Legend

Banshee

The wailing woman of Irish tradition whose keening foretells a death in the old families.

The banshee — from the Irish bean sí, «woman of the fairy mound» — is a spirit whose mournful cry, heard at night, foretells an imminent death. In tradition she is attached to particular old Irish families, and her keening announces that one of their number is about to die.

She appears variously as a young woman, a stately matron, or a withered crone — some say the same spirit in the three ages of womanhood — and in some regions she is a washer at the ford, seen rinsing the bloodied clothes of the one soon to die. Her signature is sound: the caoineadh, a piercing lament.

That lament is rooted in a real practice — the keen, the tradition of women wailing ritual laments over the dead at Irish wakes, an art in its own right. The banshee can be understood as that grief given a supernatural body, a way of holding the nearness of death in a figure the community could name. Regional versions differ widely, as befits a purely oral belief.