Banshee
In Irish folklore, a woman of the fairies whose wailing at night is heard before a death in one of the old families.
Meaning
The banshee (BAN-shee, as Dictionary.com respells it) takes her name from the Irish bean sídhe, “woman of a fairy mound”. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes her as a supernatural being of Irish and other Celtic folklore whose keening at night was believed to warn of a death in the family of the person who heard it. W. B. Yeats, introducing the banshee stories in 1888, called her “an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death”, and wrote that the keen, the Irish funeral cry, “is said to be an imitation of her cry”. She belongs to Irish folk belief, and to the families who tell of their own banshee.
Origin and history
Thomas Crofton Croker, collecting legends in the south of Ireland, quoted O’Brien’s Irish dictionary: the banshee sings “mournful lamentations” about a house at night when one of the family is ill with a sickness that will end in death, and only families “of an ancient and noble stock” are believed to have one. Croker’s own story of the Mac Carthy banshee turns on that: the family had theirs because they were an old Catholic family.
Lady Wilde describes how she might appear: as a young woman of the family who had died, chosen to bring warning to her kin, or as a shrouded woman crouched under the trees with her face veiled, or flying past in the moonlight, crying. She could follow the old families across the ocean to distant lands.
The Welsh and Scottish banshees
Croker and Britannica both point to a Welsh counterpart, the gwrach y Rhibyn, a hag who came to the window at dusk and called the name of the one who would die; Britannica says she visited only families of old Welsh stock. Croker also quotes Sir Walter Scott, who thought the banshee belief “one of the most beautiful” of Europe’s superstitions and noted Highland families who claimed a spirit of the same kind.
Banshee and keen
Yeats draws the line from the fairy to the funeral: the keen (caoine) of Irish mourners was said to imitate the banshee’s cry, and Britannica describes her own cry as keening. Many who saw her, Yeats writes, saw her “wailing and clapping her hands”. The Changeling belongs to the same Irish fairy belief.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeChangelingIn the folklore of Ireland, Germany and the Slavic lands, a fairy child, or a bewitched stand-in, left in the cradle when the fairies steal a human baby.
- The same shape in Egyptian gods and their symbolsBastetThe cat goddess of Bubastis in the Nile Delta, drawn as a woman with a cat’s head holding a sistrum, often with a basket on her arm. Herodotus saw her festival there and wrote that the Egyptians took their dead cats to Bubastis to be embalmed and buried.
See also
Minotaur, Centaur, Chimera, Hydra, Harpy, Siren.
Sources
- Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (T. Crofton Croker), Thomas Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (new edition, London: William Tegg, 1862), Project Gutenberg, The Banshee, notes to legends XII–XIII
- Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (Lady Wilde, 1887), Lady Wilde (Jane Francesca Wilde), Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms & Superstitions of Ireland (London: Ward and Downey, 1887), Project Gutenberg, The Banshee, pp. 135–137
- Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (ed. W. B. Yeats, 1888), W. B. Yeats (editor), Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London: Walter Scott, 1888), Project Gutenberg, The Banshee, introductory note
- Banshee (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Banshee”, online edition (archived copy), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article
- Banshee (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Banshee” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry, pronunciation and origin
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
Added .