In the autumn of 1777 the Rev. James Crawford, rector of the parish of Killina, County Leitrim, was riding on horseback with his sister-in-law, Miss Hannah Wilson, on a pillion behind him, along the road leading to the “The Rosses,” and, on reaching the estuary, he at once proceeded to cross it. After they had gone some distance, Miss Wilson, noticing that the water touched the saddle laps, became so alarmed that she cried out and besought Mr Crawford to turn the horse round and get back to land as quickly as possible.
“I do not think there can be danger,” Mr Crawford answered, “for I see a horseman crossing the ford not twenty yards before us.”
To this Miss Wilson, who also saw the horseman, replied:
“You had better hail him and inquire the depth of the intervening water.”
Mr Crawford at once did so, whereupon the horseman stopped and, turning round, revealed a face distorted by the most hideous grin conceivable, and so frightfully white and evil that the luckless clergyman promptly beat a retreat, and made no attempt to check the mad haste of his panicked steed till he had left the estuary many miles behind him.
On arriving home he narrated the incident to his wife and family, and subsequently learned that the estuary was well known to be haunted by several phantoms, whose mission was invariably the same, either to foretell the doom by drowning of the person to whom they appeared, or else to actually bring about the death of that person by luring them on and on, until they got out of their depth, and so perished.
One would have thought that Mr Crawford, after the experience just narrated, would have given the estuary a very wide berth in future; but no such thing. He again attempted to cross the ford of “The Rosses” on 27th September, 1777, and was drowned in the endeavour.
Among many thrilling and (so it struck me at the time) authentic stories told me in my youth by a Mrs Broderick, a well-known vendor of oranges and chocolate in Bristol, were several stirring accounts of the Banshee. I was at the time a day boy at Clifton College, residing not very far from the school, and Mrs Broderick, who used to visit our house every week with her wares, took a particular interest in me because I was Irish—one of “the real old O’Donnells.” She was a native of Cork, and had, I believe, migrated from that city in the Juno, an old cattle boat, that for more than twenty years plied regularly every week between Cork and Bristol carrying a handful of passengers, who, for the cheapness of the fare, made the best of the rolling and tossing and extremely limited space allotted for their accommodation. In later years I often travelled to and from Dublin and Bristol in the Argo, the Juno’s sister ship, so I speak feelingly and from experience. But to proceed with Mrs Broderick’s Banshee stories.
The one containing an account of a Banshee haunting on the sea I will narrate in this chapter, and the other, which has no connection with either sea or river, I will deal with later on.
Before I commence either story, however, I would like to say that though Mrs Broderick spoke with a rich brogue and was really Irish, she used few, if any, of those words and expressions that certain professors of the Dublin Academic School apparently consider inseparable from the speech of the Irish peasant class. I cannot, for example, remember her ever saying Musha, or Arrah, or Oro; and, as for Erse, I am quite certain she did not know a word of it. Yet, as I have said, she was Irish, and far more Irish than many of the Gaelic scholars of to-day who, insufferably proud of their knowledge of the Celtic tongue, bore one stiff by their feeble and futile attempts to acquire something of the real Irish wit and proverbial humour.