All About Banshees

In my childhood, when dinosaurs walked the earth and movie special effects were primitive, I thought the cloaked and faceless banshee in Walt Disney’s “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. Nowadays it looks extremely lame, but at the time it gave me nightmares.

To this day, I avoid scary visuals whenever possible. (Don't even talk to me about zombies.) Several years ago, though, I became fascinated by Abbey Lubbers, Banshees & Boggarts, an illustrated encyclopedia by the late British folklore expert Katharine Briggs. The first entry under “B”—predictably—was “banshee,” and I almost skipped over it the same way I skip the Ghost of Christmas Future illustration in A Christmas Carol.

But then I started reading. It turns out that, far from always being some faceless ghost or horrifying old hag, banshees often were maidens who’d died too young, and came back to warn their families about an impending death. Rather sweet, I thought.

There was a story in that.

Three hours later, Ashling the banshee and the entire plot of TEXTING THE UNDERWORLD were mapped out in my head. Take that, Darby O’Gill.

In Irish, “banshee” is spelled bean si, but it’s pronounced like the English spelling. There are many varieties of banshees: In some tales, the banshee is a gorgeous fairy woman combing her long silver hair; in others she’s a little old lady sitting on a rock and weeping. Once in a while she’s a horrible apparition with evil red eyes and a mouth always open, ready to shriek, and you can die just from looking at her.

If you see a comb on the ground, the legends advise, do not pick it up. If it belongs to a banshee, at worst she will use it to lure you to your doom. At best she’ll be annoyed, which probably isn’t so good either.

In some traditions—especially in Scotland, where there’s a similar entity called the bean nighe—the banshee is seen washing bloody clothes in a stream before a battle. If more than one washerwoman banshee appears, it means either there’s going to be an awful slaughter or somebody exceptionally important is about to die.

Sometimes the noise a banshee makes is simple weeping, often with hand-clapping (which apparently was a mourning gesture at one time). It’s been described as pleasant singing—sometimes with words—or unearthly shrieking and moaning. Some traditions insist that it’s the sound of two boards being clapped together.

At one point in Irish history, bereaved families hired women to “keen” (sing a mourning lament) at a funeral—some think that’s where the banshee legend started. There are those who say that a banshee appears to everyone except the doomed person. (I suppose that thought would be a comfort if you were being scared out of your wits by a horrible apparition—at least you’d know you weren’t the one being targeted.)

In most stories, banshees are connected with the oldest Irish families, and will follow them wherever they go in the world. No matter what language the family now speaks, the banshee’s cry will be understood by everyone.

If you live in an Irish neighborhood, surrounded by O’Neills and O’Briens, listen carefully to the next car alarm you hear.

Maybe it’s not what you think it is.