The whole household now looked at one another with white and puzzled faces; they began to be afraid; whilst the dogs, running about, and sniffing, and whining, were obviously ill at ease and afraid, too.
At last a kind of panic set in, and all made a rush for the house, taking care, when once inside, to shut the door with even greater haste than they had displayed in opening it. The family then retired to rest, but not to sleep, and early the next morning they received news that fully confirmed their suspicions. Mrs Carew had been taken ill with fever on Monday, while preparations for the departure were being made, and had passed away, probably at the very moment when the Richardsons, hearing the phantom coach and mistaking it for a real one, had opened their hall door to welcome her.
That is the gist of the incident as related by Mr Le Fanu, and I have quoted it merely to show how a case of this kind, especially when it happens in Ireland, and to a family that has for some time been associated with Ireland, may sometimes be mistaken for a genuine Banshee haunting, although, of course, there is no reason whatever to suppose that Mr Le Fanu himself laboured under any delusion with regard to it, or intended to convey to his readers an impression of the haunting that the circumstances did not warrant. He merely states it as a case of the supernatural without attempting to consign it to any special category.
Lady Wilde in her “Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland,” pp. 163, 164, quotes another case of coach haunting in Ireland, a very terrible one; while in a book entitled “Rambles in Northumberland,” by the same author, we are informed, “when the death-hearse, drawn by headless horses and driven by a headless driver, is seen about midnight proceeding rapidly, but without noise, towards the churchyard, the death of some considerable personage in the parish is sure to happen at no distant period.” Also, there is a phantom of this description that is occasionally seen on the road near Langley in Durham, and my relatives, the Vizes[9] of Limerick—at least, so my grandmother, née Sally Vize, used to say—are haunted by a phantom coach too; indeed, there seems to be no end to this kind of haunting, which is always either very picturesque or very terrifying, and sometimes both picturesque and terrifying.
At the same time, although intensely interesting, no doubt, the phantom coach is not essentially Irish, and not in any way connected with the Banshee.
As an example of the extreme anxiety of some people to be thought to be of ancient Irish extraction and to have a Banshee, I might refer to an incident in connection with Mrs Elizabeth Sheridan, which is recorded in footnotes on pages 32 and 33 of “The Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan,” compiled by her granddaughter, Miss Alicia Lefanu, and published in 1824, and quote from it the following:
“Like many Irish ladies who resided during the early part of life in the country, Miss Elizabeth Sheridan was a firm believer in the Banshi, a female dæmon, attached to ancient Irish families. She seriously maintained that the Banshi of the Sheridan family was heard wailing beneath the windows of Quilca before the news arrived of Mrs Frances Sheridan’s death at Blois, thus affording them a preternatural intimation of the impending melancholy event. A niece of Miss Sheridan’s made her very angry by observing that as Miss Frances Sheridan was by birth a Chamberlaine, a family of English extraction, she had no right to the guardianship of an Irish fairy, and that, therefore, the Banshi must have made a mistake.”
Now I certainly agree with Miss Sheridan’s niece in doubting that the cry heard before Mrs Frances Sheridan’s death was that of the real Banshee; but I do not doubt it because Mrs Frances Sheridan was of English extraction, for the Banshee has frequently been heard before the death of a wife whose husband was one of an ancient Irish clan—even though the wife had no Irish blood in her at all, but I doubt it because the husband of Mrs Frances Sheridan was one of a family who, not being of really ancient Irish descent, does not, in my opinion, possess a Banshee.
In “Personal Sketches of his Own Times,” by Sir Jonah Barrington, we find (pp. 152-154, Vol. II.) the account of a ghostly experience of the author and his wife, which experience the writer of the paragraph, referring to this work in the notes to T. C. Croker’s Banshee Stories, evidently considered was closely associated with the Banshee.
At the time of the incident, Lord Rossmore was Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Ireland. He was a Scot by birth, but had come over to Ireland when very young, and had obtained the post of page to the Lord-Lieutenant. Fortune had favoured him at every turn. Not only had he been eminently successful in the vocation he finally selected, but he had been equally fortunate both with regard to love and money. The lady with whom he fell in love returned his affections, and, on their marriage, brought him a rich dowry. It was partly with her money that he purchased the estate of Mount Kennedy, and built on it one of the noblest mansions in Wicklow. Not very far from Mount Kennedy, and in the centre of what is termed the golden belt of Ireland, stood Dunran, the residence of the Barringtons; so that Lord Rossmore and the Barringtons were practically neighbours.