The History of a Truly Scary Irish Spirit [View All]

[Kind of Blue]

:hi: Everybody. My niece has an Irish grand-mom who has long past away. I say "has" because we still carry on the love for spooky stories from her motherland. On St. Patrick's Day, some us, namely me, find good Irish lore for the child. Here's one I thought is a goodie I'm gonna tell her about today. Still trying to find a good tale but the background below is spooky enough for me.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/445324/the_banshee_the_history_of_a_truly.html?singlepage=true&cat=37

The banshee doesn't carry quite the recognizable cache as the leprechaun, but as far as Irish mythology goes, it ranks only second to the little people. The word banshee itself derives from an Irish term bean sídhe which translates roughly to fairy woman. If you go back in time far enough, before St. Patrick came and cleared the Emerald Isle of snakes and children-no, wait, that was the Pied Piper-you will come across a term found in the pre-Christian days of Gaelic glory called sidh, which were a form of deities. It was a tradition when an Irish villager passed on that a woman would be called on to sing a lament. This lament actually has one of those long Irish names curious absent of an appropriate wealth of consonants and since you probably couldn't figure out how to pronounce it under torture orders from Alberto Gonzales, I'll just get to the meat. The women who were called upon for this service of honoring the death at funerals were often called keeners. Of course, even in wild and woolly Ireland there were such things as class distinctions and a legend persists that at the funerals of certain Irish families with long traditions and special treatment it would not necessarily be a typical keener who sung the lament, but rather an actual fairy woman, a sidh. Such was the connection between these highfalutin Irish clan that the death of a family member far away would be heralded with the mournful song of a fairy woman.

Like many myths, the banshee seems to have been a corruption of pre-Christian and Christian folk tales. There seems to have been an intermingling of the mythological stories about the sidhs and other supernatural creatures so that wailing song of the fairy woman became not just the herald of a death of one of those famous families, but a portent of death in one's own family. Eventually, it transformed into a signal of one's own death if one should be unlucky enough to hear the song of the banshee. Contributing to this fearful symmetry is the appearance that the sidh, who was now called a banshee, began to take. There is much in folk literature to suggest that the banshee ancestry has some mermaid blood in it. Banshees are most often seen all dressed in a nebulous and flowing white, with long hair that can also be so light as to appear white. Apparently, the banshee are quite conscious off their looks because most reports indicate they appear to be brushing those long, flowing locks with a silver comb. This long flowing hair is thought by many to have originated with the same look that mermaids in the water had. One interesting element to this particular of the myth of the banshee is the fear that is the fear that you should fear if you happen to be taking a long walk through the magnificent green meadows of the Irish countryside and you happen to come across a silver comb lying on the ground. Should you happen to find a particularly beautiful silver comb in the green grass, just turn around and walk away. Do not, under any circumstances, pick it up, because the moment you do, a banshee will appear and take you away.