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Back to MainThe Banshee The noise often as a low, wailing sounds a sad mournful sobbing cry. Then it rises to a wild, agonizing shriek a piercing blood-curdling scream. Finally it dies away, fading into a soft, stifled lament. Sometimes it can be the faint sound of muffled drums beating out a somber rhythm, often accompanied by a melancholy dirge on a pipe or flute. It is the sound of the banshee, the spirit that proclaims approaching death. The banshee is a ghostly figure, common both Scottish and Irish myth, signaling the end is near.
The word itself is derived from Gaelic ‘bean shidhe’, and means literally the woman of the fairies. But her purpose is far from the innocent enchantment of fairy myth. In Irish legend, the banshee usually takes the form of the specter of a woman, brushing her hairs, and singing her song of mourning outside the family home of those about to die. But the doomed person whose time has come never hears the song of death. In Scottish myth, the banshee may appear as an old washerwoman, a solitary ‘red fisherman’ a headless horse or simply of an unseen drummer and piper playing a funeral march.
In Irish legend the Bansee normally remains unseen and heard as a form of guardian angel, watching over the members of great aristocratic families, guiding them away from danger and performing the last rites of ‘keening’ for them as death approaches. According to folklore, only being haunted by the banshee prospects the most privileged of families. The spirit cannot express itself during a lifetime of guarding a favored mortal, but can sound a wail of grief when its task is over, just before the moment of death, when its mortal charge is about is about to be taken from it.
One of the best authentic instances of the wail of the banshee is the ghostly sound that echoed around the tiny village of Sam’s cross in the southwest of Ireland on 22 August 1922. The villagers had been aware of the comings and goings of fast convoys of cars carrying armed men. One of these men was Michael Collins, head of the Irish Government and Irish Army, who was touring military outposts besieged by rebels forces during Ireland’s bloody civil war. Fearful of becoming embroiled in the conflict, the villagers another noise drifting on the wind .In the chill silence of the late summer evening, few of them could even discern the sound of gunfire on a quiet country road on the outskirts of the village. But they didn’t need to listen to the noise of battle to know that the death of an important figure was about to take place.
Next morning, the villagers heard the news, which as no surprise to them. Michael Collins had been killed by a few minutes after they heard the wail of the banshee. Psychic researcher Frank Smyth, who has carried out his own study of the myth ,reports that the folklore of the banshee has even crossed the Atlantic in the awake of the millions of Irish emigrants who settled in the United States .The descendents of one Irish family, Boston businessman Lames O’Barry, described to Smyth how he heard the banshee in Massachusetts as a small bot in 1930s.
‘I was lying in the bad one morning,’ said O’Barry ,when I heard a weird noise , like a damanted woman crying. It was spring and outside the window the birds were singing, the sun was shining and the sky was blue. I thought for a moment or two that a wind had sprung up, but a glance at the barely stirring trees told me this was not so. I went down to breakfast and there my father sitting at the kitchen table with tears in his eyes. I had never seen him weep before. My mother told me that they had just heard on phone that my grand father had died in New York. Although he was an old man he was as fit as a fiddle and his death was unexpected.’
It was only some years that O’Barry was told the legend of the bansee and it was then he recalled quite clearly hearing the noise on the death of his grand father. In 1946 while serving as an officer in the US Army Air Force in the far east , O’Barry was awakened by the low howl of banshee once more. He recalled :’It was 6 am and this time I was instantly aware of what it was. I sat bolt upright in bed and the hair on back of my neck prickled. The noise got louder ,rising and falling like an air raid siren. Then it died away . I knew my father was dead. A few days later I got notification that it was so.
On one more occasion O’Barry heard the wail of banshee ,as he sat up in bed reading the newspaper in his hotel room in Toronto during a business trip. He feared it signaled the death of his wife or his young son or his brother, but he strangely reassured that it was none of them. Only later that day ,22 November 1963 ,did he hear about the assassination in Dallas , Texas, of a close family friend—President John F Kennedy.
In Scottish legend the messenger of death takes on different forms. Folklore on the Isle of Mull claims that ,during a family feud ,the 16th century chieftain Ewan was preparing of fight against his father in law ,the MacLaine of Moy Castle , and was greeted on the eve of battle by an old woman washing a bundle of blood strained shirts in a cold island stream. He knew she was a messenger of death, and the next day Ewan was killed with one blow from an axe, severing his head from his body. The present clan chieftains maintain that the sight of a headless rider galloping across the hills of Mulls is now the new messenger of death, taking over from the ghostly washerwoman.
In the north-east of Scotland ,on Tayside ,death in the Airline clan is heralded by the sound of a drummer ,whose eerie beat was heard three times in the last century foretelling the death of three members of the family in the next 40years . In the 1840sthe drummer sounded his warning in the home of the Ogilvie family, the chieftain of Airline, at Cortachy castle ,to warn of the death of the countess . After her death ,the Earl remarried and ,in 1848,he threw a dinner party which included Miss Margeret Dalrymple as a guest .At the dinner table Miss Dalrymple remarked on the sounds of drums and a fife she heard from the courtyard while she had dressed . The Earl and the new Countess paled.
The following morning Miss Dalrymple’s maid was clearing her mistress’s bedroom wardrobe when she heard the sound of the drummer in the courtyard below. When she realized the yard was empty ,she became quite hysterical.
A day later Miss Dalrymple heard the drummer again and cut short her visit to Cortachy Castle .A few days later Lady Airlir died in Brighton ,on the south coast of England, leaving behind a despondent note saying she believed the drums had an omen of her impending death.
In 1988,in the modern world of high technology , a low screech began to wail out across the North sea ,arising to a defining scream shortly before the death of more then 160 workers abroad the oil rig platform Piper Alpha. Less then a minute later ,the platform erupted into a deadly fireball. Experienced engineers who examined the wreckage later came to the conclusion that the noise was caused by the high pressure gas escaping from a relief valve as the disaster was about to strike the crew of the oil rig. However ,one of the survivors had his own description of the awesome scream ,which sounded shortly before his mates died in the icy water of North sea. Rig fitter Derek Ellington ,45, from Aberdeen, explained simply :’ It sounded like the wail of the banshee.’