The wailing woman of the fairy mounds
The bean si, 'woman of the fairy mound', is the death-messenger of Irish folk belief, one of the si-folk who dwell in the prehistoric burial mounds. Descriptions vary by county: a young woman with hair to the ground, combing it as she sits by a window; a small old woman in a grey cloak; in the south-east she is called the badhb, the same word as the ancient battle-crow goddess. She is almost never seen, only heard. Her keen, a long-drawn cry between wail and song, circles the house of the doomed, sometimes for three nights together. Hearing her brings no harm; she does not cause the death, she announces it, a messenger arriving ahead of the news.
Tradition holds that she cries only for the old Gaelic stock, the families whose names carry O or Mac, and that if one of the line dies abroad the banshee at home keens the same night. The belief mirrors a real funeral custom: into modern times Irish wakes employed professional keening women, the mna caointe, to lament over the dead, and the banshee reads as that office carried over to the other side. Thomas Crofton Croker's 1825 collection of southern Irish legends gave the first systematic literary account, and the folklorist Patricia Lysaght's twentieth-century fieldwork gathered hundreds of first-hand testimonies.
The banshee has since become one of Ireland's most exported supernatural figures, drifting in horror films and games toward a shrieking, violent ghost, far from the tradition's grieving herald who never harms, only weeps first.
