Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/279

 So77ie Characte7'istics of Irish Folklore. 2 5 1

fore I will only give you a story of the origin of Banshees I met with in Wicklow the year before last :

" Banshees were out in my day, so I never heard one,^ but I heard tell of them. It was this way they came to be. When a man with a bit of money was going to die he would send for the keeners, maybe three or four, as many as he could pay. The rich man he would have many keeners at his burial. He would give a pound to the one, and a pound to this other, and tell them he wished them to keen for him, and for any more of his family that might die. And some were better keeners than the rest, and they would be kept to keen for all of a family, and they would promise always to keen when one of that family died. Then when they came to die they still went on keening when one was dead. So they became Banshees. I did hear," my informant added, " of a terrible loud screeching that was to be heard once for miles. It could not be a man was doing it, for they who heard at the same time was miles away."

"Screech owls," I hazarded, but was suppressed with, " There be none of them bastes here."

The accuracy of this ornithological information is open to question. Also, if this man had not heard a Banshee there is a plenitude of information from others who have, and details of various death portents.^

Irish fairy-lore has been exploited almost to the exclusion of any other, so there is no need to enlarge on this segment

^This agrees with Miss Edgeworth, Castle Rackroit, p. 17 (Morley's Universal Library Edition). A neighbour of a cousin in whose house in Tyrone I wrote part of this paper tells a different tale. He heard himself the strange unearthly keen in a relative's house just before one of the party died, and could find no human origin for the sound.

^ One case told me by a member of this Society was of an Englishman who, when visiting his Irish brother-in-law, saw and heard a Banshee. He met "a little old woman " — no mortal^on the stairs in ordinary times, but did not see her when they heard "awful shrieks." His sister at the time was supposed to be dying. She, however, recovered — but within three days of the apparition's warning the Irish husband lay dead.