The Banshee

The banshee — in Irish bean sí, “woman of the fairy mound” — is a female spirit who announces a death in the family by wailing, shrieking or keening outside the house at night. Her name links her to the síde, the ancient burial mounds that dot the Irish countryside and were believed to be dwellings of the otherworld. Descriptions vary: she may be a small, aged woman or a tall, pale young one, with long streaming hair that she combs as she cries, a gray cloak over a green dress, or a white gown, her eyes red from weeping. She is rarely seen at all; most people who “meet” the banshee only hear her.

Her cry mirrors a real Irish mourning custom. At wakes and funerals, the bean chaointe, or keening woman, sang a lament, the caoineadh, over the dead, and the best keeners were in demand. In folklore the banshee performs that lament in advance — sometimes even when a family member has died far away, so that her wailing is the household’s first news of the loss. Tradition holds that she follows only old Gaelic families, the “Milesian” stock with names beginning Ó or Mac, though families such as the Geraldines were said to have become Irish enough to earn one; the O’Briens’ banshee, Aibell, was said to command twenty-five others.

References reach back to the 14th-century Cathréim Thoirdhealbhaigh (“Triumphs of Turlough”). One of the most quoted accounts comes from Ann, Lady Fanshawe, an English royalist who stayed with Lady Honor O’Brien in County Clare in the winter of 1649–50, as Cromwell’s army advanced. Woken in the night, she wrote, she saw a pale, red-haired woman in white leaning in at the window, who called out three times in a tone she had never heard – the printed memoir renders it “A horse” – and vanished with a sigh, her body looking “more like a thick cloud than substance”; in the morning her hostess told her a cousin had died in the house at about two o’clock, and that a woman’s shape always appeared at that window when one of the family was dying. Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825) popularized the Bunworth Banshee of County Cork, and Elliott O’Donnell’s The Banshee (1907) collected dozens of family stories.

The folklorist Patricia Lysaght’s landmark study The Banshee: The Irish Death-Messenger (1986), based on her doctoral research at University College Dublin, showed how deeply the belief ran in rural Ireland into the 20th century, and how its form varied by region — in parts of Leinster she is the bean chaointe whose cry can shatter glass, while Scotland has the related bean nighe, the washer at the ford who rinses the bloodstained clothes of those about to die.

A woman’s keening, wailing or screaming outside a house at night, heard before a death in the family; occasionally a glimpse of a small old woman or a pale young one combing her long hair, sometimes linked with a death coach.

Outside the homes of old Irish families, by windows, streams and fords, and on country roads at night — in tradition throughout Ireland, with related figures in Gaelic Scotland.

The banshee is everywhere in Irish and diaspora culture, from Croker and Lady Wilde to Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), comic books and the word “banshee” itself for any piercing wail.