“Banshee, correctly written she-fairies or women fairies, credulously supposed, by the common people, to be so affected to certain families, that they are heard to sing mournful lamentations about their houses at night, whenever any of the family labours under a sickness which is to end in death. But no families which are not of an ancient and noble stock are believed to be honoured with this fairy privilege.”—O’Brien’s Irish Dictionary.
For accounts of the appearance of the Irish Banshee, see “Personal Sketches, &c. by Sir Jonah Barrington;” Miss Lefanu’s Memoirs of her Grandmother, Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1824,) p. 32; “The Memoirs of Lady Fanshaw” (quoted by Sir Walter Scott in a note on “the Lady of the Lake,”) &c.
Sir Walter Scott terms the belief in the appearance of the Banshee “one of the most beautiful” of the leading superstitions of Europe. In his “Letters on Demonology,” he says that “several families of the Highlands of Scotland anciently laid claim to the distinction of an attendant spirit, who performed the office of the Irish Banshee,” and particularly refers to the supernatural cries and lamentations which foreboded the death of the gallant Mac Lean of Lochbuy.
“The Welsh Gwrâch y Rhibyn (or the hag of the Dribble) bears some resemblance to the Irish Banshee, being regarded as an omen of death. She is said to come after dusk and flap her leathern wings against the window where she warns of death, and in a broken, howling tone, to call on the one who is to quit mortality by his or her name several times, as thus, A-a-a-n-ni-i-i-i! Anni.”—MS. Communication from Dr. Owen Pughe. For some farther particulars, see, in “A Relation of Apparitions, &c. by the Rev. Edmund Jones,” his account of the Kyhirraeth, “a doleful foreboding noise before death;” and Howell’s “Cambrian Superstitions,” (Tipton, 1831,) p. 31.
The reader will probably remember the White Lady of the House of Brandenburgh, and the fairy Melusine, who usually prognosticated the recurrence of mortality in some noble family of Poitou. Prince, in his “Worthies of Devon,” records the appearance of a white bird performing the same office for the worshipful lineage of Oxenham.
“In the Tyrol, too, they believe in a spirit which looks in at the window of the house in which a person is to die (Deutsche Sagen, No. 266;) the white woman with a veil over her head (267,) answers to the Banshee; but the tradition of the Klage-weib (mourning woman,) in the Lüneburger Heath (Spiels Archiv. ii. 297,) resembles it still more closely. On stormy nights, when the moon shines faintly through the fleeting clouds, she stalks, of gigantic stature, with death-like aspect, and black hollow eyes, wrapt in grave-clothes which float in the wind, and stretches her immense arm over the solitary hut, uttering lamentable cries in the tempestuous darkness. Beneath the roof over which the Klage-weib has leaned, one of the inmates must die in the course of the month.”—
The Brothers Grimm, and MS. Communication from Dr. William Grimm.
LEGENDS OF THE PHOOKA.
“Ne let house-fires, nor lightnings’ helpless harms,
Ne let the Pouke, nor other evil spright,
Ne let mischievous witches with their charms,
Ne let hobgoblins, names whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not.”
Spenser.