Opinion: The common belief was the banshee was a ghostly female messenger of death who would let out a sorrowful wail in an unearthly voice
I was a child of the 1980s and had only two TV channels to surf. One night, I switched on the Late Late Show, Ireland's legendary chat show hosted by Gay Byrne. I had been allowed to stay up to watch the Late Late previously, but the segment I encountered at that moment was different to the usual light entertainment encountered before.
Amid a hushed studio audience, Byrne announced his next guest was going to talk about the banshee, a particular type of phantom known in traditional Irish belief. Alone in the house and terrified of ghosts, it was too much for me to bear, so I switched the channel immediately and tried to forget it was even mentioned.
Recently I stumbled across that clip in the RTÉ archives. There in grainy colour, first broadcast in winter 1986, was the interview that I had avoided when I first encountered it. But now, as a fearless adult, with research interests in Irish folk rituals, I watched it.
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From RTÉ Archives, Prof Patricia Lysaght talks about the traditions, history and beliefs surrounding the Irish harbinger of death
The show featured the foremost expert on the subject, Prof Patricia Lysaght. After she explained what the banshee was, Byrne asked the audience if they had ever heard the banshee and one woman, a perfectly nice ordinary lady, admitted she had and explained what she heard.
When I was a child, it was common to hear of people, usually a friend of a friend, who had heard the banshee’s wail before receiving news of a death. The common belief was the banshee - also referred to as the bean chaointe or keening or crying woman – was a ghostly messenger of death. She would be heard, not always seen, and would let out a sorrowful wail in an unearthly voice. Hearing this was meant to signify imminent death: the person who is going to die does not hear it, rather a member of their family hears it soon before their relative’s death.
The banshee is said to take the form of a cloaked solitary old woman with white or grey hair left loose, and she is often seen combing her hair, mermaid like, as she passes through the earthly realm. A belief was that one must never pick up a comb from the ground, lest it belonged to her. Some say that the banshee only wails for certain great old Irish families – that family names prefixed with an O, Mc or Mac are those she cries for. Yet many have claimed to hear her who did not have this familial association. Two examples: Lady Jane Wilde and Charlotte Thornley Stoker - the mothers of Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker respectively - separately claimed to have heard the banshee right before the death of family members.
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From RTÉ Archives, 1949 audio clip with keener from Inishmore Bríd Iarnáin giving an example of her craft
The banshee is not just heard in Ireland; Irish emigrants have claimed to have heard her in the foreign countries they moved to, immediately preceding the death of a family member at home in Ireland. Lysaght has said that hearing a banshee's wail acted as a type of 'intergenerational link’ with the ancestors, describing it as 'one of your own coming to convey you to the other side’, offering not only consolation for the hearer but pride in this ancestral connection too.
What the banshee is supposed to look like, tallies with the professional keeners who performed at Irish wakes and funerals in the distant past, the need for whose services died out by the middle of the 20th century. As they ‘keened’ over corpses at funerals, and were well paid to do so, they left their hair loose, often leaving feet bare too, in what was deemed to be a proper show of mourning and unbridled grief.
Traditional keeners were often superstitious about their song and strict about the specifics of the ritual, they did not keen outside of funerals as they felt it deeply inappropriate and even unlucky to do so. Consequently, there are few recordings of traditional keeners from that period. You can hear one as part of a display in the National Museum of Ireland, Country Life in Mayo, and it is an ethereal sound, almost unhuman, perhaps a low version of what a banshee would sound like. The origins of the banshee legend are unknown, but Lysaght suggested the belief that a woman who had been a professional keener in life might herself become a banshee after death.
Read more: The Year In Ireland: a vital collection of Irish folk customs and beliefs
The cry of the banshee is supposedly very loud and siren-like. In the Irish rural countryside on a quiet night, might the sound of barking foxes or crying cats have been mistaken for a banshee's wail? It’s unlikely as Irish country people were well acquainted with such sounds. Unlike many other regional-specific customs in Ireland the banshee belief was widely held across the country.
My own interest in Irish folk rituals has extended to writing on the general subject and I would not be an expert of the calibre of Lysaght. But what I have gleaned over the years from growing up in Ireland, is that as previous generations have died out, so too are old continuous belief systems handed down (This does not include groups of people reviving old customs). I wonder has the same belief in the banshee fallen away over the years? I remember a time when most people were like that Late Late studio audience, nervous when the topic was broached, and then a small number reluctantly admitting their belief, and people being generally reticent to talk about such things in polite company.
It was as if in Ireland, admitting belief in the old systems was wrapped up in embarrassment, that by admitting credence or even attesting to a supernatural experience meant you were primitive or simple minded. I wonder if the show went out today would we see how attitudes have changed, would there be members of the audience - regular ordinary people - saying they believe and describing what they heard?
From Snarled, a US take on the Irish Banshee legend
We have a growing lack of knowledge of our folk rituals compared to previous generations. This is likely due to the reluctance of parents of a certain era to pass them on. Those who were steeped in such traditions growing up, who became rural bungalow dwelling parents in the 1970s and 1980s, who wanted to 'better' their children, decided that certain beliefs were reminiscent of an era of perceived poverty where houses were thatched, with no electricity or running water.
Modernisation, of course, played its own role in this process: it can’t be a coincidence that faith in the supernatural began to wane after rural electrification, as the darkness of the rural Irish countryside was purged. Socially too, people wished to move on from a culture of piseógs that was deemed primitive and slightly embarrassing.
This was entirely understandable given the often grim and grinding poverty of Ireland in the past, but I hope it does not mean that we continue to leave the belief systems, that make us uniquely Irish, behind in a rapidly changing country. And especially not the banshee, in her authentic traditional form. For if we stop believing in her and her world, then it's surely a harbinger of the dealth of traditional Irish customs and rituals and with it our unique Irish cultural identity.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
