“I remember vividly my first experience of our Banshee. I had never heard of it at the time, and in fact I have only heard of it in recent years.
“It happened one day that I went into the hall, in the daytime, I forget the exact hour, and as I climbed the stairway, being yet a small child, I happened to look up. There, looking over the rails at the top of the stairway, was an object so horrible that I shudder when I think of it even now. In a greenish halo of light the most terrible head imagination could paint—only this was no imagination, I knew it was a real object—was looking at me with apparently fiendish fire in its light and leering eyes. The head was neither man nor woman’s; it was ages old; it might have been buried and dug up again, it was so skull-like and shrunken; its pallor was horrible, grey and mildewy; its hair was long. Its mouth leered, and its light and cruel eyes seemed determined to hurt me to the utmost, with the terror it inspired. I remember how my childish heart rebelled against its cowardice in trying to hurt and frighten so small a child. Gazing back at it in petrified horror, I slowly returned to the room I had come from. I resolved never to tell anyone about it, I was so proud and reserved by nature.
“I had then two secret terrors hidden in my Irish heart. The first one I have never till recently spoken of to anyone; it happened before I saw this awful head. I was asleep, but yet I knew I was not asleep. Suddenly, down the road that led to our home in Ireland came an object so terrible that for years after my child’s heart used to stand still at the memory of it. The object I saw coming down to our house was a procession—there were several pairs of horses being led by grooms in livery, pulling an old coach with them. It was a large and awful looking old coach! The horses were headless, and the men who led them were headless, and even now as I write, the awful terror of it all comes over me, it was a terror beyond words. I knew, I felt certain they had come to cut off my head! This procession of headless things stopped at our door, the men entered the house, chased me up to the very top of it, and then cut off my head! I can remember saying to myself, ‘Now I am dead, I am dead, I can suffer no more.’
“They then went back to the coach, and the procession moved away and was lost to view.
“Night after night I lay shivering with terror, for months, for years, there was such a lurid horror about this headless procession.
“Some weeks after I saw the head, we heard that our father had been killed about that time in Egypt, murdered it was supposed. My mother died some years afterwards.
“One evening, when I was grown up, we were sitting round the fire with friends, and someone said:
“‘I don’t believe in ghosts. Have you ever met anyone who has seen one? I have not!’
“A sudden impulse came over me—never to that moment had I ever mentioned the head—and, leaning forward, I said:
“‘I have seen a ghost; I saw the most terrible head when I was a child, looking over the staircase.’