The Banshee: The Wailing Woman of Irish Lore, Herald of Death and Voice of Grief
The Bunworth Banshee — Thomas Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland , 1825. The defining image of the Irish death-herald: an old woman keening at the threshold of a house where someone will die. In Ireland, when someone is about to die, they sometimes know before anyone else does. Not because of any medical sign or rational inference — but because of a sound. The sound comes at night, usually: a keening, a wailing, a sound of grief so intense and so specifically targeted that it passes through the walls of the house and enters the hearing of those inside as a message. The message is not a question. The message is a fact: someone here is going to die . The banshee — from Old Irish bean sídhe (woman of the fairy mound; bean = woman, sídhe = of the fairy mounds, the Otherworld) — is the spirit who makes this sound. She is not a monster. She does not cause death; she announces it. She is, in the most precise sense of the theological category, a psyc...