Ok, I’m not really sure why but I always thought a banshee was like an ape. There’s zero explanation for it. Somewhere in my brain a banshee was this crouched, dark, scary creature, vaguely ape-shaped, that screamed at you and probably also wanted to hurt you. I dunno…anyways.
I went down a rabbit hole on this one and basically everything I thought I knew about the banshee turned out to be incorrect. And since I’m Irish, which makes this somehow more embarrassing, I figured I’d share my research with all of you.
The Banshee is a…Fairy?
Not an ape, obviously. A fairy.
Now before you picture something small and winged and sparkly, understand that Irish fairies are nothing like that. Irish fairies are ancient, powerful, and deeply unsettling. They come from the Tuatha Dé Danann, the old gods of Ireland who were defeated and driven underground thousands of years ago. Over centuries the gods shrank in the imagination of the people, growing smaller and stranger until they became what we now call fairy folk.
The banshee, or bean sídhe in Irish, literally means “woman of the fairy mound.” The Irish countryside is covered in ancient earthen mounds called sídhe, some dating all the way back to the Stone Age. These were burial sites, gateways to the underground kingdom where the old gods retreated. The banshee came from there.
She’s not a monster….
She’s Not Trying to Kill You
The banshee doesn’t cause the death. She doesn’t come to hurt you. She already knows you’re going to die, and she comes to tell you.
She wails outside the house. She mourns and cries. And then someone in the family dies, sometimes right away, sometimes days later. She can even show up when the person has died far away and the news hasn’t reached home yet. Her wailing is the first warning the family has that something has gone wrong.
I sat with that for a while. She already knows. She sees it coming before it happens. How? Nobody really knows. She just does. She’s been doing this for thousands of years and apparently she’s never been wrong.
She’s Beautiful
She has long streaming hair, sometimes silver, sometimes dark. She wears a grey cloak over a green dress. She’s described in many accounts as pale and striking, almost luminous. Beautiful in an ancient and otherworldly way.
The only giveaway is her eyes.
They’re red from crying. She’s been weeping for so long, for so many families across so many centuries, that her eyes have gone permanently red.
That detail alone kept me up a little.
A Family Guardian
The banshee is not malevolent. In many stories she’s portrayed as a compassionate figure who has been attached to your family for generations, watching over you, and when one of you is about to leave she simply cannot help herself. She grieves.
Her scream isn’t rage. It’s heartbreak.
Many Irish families believe they have their own banshee, a specific spirit tied to their bloodline who has been present at every death in the family going back further than anyone can remember. Some say she makes sure the dying person passes safely to the other side. She’s not the monster at the door. She’s the one making sure you get where you’re going.
That is somehow so much more unsettling to me than if she were just evil. Evil I can deal with. Something that has loved your family for a thousand years and cries every time one of you dies? I don’t know what to do with that.
The Banshee Is Still a Part of Irish Culture
This isn’t ancient history.
There are records from County Clare in the 1930s of a man describing how his grandmother would hear the banshee before a family member died every single time. He described her cry as a long, shrill, mournful sound that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
People in Ireland today will tell you without any embarrassment that their family has a banshee and that they’ve heard her and that every time she came, someone died.
Now We Know…
I came into this thinking I knew what a banshee was. Scary ape creature who screams and causes death.
What I found was something that has been quietly watching over Irish families for thousands of years, crying every time one of them dies, red eyed from all that grief, beautiful.
She doesn’t want anything from you. She’s not angry. She’s just been around long enough to know when your time is coming, and she loves your family too much to stay quiet about it.
If you’ve got Irish blood in you, she’s been there. Standing outside houses in the dark, mourning people whose names you’ll never know, who are somehow still your family.
Are you Irish? Does any of this change how you think about the banshee? Tell me in the comments.
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