The Banshee

The story

In Ireland, in the farmhouses of the countryside, there is a sound that nobody wants to hear.

It is not thunder, and it is not the wind. It comes from outside, after midnight, when the fire has burned down to embers and the whole house is asleep. It begins softly, almost like a breath. Then it rises into a long, thin wail that sounds like no animal, and not quite like a human voice either. It is a woman weeping. And as she weeps, she sings.

The Irish call her bean sídhe, “the woman of the fairy people”. In English we say banshee.

Picture a low house with a thatched roof, in a valley in the west of Ireland. An old family lives there, the kind whose surname begins with O' or Mac: names of people who have been on that land for longer than memory can count. The grandfather has been in bed for a week. The doctor came, shook his head and went away again. Nobody said anything, but everyone stopped speaking out loud.

That night, his granddaughter was keeping watch. She was alone in the kitchen with a candle and a cup of tea that had long gone cold. A log split in the fireplace. And from outside, from the field behind the house, came the first sound.

She looked up. A fox, she thought: foxes make strange cries, sometimes almost human. She waited.

The sound came again, closer. Now it had a tune, or something like one: a wave that rose, fell, and rose again. The dog, who had been sleeping at the foot of the grandfather's bed, got up, crept under the table with his tail between his legs, and did not bark once.

Then the girl understood.

She had never heard it before. But she didn't need to have. Her grandmother had described it to her a hundred times, in the low voice people use for true things: the banshee's cry is like nothing else. It does not ask for help, and it does not ask questions. It is a cry that already knows how things will end.

Who that woman was, the old people could never agree. Some said she was the spirit of an ancestor who had died long ago and had never stopped loving the family. Others said she belonged to the fairy people, and was bound to the old families by a pact older than any other. Others still spoke of a woman of that house who had been badly treated in life. Nobody really knew. But on one thing they all agreed: the banshee harms no one. She does not bring death. She announces it, like a messenger who arrives with the worst news of all and has the decency to weep as she delivers it.

That did not make her crying any easier to listen to.

The granddaughter stood up. Her legs were shaking, but she went to the window. She moved the curtain aside by a finger's width and looked out.

The field was grey under the moon. At the far end, where the stone wall met the old hawthorn, a figure was sitting. She could not see it clearly. It was a woman, that much was certain, wrapped in a grey cloak, with very long hair that fell all the way to the ground. With one hand she was drawing it down, slowly, along its whole length. With every stroke, something glinted in the moonlight.

A comb. A silver comb.

The woman was not looking at the house. She combed her hair and sang, and the song rose and fell over the field. When she lifted her face for a moment, the girl saw that it was impossible to tell whether she was young or old: perhaps both, depending on how you looked at her. Her eyes were red, like the eyes of someone who has been crying for centuries and still has not finished.

From the bed behind her came a dry voice.

“You heard her too?”

The grandfather was awake. His eyes were open and, to her surprise, his face was calm.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was trembling.

“Then that's all right,” he said. “She's come to say goodbye to me. A family with nobody to weep for it is a family that has forgotten itself.”

The girl sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand. There was nothing else to do. Outside, the wailing went on, no louder and no softer, as if it had the whole night and was in no hurry at all. Inside, the candle burned down.

At dawn, when the sky grew light beyond the field, the crying died away. It did not stop all at once: it grew further and further away, thinner and thinner, until it was only a thread, and then it was gone. In the kitchen there was nothing to hear but the cockerel.

The grandfather died soon afterwards, in his sleep.

On the wall at the end of the field, there was no one. Only the flattened grass, and the hawthorn swaying, although there was no wind.

They say the banshee follows her families wherever they go, even far from Ireland, even across the sea. And there are many stories about her, but there is one that everybody knows, because it is the strangest.

There was a man who, walking home one night, found a comb on the path. A beautiful comb, polished and shining. He picked it up and put it in his pocket, thinking he would give it to his wife.

When he got home, he heard something scratching at the window. Then a wail, and a woman's voice, very low, saying: “Give me back my comb.”

The man was less foolish than he looked. He did not open the door. He took the tongs from the fireplace, gripped the comb between their iron tips and held it out of the window, keeping well back. A hand seized it from the other side. There was a scream, the sound of something twisting, and when the man pulled the tongs back in, the iron was bent like a dry twig.

That is why, they say, in Ireland you never pick up a comb you find on the ground.

And if, one night in the countryside, you hear singing that shouldn't be there, do not go out looking for it. She has not come to take anyone. She has come to warn.

Listen to her until the end. It is the only way she has of loving you.