What Is A Banshee? Bean Sí Meaning In Irish Folklore

A banshee, from the Irish bean sí (say ban SHEE), is a woman of the fairy mound. In Irish folklore she is a death messenger who wails or keens outside a house before someone in certain families dies. She is usually described as a small old woman with long white or grey hair, often combing it. She warns of a death but never causes it.

Every Halloween the banshee gets dragged out with the witches and vampires, usually screaming. The Irish banshee is sadder than that. She is a messenger, and the message is always the same.

Here is what the old sources say, with folklore and history kept apart. For the bigger picture of the season, see how the Irish invented Halloween.

What is a banshee?

The banshee is a female spirit from Irish folklore who announces a death. According to tradition she is heard crying, keening or clapping her hands near the house of someone about to die. She attaches herself to families rather than places. The standard study is Patricia Lysaght’s The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death-Messenger (1986).

W. B. Yeats put it neatly in 1888. She is “an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death”. He counted her among the solitary fairies, alongside the púca.

Banshee meaning: what does bean sí mean?

Banshee is the English spelling of the Irish bean sí, older spelling bean sídhe. Say it ban SHEE. Bean means woman, and sí means a fairy mound or fairy hill.

So she is the woman of the fairy mound, one of the aos sí (eess SHEE), the fairy people. It’s the same sí you find in the cat sí, the fairy cat.

The medieval tale Táin Bó Fraích has fairy women lamenting the wounded hero Fráech. It says this gave Irish musicians a lament, the golgaire ban síde, the wail of the fairy women.

Her other names

RTÉ’s write-up of Lysaght on The Late Late Show in 1986 says that in Wexford, Carlow and parts of Wicklow she is “the Bow”. In Waterford she is “the Bibe”, and in Tipperary and Mayo the bean chaointe, or keening woman.

The Bow comes from badhbh (BOW, rhymes with cow), an old word for a war-goddess and a scald-crow. Ó Dónaill’s dictionary even gives badhbh chaointe, the keening badhbh, as a word for banshee.

Which families does the banshee follow?

The O’s and the Macs

The best-known rule is that she only cries for families whose surnames begin with O or Mac. RTÉ’s account of Lysaght’s talk adds the old Anglo-Norman families too.

The Schools’ Collection, gathered by pupils in 1937 to 1939 and free to read at duchas.ie, backs up the saying. A pupil in Kells, Co. Meath wrote that she “bewails the death of an ‘O’ or ‘Mac'”.

The old printed books name the MacCarthys (Croker), the O’Neills of Tyrone (in a story Yeats reprinted in 1888) and the O’Briens (Lady Fanshawe). Croker quotes O’Brien‘s Irish Dictionary, which says only families “of an ancient and noble stock” had one. Snobbery, it seems, outlives us all.

Not only the O’s and Macs

In practice the rule was loose. Killahan, Co. Kerry names the Cantillons and the Healys. Tamney, Co. Donegal lists the Gallaghers, Campbells, McAteers, McCoaches, Davises and McElwaines.

So there is no fixed list of families, whatever the internet tells you. My guide to Irish surnames has more on your own name.

She followed the O’Gradys to Canada

This part is for readers in Boston, Toronto and Sydney. Lady Wilde wrote in 1887 that “the Banshee even follows the old race across the ocean and to distant lands”.

Her example is a branch of the O’Gradys settled in Canada. A bitter cry was heard outside their house, and the next day the father and eldest son drowned while boating. According to Wilde, they were carried home at the same hour the cry had been heard.

If you’d rather watch than read, this short video tells the Bunworth story in under 90 seconds.

What does a banshee look like?

The most common picture is a small old woman, alone, with long loose white or grey hair. RTÉ’s summary of Lysaght’s work has a small woman in black, combing long white hair.

The school accounts vary more than you’d think. In the Rower, Co. Kilkenny she is “a lovely girl with long hair”, in white and barefoot. Carrigtwohill, Co. Cork has her flying along the sky, combing her hair.

That Cork sighting is unusual. RTÉ reports Lysaght saying that in Cork and Kerry the banshee is heard but never seen.

The banshee scream: what does she really sound like?

Forget the glass-shattering scream from comics and games. In the folk accounts the banshee cries, moans and keens, often clapping her hands. She can still be loud: in Kells, Co. Meath her cries were heard from miles around.

A Killahan account says the crying comes “two or three times every night for three or four nights”. Yeats adds that when several banshees wail together, “it is for the death of some holy or great one”.

People often suggest a screaming vixen or a barn owl as the real source. Marion McGarry of RTÉ Brainstorm doubts it, since country people knew those sounds well.

The banshee comb: why you never pick one up

Never pick up a comb you find on the ground. McGarry lists this among the common beliefs, because the comb might be the banshee’s. And she will want it back.

The Schools’ Collection tells the story over and over. A man takes the comb she leaves behind, and that night she is at his window, crying for it.

The wise man hands it out on the tongs or a spade. In Lickerrig, Co. Galway, the banshee, “thinking the spade was the man’s hand”, broke it in two. At Strang’s Mills near Kilmacow, Co. Kilkenny she takes it off the tongs and says: “It’s well for you, you didn’t put out your hand.”

Keening women: the bean chaointe

The banshee makes most sense next to real Irish wakes. Women keened over the body in a lament called the caoineadh (KEEN-yuh), which gives English the word keen.

A keening woman was a bean chaointe (ban KHEEN-cha, with the KH as in loch). Lady Wilde, in 1887, wrote the keeners’ wail as “Ul-lu-lu”. Yeats noted that the keen was “said to be an imitation of her cry”.

McGarry points out that the banshee, with her loose hair and her wail, looks a lot like these women. For a keen in poetry, read Pearse’s Bean Sléibhe ag Caoineadh a Mhac, a mother keening her son.

Famous banshee accounts

The Bunworth Banshee, Buttevant, Co. Cork

Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825) has a story from my own county. The Rev. Charles Bunworth was rector of Buttevant in the mid-1700s. He played the Irish harp, and harpers left him fifteen harps.

As he lay ill, his herdsman said the banshee had walked beside him through the glen of Ballybeg. She was “keening, and screeching, and clapping her hands”, with long white hair.

On the last night, moaning and hand-clapping came at the window by his bed. Two sceptical gentlemen went out to look. The earth under the window had just been dug, yet there wasn’t a footprint in it. He died at first light.

Bunworth is neither an O nor a Mac. But Lady Wilde says the banshee also attends “persons gifted with music and song”. More on the harpers in my post on the Irish harp.

Lady Fanshawe and the O’Briens, around 1650

Ann, Lady Fanshawe stayed with Lady Honor O’Brien while Cromwell was in Ireland. At about one in the morning she saw, by moonlight, a woman at the casement, “in white, with red hair and pale and ghastly complexion”.

It called out three times and vanished “with a sigh more like the wind than breath”. At five, her host told her a cousin O’Brien had died at two. A woman’s shape, she said, appeared at that window whenever one of the family was dying.

Fanshawe never uses the word banshee. Sir Walter Scott retold her story in his 1810 notes to The Lady of the Lake, among family death omens. Croker later listed it as a banshee account.

The washer at the ford, the bean nighe and the Morrígan

The Badb and the Morrígan

In early Irish mythology the Badb was a war-goddess, and also the hooded crow she appeared as. eDIL shows her foretelling slaughter, and one gloss links her to the Morrígan (MOR-ee-gan). There’s more in my guide to Celtic gods.

In Cath Maige Tuired, the Dagda meets the Morrígan near Samhain (SOW-in), washing astride the river Unshin in Co. Sligo. It is often read as an early washer at the ford, though the text never calls it a death omen.

A clearer case is Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh, written around 1350. Before a battle in the Burren in 1317, Donnchadh Ó Briain’s army meets a hag washing heads and limbs. She tells them the heads are theirs.

So the south-east name badhbh is the same word as the old war-goddess. But the banshee of the school accounts is a family messenger, not a battle goddess. I’d call them relations, not the same woman.

Scotland’s bean nighe

Scottish Gaelic tradition has the bean nighe (ben NEE-uh), the washing woman. John Gregorson Campbell, writing in 1900, describes her washing the linen of those about to die. On Skye, he says, she was a woman who died in childbirth.

So the “died in childbirth” idea is Scottish. An earlier version of this page gave it to the Irish banshee, so consider this my correction.

The Irish banshee washes now and then too. After a drowning in Lough Hacket, Co. Galway in 1929, a school account has her seen washing clothes at the spot.

What does it mean if you hear a banshee?

According to tradition, it means a death is coming in a family she follows. She doesn’t cause it, and her cry kills nobody. The deadly sonic scream belongs to Marvel’s Banshee, an Irish mutant first seen in 1967.

Lysaght said a banshee is never approached: leave the otherworld alone and it will leave you alone. Yeats adds that she sometimes comes with the cóiste bodhar (KOHSH-tcheh BOW-er), the death coach linked with the Dullahan. That’s one Halloween visitor I’d sooner skip.

The Banshees of Inisherin: what does the title mean?

Martin McDonagh’s 2022 film, with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, is set in April 1923 on Inisherin, a made-up island. It was filmed on Inis Mór and Achill Island and earned nine Oscar nominations.

There’s no actual banshee in it. The title is the fiddle tune Colm writes after he cuts off Pádraic. Many viewers read old Mrs McCormick, who keeps foretelling a death, as a banshee figure, but that’s interpretation.

McDonagh told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022 that the title came from an earlier play of his, The Banshees of Inisheer, which he never finished. My post on The Banshees of Inisherin trailer has the first look.

Banshee FAQ

Is the banshee good or evil?

Neither. In Irish tradition she mourns a death but does not cause it. Croker records that Sir Walter Scott called the belief “one of the most beautiful” of Europe’s superstitions.

Is the banshee a ghost or a fairy?

Her name makes her a fairy, and Yeats calls her an attendant fairy. But Lady Wilde says she can take the form of a young woman of the family who died young. So the line blurs.

Is there a male banshee?

Not in the Irish sources quoted here. Bean means woman, and every account describes a female figure.

Is the banshee the same as the Morrígan?

Not quite. The south-east name badhbh is the same word as the Badb, a war-goddess linked to the Morrígan. The shared name suggests a family likeness, not the same figure.

Why shouldn’t you pick up a comb in Ireland?

According to tradition, it might belong to the banshee, who comes to the window at night to demand it back. The comb goes out on the tongs, never in your bare hand.

Do people in Ireland still believe in the banshee?

Some do. When Lysaght appeared on The Late Late Show in 1986, an audience member said her mother had seen one in Inchicore, Dublin. A Malahide woman called the cry “the most terrifying sound I ever heard”.

More Irish folklore

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What Is a Banshee? The Wailing Woman of Irish Folklore and the Families She Follows