Banshee

“ In fiction no writer has, I think, dealt more freely with the subject of the Banshee than Thomas Crofton Croker, the translator of the abovementioned elegy. In his “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,” he gives the most inimitable accounts of it; and for the benefit of those of my readers who are unacquainted with his works, as well as for the purpose of presenting the Banshee as seen by such an unrivalled portrayer of Irish ghost and [Pg 182] fairy lore, I will give a brief résumé of two of his stories. ”

“ Many people have fallen in the error of imagining all banshees are moulded after one pattern. Nothing could be more fallacious. The banshee of the O’Rourkes, for [28] example, does not resemble that of the O’Donnells; there are many forms of the banshee, each clan having a distinct one—or more than one—of its own. Some of the banshees are fair to look at, and some old, and foul, and terrifying; but their mission is invariably the same, i.e., to announce a death or some great family catastrophe.
“The banshee is never joyous; it is always either sad or malevolent. ”

“ Once again, then, the Banshee confines itself solely to families of bona-fide ancient Irish descent. As to its origin, in spite of arbitrary assertions made by certain people, none of whom, by the way, are of Irish extraction—that no one knows. As a matter of fact the Banshee has a number of origins, for there is not one Banshee only—as so many people seem to think—but many; each clan possessing a Banshee of its own. ”

“ But the people in the village were busy even so late with the harvest, and did not hear; only in one house where a mother sat with her sick child did the cry come, and she closed the shutter and fell to prayer.
"'Tis the banshee who crieth," she whispered, "and my Conneen so ill! 'Tis the banshee, and Sheila with the cheek of snow. God bid the fairy pass, and set the angels at my door! Whisht!" she cried to the playing young ones, "come beside my chair and pray."
And of her fear shall I sing, lest thou grow weary of my prose:
Oh, whisht! I hear the banshee keen,
All woful is her cry. ”

“ He confines the Banshee to families of pure Milesian stock, and declares it is never to be found attached [Pg 11] to the descendants of the multitudinous English and Scotch settlers who have, from time to time, migrated to Ireland; nor even to the descendants of the Norman adventurers who accompanied Strongbow to the Green Isle in the twelfth century.
Lady Wilde [1] goes to the other extreme and allows considerable latitude. She affirms that the Banshee attaches itself not only to certain families of historic lineage, but also to persons gifted with song and music. ”

“ I disagree, in toto, with Lady Wilde’s theory that, occasionally, the Banshee haunts a person who is extremely poetical and musical, simply because he happens to be thus talented. In my [Pg 12] opinion, to be haunted by the Banshee one must belong to an Irish family that is, at least, a thousand years old; were it not so, we should assuredly find the Banshee haunting certain of the musical and poetical geniuses of every race all over the world—black and yellow, perhaps, no less than white—which certainly is not the case. ”

“ At least, the girl in green is our Banshee. I saw her before the death of a cousin of mine, and she appeared to my mother the night before my father died. I don’t know what the other apparition could have been, unless it was what my father used to term the ‘hateful Banshee,’ which he said was only supposed to appear before some very dreadful catastrophe, worse even than death, if anything could be worse.”
“You haven’t the monopoly of Banshees,” Ralph laughed. “We have one too, and I am positive the woman I saw—the beautiful woman I mean—was the O’Donnell Banshee. ”

“ According to Mr McAnnaly, the malevolent Banshee is invariably “a horrible hag with ugly, distorted features; maledictions are written in every line of her wrinkled face, and her outstretched arms call down curses on the doomed member of the hated race.” ”

“ A hideous hag with a shock head of tow-coloured hair, who stood on the staircase laughing devilishly, and then, all at once, vanished. She is known as the bad Banshee to distinguish her from the good one, which is, so I have always been led to understand, very beautiful, but which never manifests itself, saving when anything especially dreadful is going to happen to an O’Hara. ”

“ No country besides Ireland possesses a Banshee, though some countries possess a family or national ghost somewhat resembling it. In Germany, for example, popular tradition is full of rumours of white ladies who haunt castles, woods, rivers, and mountains, where they may be seen combing their yellow hair, or playing on harps or spinning. ”

“ It is simply like a woman wailing in the most unearthly fashion. At the time an O’Neill was in this house, and she subsequently heard that her eldest brother had died on that night between twelve a.m. and three a.m., when we all of us heard the Banshee wailing. ”

“ Miss O’Rorke began, “a most unpleasant attachment; in other words, a most unpleasant Banshee. Being Irish, you will not laugh, of course, as many English people do, at what I say. You know as well as I do, perhaps, that many of the really ancient Irish families possess Banshees.”
Miss S—— nodded. “We have one ourselves,” she remarked, “but pray go on. I am intensely interested.”
“Well, unlike most of the Banshees,” Miss Georgina continued, “ours is appallingly ugly and [Pg 49] malevolent; so frightful, indeed, that to see it, even, is sometimes fatal. ”

“ The "Banshee" is a gloomy, foreboding spirit, of rather aristocratic tastes, as she is only attached to highly respectable old families. She never appears but to announce some great misfortune, or the death of a member of the household. She does this by howling and shrieking in the night; and sometimes, they say, she is seen—a tall, pale woman, in long white robes, with black hair flying in the wind.
The most amusing of these supernatural creatures is the Leprehawn, or Luriceen, or Clericaune, the brogue-maker of the "good people." ”

“ In his “Letters on Demonology” he says: “Several families of the Highlands of Scotland anciently laid claim to the distinction of an attendant spirit, who performed the office of the Irish Banshee,” and he particularly referred to the ghostly cries and lamentations which foreboded death to members of the Clan of MacLean of Lochbery. But though many of the Highland families do possess such a ghost, unlike the Banshee, it is not restricted to the feminine sex, nor does its origin, as a rule, date back to anything like such remote times. ”

“ That the famous Irish Banshee, like the Drummer and Pipers of Scotland, the Death Candles of Wales, and the various English Family Ghosts, is the work of a species of Elemental, to which I have given the name, "Clanogrian," I have no doubt. The Celtic word Banshee, meaning the woman of the barrow, may in all probability account for the popular idea that whenever a member of one of the old Irish clans dies, their doom is foretold (to any or every member of the family but themselves) by a series of wails, in a woman's voice, [p.24] the phantasm of the woman herself being sometimes seen. ”

“ How do you know?"
"I don't know that the Good People took her," she answered, "though I think they did; but I am sure she is not dead." [223]
"And how are you sure, mother?"
"Kathleen could never die," Mrs. O'Brien said, "without I'ld hear the banshee."
"The banshee?" said John. "There's no banshee here. There's banshees only in Ireland."
"Our banshee is here," his mother answered. "I know she is here. You've heard me tell of her. She's the sad, mourning woman of the Good People that weeps and wails about the house when anybody of the family is to die, anywhere in the world. ”

“ Amongst the rest the Banshee was mentioned—a spirit of whose peculiar office and character Woodward, in consequence of his long absence from the country, was completely ignorant.
“The Banshee!” he exclaimed; “what kind of a spirit is that? I have never heard of it.”
“Why, sir,” replied Barney, who was present, “the Banshee—the Lord prevent us from hearin' her—is always the forerunner of death. She attends only certain families—principally the ould Milesians, and mostly Catholics, too ”

“ The Banshee is a species of aristocratic fairy, who, in the shape of a little hideous old woman, has been known to appear, and heard to sing in a mournful supernatural voice under the windows of great houses, to warn the family that some of them are soon to die. ”

“ In “Personal Sketches of his Own Times,” by Sir Jonah Barrington, we find (pp. 152-154, Vol. II.) the account of a ghostly experience of the author and his wife, which experience the writer of the paragraph, referring to this work in the notes to T. C. Croker’s Banshee Stories, evidently considered was closely associated with the Banshee.
At the time of the incident, Lord Rossmore was Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Ireland. He was a Scot by birth, but had come over to Ireland when very young, and had obtained the post of page to the Lord-Lieutenant. Fortune had favoured him at every turn. ”

“ He had always understood that the one who neither sees nor hears the Banshee during its manifestations is the one that is doomed to die. And yet Dick was assuredly as safe in that inn as he was here—here, surrounded on all sides by his enemies. ”

“ Be the Lord!” says he, “ye might as well grip hould of a Banshee. * For all the tidings I could get of him was, that a ruffin, called Shemus Rhua, ran off with a tailor’s wife; and he, the villin, persuaded the good-natured young gentleman to follow him.”
* The Banshee is a spirit attached to old Irish families, who foretells deaths and other calamities by melancholy wailings before they occur. He is never seen.
Well, who should the little man be but a lawyer sent in pursuit of Dick ”

“ For my own part I am inclined to adopt a middle course; I do not believe that the Banshee would be deterred from haunting a family of historical fame and Milesian descent—such as the O’Neills or O’Donnells—simply because in that family was an occasional strain of Saxon or Norman blood, but, on the other hand, I do not think the Banshee would ever haunt a family that was not originally at least Celtic Irish—such, for instance, as the Fitz-Williams or Fitz-Warrens—although in that family there might happen to be periodic infusions of Milesian blood. ”

“ She is a spirit with a lengthy pedigree—how lengthy no man can say, as its roots go back into the dim, mysterious past. The most famous Banshee of ancient times was that attached to the kingly house of O'Brien, Aibhill, who haunted the rock of Craglea above Killaloe, near the old palace of Kincora. ”

“ Even those who ridicule the Banshee and deny its omens hate to hear the cry. The superstition is inborn. It is like the evil eye in Italy. People who do not believe in it will nevertheless dodge a person who is accused of carrying such a curse. ”

“ It is, I think, quite conceivable that she is no earth-bound soul, but some impersonating elemental, which—like the Banshee—has, for some strange and wholly inexplicable reason, attached itself to the unfortunate Hohenzollerns, and their relatives and kinsmen. ”

“ Like all spirits, he is only half in the world of form.’ The banshee does not care much for our democratic levelling tendencies; she loves only old families, and despises the parvenu or the nouveau riche. When more than one banshee is present, and they wail and sing in chorus, it is for the death of some holy or great one. ”

“ Presently, the singing having ceased, the old woman got up and dried her tears. Her anxiety, however, was not allayed; all through the night she could still be heard, every now and again, crying quietly and whispering to herself “’Twas the Banshee! Banshee!”; and in the morning Norah, suddenly growing alarmingly ill, passed away before medical assistance could be summoned.
A case of Banshee haunting that is somewhat unusually pathetic was once related to me in [Pg 29] connection with a Dublin branch of the once powerful clan of McGrath. ”

“ A case of the two Banshees resulting in a dual Banshee haunting was told me quite recently by a man whom I met in Paris at Henriette’s in Montparnasse. He was a Scot, a journalist, of the name of Menzies, and his story concerned an Irish friend of his, also a journalist, whom I will call O’Hara.
From what I could gather, these two men were of an absolutely opposite nature. O’Hara—warm-hearted, impulsive, and generous to a degree; Menzies—somewhat cold, careful with regard to money, and extremely cautious ”

“ In Denmark and Sweden the likeness between the family ghost and the Banshee is decidedly pronounced. Quite a number of old Scandinavian families possess attendant spirits very much after the style of the Banshee; some very beautiful and sympathetic, and some quite the reverse; the most notable difference being that in the Scandinavian apparition there is none of that ghastly mixture of the grave, antiquity, and hell that is so characteristic of the baleful type of Banshee, and which would seem to distinguish it from the ghosts of all other countries. ”

“ It has often been stated that the banshee is an appanage of the great, but this is not the belief of the peasantry of Ulster: many families in humble life have a banshee attached to them. When in a curragh on Lough Sessiagh, in Co. Donegal, the neighbouring hill of Ben Olla was pointed out to me, and I was also shown a small cottage in which a girl named Olla had lived. She was carried off by the fairies, and her wailing was heard before the death of her mother, and again before the death of several members of her family. ”