Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter

by Elliott O'Donnell

Finding that, owing to the vigour with which they pulled, he was actually slipping from his seat, he appealed to his servant for assistance; and the latter, doing as he was told, held on to him with all his strength, and thus prevented the little people from dragging him to the ground. Mrs. Meta O’Donnell is absolutely sure that her relative never took stimulants of any sort, and that he was in a perfectly normal state of mind when this event happened.

Nor is this road haunted only by fairies, for Mrs. Meta O’Donnell again tells me that this same relative of hers, when driving home on another occasion—this time with several friends—saw a man on horseback, in a hunting coat, suddenly leap the hedge, and, after riding for some distance by the side of the car, abruptly vanish. Two of the men who were with him, she believes, also witnessed this phenomenon.

It is a long step, seemingly, from the fairy to the banshee, but these two types of spirit have at least one trait in common, namely, exclusiveness; and the banshee, even more emphatically than the fairy, will have nought to do with the alien. It will attach itself only to the family of bona-fide Irish origin, only to the clan that has been associated with Irish soil for many generations.

With the kind permission of Mr. Ralph Shirley, I will here introduce, making only slight alterations, a few extracts from an article of mine on the banshee, which appeared in the “Occult Review” for September, 1913:

“Contemporary with fairies and the Feni, phantoms typical of the great lone hills of Wicklow and Connemara, and of the bare and wind-bitten cliffs of Galway, may well have been the banshees, which, attaching themselves for divers reasons to various chieftains and sons of chieftains, eventually became recognised as family ghosts or familiars.

“Many people have fallen in the error of imagining all banshees are moulded after one pattern. Nothing could be more fallacious. The banshee of the O’Rourkes, for example, does not resemble that of the O’Donnells; there are many forms of the banshee, each clan having a distinct one—or more than one—of its own. Some of the banshees are fair to look at, and some old, and foul, and terrifying; but their mission is invariably the same, i.e., to announce a death or some great family catastrophe.

“The banshee is never joyous; it is always either sad or malevolent. Sometimes it wails once, sometimes three times—the wail in some degree, but not altogether, resembling that of a woman in great trouble or agony; sometimes, again, it groans; and sometimes it sighs, or sings. In some clans the demonstrations are both visual and auditory, in others only visual; and in others, again, only auditory. There is no really old clan but has its banshee, and few members of that clan who are not, at some time or other of their lives, made aware of it.

“How well I recollect as a child being told by those who had experienced it, that a dreadful groaning and wailing had been heard the night prior to the death of a very near relative of mine in Africa. I enquired what made the wailing, and was informed ‘the banshee,’ or the ghost woman, who never fails to announce the death of an O’Donnell.

“Years later, when in the extreme West of England, my wife and I were awakened one night by a terrible wail, which sounded just outside our door. Beginning in a low key, it rose and rose, until it ended in a shrill scream, that in time died away in a horrible groan. The idea of the banshee at once flashed through my mind, for I felt none other but a banshee could have made such a sound.

“Still, to satisfy my wife, I jumped out of bed and went on to the landing; all was dark and silent, and outside their bedrooms were assembled the rest of the household, terrified, and eager to have an explanation of what had happened. We searched the whole house and the waste land outside, but there was nothing which could in any way account for the noise, and in the morning I received news of the death of someone very closely related to me.... Whilst some writers are inclined to treat the subject jocularly, and attribute the banshee either to obviously absurd physical causes, or to the abnormally imaginative powers they insist are the birthright of all Irishmen, others dive into the pseudo-profound compilations of modern Theosophy, and reappear with the pronouncement that banshees are not spirits at all—not entities hailing from the superphysical world—but mere thought germs, created by some remote ancestor of a clan, and wafted down from one generation to another of his descendants, an idea as nonsensical as it is extravagant, and which will not for an instant hold water when looked into by those who have had a bona-fide experience of the banshee or any other ghostly phenomenon. Indeed, it is only the latter who are capable of making observations of any value on such a subject, and all effort to describe or account for the superphysical by those who have never experienced it, no matter whether those efforts are made by theosophical savants, professional mediums or scientific experts, are, in my opinion, weightless, colourless and futile.