ADDENDA
In reply to a letter of mine asking for particulars of the Banshee alleged to be attached to the Inchiquin family, I received the following:
“I think the name (of the Banshee) was Obenheim, but I am not sure. Two or three people have told me that she appeared before my grandfather’s death, but none of them either saw or heard her, but they had met people who did say they had heard her.”
Writing also for particulars of the Banshee to a cousin of the head of one of the oldest Irish clans, I received a long letter, from which I will quote the following:
“I have heard ‘the Banshee’ cry. It is simply like a woman wailing in the most unearthly fashion. At the time an O’Neill was in this house, and she subsequently heard that her eldest brother had died on that night between twelve a.m. and three a.m., when we all of us heard the Banshee wailing. I heard her also at my mother’s death, and at the death of my husband’s eldest sister. The cry is not always quite the same. When my dear mother died, it was a very low wail which seemed to go round and round the house.
“At the death of one of the great O’Neill family, we located the cry at one end of the house. When my sister-in-law died I was wakened up by a loud scream in my room in the middle of the night. She had died at that instant. I heard the Banshee one day, driving in the country, at a distance. Sometimes the Banshee, who follows old families, is heard by the whole village. Some people say she is red-haired and wears a long flowing white dress. She is supposed to wring her long thick hair. Others say she appears as a small woman dressed in black.
“Such an apparition did appear to me in the daytime before my mother-in-law died.”
The writer of this letter has asked me not to publish her name, but I have it by me in case corroboration is needed.
In reference to the O’Donnell Banshee, Chapter XIII., my sister, Petronella O’Donnell, writes: