The Banshee: The History of a Truly Scary Irish Spirit

Anyone who ever saw the Walt Disney movie Darby O’Gill and the Little People when they were a young kid doubtlessly has carried with them one memory of the movie that was seared into their subconscious and repeatedly tried to burst through to the conscious mind in the form of nightmares. I’m talking, of course, about the Banshee, and even though that movie was made back before Sean Connery’s Irish brogue made him all but unintelligible, not to mention long before anyone had ever even thought of CGI, that special effect was perhaps the scariest in kids movies to that point. I unfortunately was at the mercy of a slightly older cousin who thought the height of humor was to cry out for the banshee whenever we were outside in the darkness of night. Funny guy. His name is Chris. He lives out west. Feel free to beat him up.

The banshee doesn’t carry quite the recognizable cache as the leprechaun, but as far as Irish mythology goes, it ranks only second to the little people. The word banshee itself derives from an Irish term bean sídhe which translates roughly to fairy woman. If you go back in time far enough, before St. Patrick came and cleared the Emerald Isle of snakes and children-no, wait, that was the Pied Piper-you will come across a term found in the pre-Christian days of Gaelic glory called sidh, which were a form of deities. It was a tradition when an Irish villager passed on that a woman would be called on to sing a lament. This lament actually has one of those long Irish names curious absent of an appropriate wealth of consonants and since you probably couldn’t figure out how to pronounce it under torture orders from Alberto Gonzales, I’ll just get to the meat. The women who were called upon for this service of honoring the death at funerals were often called keeners. Of course, even in wild and woolly Ireland there were such things as class distinctions and a legend persists that at the funerals of certain Irish families with long traditions and special treatment it would not necessarily be a typical keener who sung the lament, but rather an actual fairy woman, a sidh. Such was the connection between these highfalutin Irish clan that the death of a family member far away would be heralded with the mournful song of a fairy woman.

Like many myths, the banshee seems to have been a corruption of pre-Christian and Christian folk tales. There seems to have been an intermingling of the mythological stories about the sidhs and other supernatural creatures so that wailing song of the fairy woman became not just the herald of a death of one of those famous families, but a portent of death in one’s own family. Eventually, it transformed into a signal of one’s own death if one should be unlucky enough to hear the song of the banshee. Contributing to this fearful symmetry is the appearance that the sidh, who was now called a banshee, began to take. There is much in folk literature to suggest that the banshee ancestry has some mermaid blood in it. Banshees are most often seen all dressed in a nebulous and flowing white, with long hair that can also be so light as to appear white. Apparently, the banshee are quite conscious off their looks because most reports indicate they appear to be brushing those long, flowing locks with a silver comb. This long flowing hair is thought by many to have originated with the same look that mermaids in the water had. One interesting element to this particular of the myth of the banshee is the fear that is the fear that you should fear if you happen to be taking a long walk through the magnificent green meadows of the Irish countryside and you happen to come across a silver comb lying on the ground. Should you happen to find a particularly beautiful silver comb in the green grass, just turn around and walk away. Do not, under any circumstances, pick it up, because the moment you do, a banshee will appear and take you away.