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The Wailing Spirit

"There is a story told in the Emerald Isle about a faithful farmer, whilst on a journey of mercy in the night hours, who heard a faint wailing cry. The cry, faint at first, flared louder with ever step he took.

"At first it sounded to him like a poor wee lass a-weeping and whimpering for smitten love; then he thought the sound might be the whine of a lost

whelp. It was neither a pitiable maiden weeping nor a tiny animal pup whining, but the spirit of a wailing woman in plaintive lamentation."

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Of all the stories, legends and myth about ghosts and faries, the Banshee is best known to the general public. Banshee or Bean-sidhe' is Irish for fairy woman or; her sharp cries and piercing wails are also called keening' (Caoineadh' lament, Irish).

Take no fear as there is no harm or evil in her mere presence during the dark of night, unless she is seen in the act of wailing, but this is a fatal sign. The wail of banshee pierces gloom of the nightly hours, her notes rising and falling like the waves of the sea' it also announces a mortal's demise.

Whatever her origins, the banshee chiefly appears in one of three guises: Sometimes she is young and beautiful or sometime in the appearance of a wicked looking old hag. One writer described her as a tall, thin woman with long tangled hair that floated round her shoulders and uttering piercing cries of lament'. The banshee may also appear in a variety of forms, such as a hooded crow or other animals associated with witchcraft in Irish lore.

Throughout the Emerald Isle she could be heard in different sounds when she is mourning the coming death when it was just so dark, that forms of things were indistinct but not wholly lost. In some parts of Leinster, the banshee is referred to as the bean chaointe' (keening woman) whose whose wailing cry can be so piercing that it shatters glass. Through the county of Kerry, the keen is heard as low, pleasant singing'. But through Tyrone, her cries can be heard as two boards being struck together; and on Rathin Isle as a thin, screeching sound between the wail of a woman and the screech of an owl'.

She usually wears a grey, hooded cloak or the winding sheet or grave robe of the unshriven dead. She may also appear in the guise of a washer-woman, and seen apparently washing the blood-stained clothes of those who are about to die. In this form she is known as the bean-nighe' (washing woman).

She is a solitary woman spirit, mourning and forewarning those only of the best families

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