. She usually wears a gray or green cloak that waves with the wind of the omen. Her long unbound hair flows as a symbol of ancestral mourning. Lady Wilde collects accounts where the banshee appears combing her hair by a stream before raising her caoineadh. This figure does not wander but remains near the ancestral house of the lineage she serves. The comb functions as a warning: it should never be picked up from the ground because it belongs to the spirit of the mound.

In Croker's pages the banshee does not work alone. Her lament is heard on the same night that the cóiste bodhar, the deaf coach, rolls, and that the Dullahan halts before the door: three warnings of the same death, each by a different sense. She is heard, the coach is heard coming from afar, the horseman is seen. Yeats sums it up in a line: the cóiste bodhar is «an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless horses driven by a Dullahan», and if you open the door a basin of blood is thrown in your face. The division has its logic: the banshee belongs to the family and wails for its name, while the coach and the horseman travel the roads and answer to no one.

With the Scottish washerwoman, the bean nighe, she shares origin and office, but the Scot crouches at the ford washing the shroud while the Irishwoman stays by the ancestral house and sings.

And there is a difference seldom quoted: the banshee travels with the surname. Lady Wilde tells of a branch of the ancient O'Gradys settled in Canada who one night heard the lamentation outside the house, and writes that «the Banshee even follows the old race across the ocean and to distant lands», for neither space nor time hinders that power. Not everyone accepted it: McAnally, in 1888, warns that the theory is «by no means well or generally received», and that the burden of evidence points the other way — that she knows what is coming without needing to leave Ireland, and gives notice at the family seat even when the death falls on the far side of the world.