The Banshee — Bean Sídhe in Irish, 'woman of the fairy mound' — is one of the most enduring figures in Irish folklore. She is not a monster. She is a mourner, a fairy woman whose role is to keen for the dying long before any human knows that death is coming.
Tradition holds that she is attached to certain old Irish families — typically those whose surnames begin with O' or Mac, families whose lineage reaches deep into the Gaelic past. When a member of one of those families is about to die, anywhere in the world, the Banshee comes to mourn them. She may appear in the family's home country even if the person dies far overseas.
She is described in many forms. Sometimes a beautiful young woman with long pale or red hair, wrapped in a green gown with a grey cloak. Sometimes a stately middle-aged woman in white. Sometimes a ragged old hag, eyes red from weeping, hair wild from the wind. What never changes is the cry: a long, sorrowful keen, sometimes a single voice, sometimes an entire choir of fairy women — the bean chaointe, the keening women — heard in the dark hours before a death.
Some old families spoke of the Banshee almost with affection. To have one was to be old, to be remembered, to be part of a line that mattered enough for a fairy woman to mourn. Others dreaded her absolutely. Hearing her was hearing the future arrive early.
The Banshee survived the long centuries of Irish history, the Norman invasions, the famine, the diaspora. Irish emigrants in America, Australia and Britain wrote home in the 19th century reporting that they had heard her keening on the night that, days later, news arrived of a death back home.
She is one of the great archetypes of grief: the figure who tells you that something has already happened in the world, even before the messenger reaches your door. Older than Christianity in Ireland, older than English in Ireland, the Banshee still walks the night where the old families remain.