Banshee

The Irish *bean sí*, the woman of the fairy mound. A female spirit who attaches to particular families and announces an approaching death by keening, the older funerary lament. She is heard rather than reasoned with. The voice is given as wailing or as the cry of a woman in mourning. In the older accounts she is seen combing long grey hair, wearing a green dress beneath a grey cloak, her eyes red from continuous weeping. The first record of the figure in the Irish written tradition appears in the fourteenth-century *Cathreim Thoirdhealbhaigh*. Some Leinster sources name her plainly as the *bean chaointe*, the keening woman.

The keening tradition outlasted the Catholic suppression of professional mourners and entered folk practice as a domestic art. The banshee’s keen is the form of that practice as supernatural attribute: not announcing death so much as performing the lament before the family is able. She is not held to be dangerous. She is held to be punctual.