🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº6501
ACTIVE
Banshee
Banshee is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Irlanda, IE. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.
Where and when was Banshee sighted?
- Location
- Irlanda, IE
- Date sighted
- Unknown
- Coordinates
- 53.4, -8.0
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
What is Banshee?
The banshee, from the Irish bean sí meaning 'woman of the fairy mound,' is a spirit woman whose mournful wail or keening cry is said to foretell an imminent death in a family. She is usually described as a pale, sorrowful woman with long hair, sometimes dressed in grey or white, who appears or is heard near a house shortly before a death occurs, particularly one attached to certain old Irish families. The tradition is deeply rooted in pre-Christian Irish belief in fairy mounds and ancestral spirits, and it absorbed the very real custom of keening, the loud ritual lamentation performed by women at Irish wakes and funerals, which likely shaped how the banshee's cry was imagined and described over generations. Written accounts of banshee encounters appear from the medieval period onward and remained a vivid part of rural Irish storytelling well into the 20th century, often serving to process grief and give warning-like meaning to sudden deaths. The earliest written reference is c. 1380 in Seán mac Craith's Cathréim Thoirdhealbhaigh (The Triumphs of Turlough), a scholarly work where the attribution is received rather than verified; the text describes fairy women keening for the dying. Sceptics attribute banshee reports to nocturnal animal calls such as owls or foxes, wind moving through stone structures, and the psychological tendency to retroactively interpret ordinary sounds as omens once a death has already occurred, a form of confirmation bias common to omen folklore worldwide. The banshee is specifically attached to old Gaelic families; the archive records that she cries for the Conways and McManamons (Srahmore, Co. Mayo) and the Colohans, Coadys and Shanleys (Laurencetown, Co. Galway), and that she 'follows the Mcs and the Os' — old Gaelic surnames rather than Norman or English ones. The caoineadh, or keening, was a recognized profession (bean chaointe) who was paid to lament the dead.
What is the history of Banshee?
Bean sí — in the older spelling bean sídhe — means the woman of the síd: the woman of the burial mound. The síde are the prehistoric tumuli still standing in Irish fields; the word places her among the country's older inhabitants, not among ghosts. Nothing in the tradition makes her a monster. She does not attack, lure or kill. Her whole function is to announce, and what she announces has already been decided.
The most consistent thing said about her is not what she looks like but whom she belongs to. She is attached to particular families, and the archive is blunt about which. At Srahmore, Co. Mayo, the teacher Brighid Bean Mhic Ultaigh wrote for the Schools' Collection that the banshee “is still believed in by certain families in Shramore”, that she cries for the Conways and the McManamons, and that she “follows the Mcs and the Os” — the old Gaelic surnames rather than the Norman or English ones. At Laurencetown, Co. Galway, T. Connolly named three families of his own district: the Colohans, the Coadys and the Shanleys. The standard scholarly study of the whole tradition, Patricia Lysaght's 433-page The Banshee (1986), was built on this same archive.
Connolly described her as “a fairy, a girl dressed in white with long hair which is often combing”, and said that to see her combing meant a death was near. Elsewhere she is not combing but washing. A pupil at Baile an Leasa, Co. Galway, took down from Seán Ó Miadhacháin, aged 56, that she was heard at a flagstone by the river beside Jim Fallon's house, “washing on the flag and crying at the same time”. After Pa Moran drowned in Lough Hacket in 1929, Brigid Hughes, then 68, told the schoolgirl Mary Gannon that the banshee was heard there every night and seen washing clothes near where he drowned. That washing figure is the Scottish cousin, the bean nighe, the small woman at the ford who scrubs the grave-clothes of those about to die.
But the sound is what matters, and the sound has an ordinary name. What she does is caoineadh — keening — and keening was a job. Teresa Burke, at Ballinrooaun in Co. Galway, wrote down what her father Thomas, a fifty-year-old farmer, told her: cycling home one summer evening with a neighbour, the two men heard “keening down in the hills as they thought in a neighbours house named Murphy where a man named Andy Murphy was very ill”. They could not tell the supernatural announcement from the human one, because it was the same sound. The bean chaointe wailed over the body. The bean sí wailed before it.
Timeline: the documented record of Banshee
- c. 1380 Seán mac Craith's Cathréim Thoirdhealbhaigh (The Triumphs of Turlough), usually dated to the later fourteenth century, is routinely cited as the earliest sustained written appearance of otherworld women keening the doomed. We have not read the manuscript and flag the attribution as received rather than verified.
- 4 May 1773 Art Ó Laoghaire is shot dead at Carraig an Ime, Co. Cork. His widow Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill keens over the body extempore; the result, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, survives orally and is the fullest caoineadh we have. Its most complete text was taken down from Nóra Ní Shíndile of Boolymore, Co. Cork, a professional keening woman who died in 1873.
- 1935 The Irish Government founds the Irish Folklore Commission, with Séamus Ó Duilearga as honorary director. For the first time the state sets out to collect rural oral tradition systematically, in Irish and in English, before the generation that holds it dies.
- 1937-1939 The Schools' Scheme puts the collecting in the hands of the children themselves: more than 50,000 pupils interview their parents and neighbours. By June 1939 it has produced 1,128 volumes and 375,660 pages. The banshee is one of the recurring subjects, and the entries name real families and real dead neighbours.
- Srahmore, Co. Mayo The teacher Brighid Bean Mhic Ultaigh records that the banshee cries for two named local families, the Conways and the McManamons, and that she "follows the Mcs and the Os" — the clearest statement in the archive of the rule that binds her to old Gaelic surnames.
- Laurencetown, Co. Galway T. Connolly describes her as "a girl dressed in white with long hair which is often combing", says that seeing her comb means a death is near, and names the Colohans, the Coadys and the Shanleys as the families she attends, citing the case of a sick man called Jim Shanley.
- Caherlustraun, Co. Galway Mary Gannon takes down from Brigid Hughes, aged 68, that after Pa Moran drowned in Lough Hacket in 1929 the banshee was heard there every night and seen washing clothes by the water — the washer-at-the-ford motif of the Scottish bean nighe, recorded in Irish Galway.
- 1986 Patricia Lysaght publishes The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger (Glendale Press, Dublin), 433 pages built on the Commission's holdings. It remains the standard scholarly treatment of the figure.
- December 2013 Dúchas.ie goes live, a joint University College Dublin and Dublin City University project that puts the digitised manuscripts online free of charge. In December 2017 UNESCO inscribes the National Folklore Collection on the Memory of the World register. Anyone can now read what a neighbour of theirs said about the banshee in 1937.
Is there a rational explanation for Banshee?
The first thing to be sceptical about is the archive itself. The Schools' Collection is superb evidence of what people said and believed in 1937; it is not evidence that anything happened. The collectors were children of eleven to fourteen writing down what a parent or a neighbour told them, often about events already decades old. The page records the shape of a story, not the shape of a night.
The sounds have candidates, and they are unglamorous. A vixen's mating scream in midwinter is a long, ragged, almost human shriek that has frightened country people wherever foxes live. A barn owl does not hoot; it rasps. Wind across a chimney pot or a gap in a stone wall does the rest. Rural Ireland at night, before rural electrification, was acoustically a far stranger place than it is now.
The recall is the harder problem. Nobody writes down the night they heard a cry and nobody died. The archive contains only the cases where a death followed, because the cry does not become a memory until a death has given it a meaning. That is not a flaw in Irish testimony; it is how every omen in the world stays alive.
And the family rule has a social edge that is easy to miss. A banshee was a distinction. To say the bean sí followed your name was to say your name was old, Gaelic and worth announcing — a claim about pedigree made in the only currency left to people who had been dispossessed of every other kind. It also did practical work: in a scattered rural parish it turned a sudden death from a random event into something the community had been warned about. Notice which families in the archive do not have one.
Can you visit Banshee?
There is no banshee site, and anyone selling one is selling a costume. What there is, and it is unusually good, is an archive.
The National Folklore Collection sits at University College Dublin, Belfield, and is one of the largest oral-tradition archives in Europe; UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World register in December 2017. Its reading room opens Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 16:30, by appointment.
You need not go. Dúchas.ie — the joint UCD and Dublin City University digitisation project launched in December 2013 — puts the manuscripts online for nothing, page images beside transcripts. A search for “banshee” returns 224 results across the Schools' Collection and the Main Manuscript Collection. Because the material is arranged by school and county, you can read what was written down in one specific parish, quite possibly the one your own name comes from.
If you want ground rather than paper, Kilcrea Friary in Co. Cork is a roofless ruin in open farmland where Art Ó Laoghaire was buried in 1773 — the man over whose body Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill composed the fullest caoineadh that survives. Go quietly; it is a burial ground.
And do not assume the keen is a museum piece. Writing in the journal Religions in 2019, Mary Mc Laughlin argued from fieldwork carried out between 2010 and 2018 that it keeps resurfacing in new forms rather than dying out.
Sources consulted
- Collected by Brighid Bean Mhic Ultaigh, Sraith Mór school (roll 15941), Co. Mayo, «The Banshee (Srahmore) — banshee beliefs and the families she follows» — The Schools' Collection (1937-1939), Volume 0087, p. 125 — National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin, 1938 archive
- Collected by T. Connolly, Baile Mór Síl Anmchadha school, Co. Galway, «The Banshee (Laurencetown) — the combing woman and the Colohans, Coadys and Shanleys» — The Schools' Collection (1937-1939), Volume 0055, p. 0194 — National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin, 1938 archive
- Collected by Mary Gannon from Brigid Hughes (68), Cathair Loisgreáin school, Co. Galway, «The Banshee in Lough Hacket» — The Schools' Collection (1937-1939), Volume 0022, p. 0625 — National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin, 1938 archive
- National Folklore Collection / Dúchas.ie (UCD and Dublin City University), «The National Folklore Collection, the Irish Folklore Commission and the Schools' Collection» — Archive documentation and reading-room information, 2026 archive
- Patricia Lysaght, «The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger» — Glendale Press, Dublin (433 pp., ISBN 0907606296), 1986 book
- Mary Mc Laughlin, «Keening the Dead: Ancient History or a Ritual for Today?» — Religions, vol. 10, no. 4, article 235 (MDPI), doi:10.3390/rel10040235, 2019 academic
Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-07-29 · How we verify our content
📎 Source: Enigma Atlas
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