Skip to main content

Sighting of the Banshee and the History of Keening

 

Spooky Irish Banshee ghost
Blindboy Boatclub is an Irish artist and author, who has a weekly podcast on which he talks about pretty much whatever he thinks is interesting. Sometimes the topic is Irish folklore. 

On a recent edition of the Blindboy Podcast, he recounted an eerie experience of being out for a walk and hearing a disturbing, shrill scream that he initially took for a child being tortured. He followed the noise and eventually found he had come into contact with a Banshee, or as he later figured out after doing additional research, a female fox with a cough. (No spoiler there, that's the actual title of the episode: "I Thought I Heard the Banshee But It Was a Fox With a Cough.")

What struck me most about this story wasn’t the twist ending, amusing as it was, but the folkloric richness Blindboy unpacked along the way. As he explained the origins and traditions surrounding the banshee, I was reminded of my own encounter with another famous weeping woman of folklore: La Llorona. While these spirits hail from different cultures -- Ireland and Spanish-speaking countries, respectively -- they bear a striking resemblance in form and function. Both are ghostly women linked to death, grief, and deep, unresolved sorrow. Both are known more by their behavior than by individual names or personalities. And in both traditions, the figure is as much a cautionary tale as she is a supernatural presence.

My own La Llorona encounter can be found here. 

And as Blindboy explains on his podcast the history of the Banshee, it seemed to me that it sounds to be a very similar type of spirit in traditional folklore -- though the Banshee is not one specific woman but any of a number of women who could be turned into Banshees after death and left to haunt a particular location. He tells one tale, of a similar nature to the classic La Llorona, in which a woman who was having an affair with a bishop was murdered by him and she became a Banshee who haunts the bridge by the castle where he lived. (Compare the classic La Llorona story where she either married or had an affair with a wealthy man who then abandoned her and her children. Usually her murder of her children is part of the story but the setup for what put her on the path is similar.) 

The parallels are fascinating: both tales involve women who were destroyed -- whether by their own actions or by betrayal-- and who return to weep, not just as symbols of personal grief, but as omens for others. Both are deeply entwined with themes of shame, injustice, and a society’s judgment on women who transgress certain boundaries, whether that’s taking a lover, losing children, or speaking out against the powerful.

Blindboy also tells of another way Banshees could be created: they could begin as traditional Irish funeral singers, called Keeners, who would perform songs of lament at traditional multi-day Irish funerals. If these singers ever refused a job, that is, they refused to sing at a funeral they were asked to perform at, they could be divinely punished for this by becoming a Banshee after their own death. The Banshee is reputed to foretell a death by her appearance, and it would be a kind of irony that the Keener would then be punished for refusing to sing at funerals by being made to foretell deaths instead. 

There’s something tidy and terrifying about the way a keener becomes a banshee. One minute she’s the town’s designated mourner, letting folks grieve without having to make too much noise themselves. Next thing you know, she’s a walking omen, a shrieking specter nobody wants to see. She stops being a woman doing a job and turns into the job itself: stripped of choice, swallowed by the role. And it’s not hard to see how that shift might come out of real-life discomfort: the shame of failing your neighbors when it’s your turn to cry, or the quiet punishment society doles out to women who emote too freely in public.

Blindboy’s tale of a Banshee turned fox is funny on its surface, but the stories it touches on go far deeper. They show how much folklore functions as a mirror -- reflecting not just our fears of death, but our deeper concerns about guilt, injustice, gender roles, and the proper handling of grief. Whether it’s a ghost crying on a riverbank in Mexico or a wailing spirit hovering by an Irish window, these figures endure because they express something beyond language: the keening sound of loss, the echo of things unresolved, the sorrow that waits just outside the door.

And sometimes, of course, it’s just a fox with a cough.

Popular posts from this blog

Planetary Hours and How To Use Them for Magic Spells and Conjure Work

The Planetary Hours are a belief that sections of each day are ruled by certain heavenly bodies, and that these times of day can be utilized by those who understand their secrets to improve success in certain types of ventures. Folks like Jim Haskins and Tarostar have printed slightly incorrect versions of "Venus Hours" which have been popularly repeated: the claim that 2 AM, 9 AM, 4 PM and 11 PM on a Sunday, 6 AM, 1 PM and 8 PM on Monday, etc, are Venus Hours is wrong. This is a problem that goes back to the 18th century at least -- the Petit Albert itself mentions the mistake. The error stems from the notion that planetary hours align to hours on the clock -- they do not. As the Albert puts it: "In order that there be no mistakes about the hours that each planet rules [...] one needs to reckon the first hour from the sunrise, and not by midnight, as some people have erroneously claimed." In other words, the planetary hours are reckoned by a solar clock. T...

The Intranquil Spirit

(EDIT: Up to date information about the Intranquil Sprit can be found in my book  The Intranquil Spirit , available on Amazon.  This post has some incomplete information which is clarified in the book.) The Intranquility spell is, unfortunately, the first resort of many a rejected lover. In some ways it makes sense -- the more unhappy and forlorn one is about a breakup, the better this idea of making the other partner feel just as much so starts to sound. Unfortunately, this spell is often not well suited to a case. The purpose of the standard Intranquility spell is to have the person be tormented by the spirit until they make contact with you, or whomever the spell is being cast for. This means that if a person is already in good contact with their ex OR if they're one of those people who cannot restrain themselves from initiating contact, then this already is probably not the right spell for that case. If you've had an Intranquility spell cast and you make contac...

Paper-in-Shoe Spells

A popular and very traditional hoodoo spell, often used for any situation where you need to control someone with magic , is the namepaper-in-shoe spell. It's very easy: you write the target's name 3, 7, or 9 times on a paper (depending on intent and who's giving instruction) then fold it up, sometimes after dressing it with oils or powders, then put it in your shoe. This "keeps the person underfoot" or "stomps out the trouble" or "puts pressure on them" or any other number of metaphors. I have had this work several times over the years. In one instance, I was working for a very unpleasant boss, on a short-term job. It was the last day, and I only had about 3 hours of work left on the project; and I wanted him to up my pay for the day since it almost wasn't worth the trip across town for the amount he was paying me, for only 3 hours. He was very reluctant. So I wrote his name 3 times on a 5-dollar bill he'd given me, and dusted it...

Cut and Clear Purification Spell - White Witchcraft to Forget the Past

The time has come. You're over and done with that relationship. It could be a romance, a friendship, a business partnership -- any sort of connection really. But now you're done, and you want all ties severed. This spell helps clear up any lingering energies and makes people let go of past feelings. You need: 1 bottle Jinx Removing salt Lemon verbena leaves Purification oil or Cut and Clear oil Personal or representational items of the person(s) you are removing yourself from (names and photos are easy) Purification incense 4 white candles You will also need to make your own Cut and Clear bath salt. For this you'll need about 1/2 cup epsom salt to which you add 5 drops each lemongrass oil, lemon or melissa oil, and rue or rosemary oil. It's important to make this salt yourself with only oils (no herbs) because we want it to run clean down the drain with no residue left behind to be cleaned up. Many spiritual bath blends contain herbal matter and curio...

13 Herb Bath for Curse Removal

13 Herb Bath for curse removal can be made from from any 13 uncrossing and purification herbs. For example, if I needed to fix a batch of 13 herb bath right now based on what I've got in the house, I could mix bay leaves, rue, mint, rosemary, wood betony, sage, verbena, angelica root, white rose petals, lemongrass, lemon peel, agrimony and arnica, and it would suffice well. Other herbs like hyssop, pine needles, juniper leaves, boldo, eucalyptus leaves, mullein, basil, lavender, or marshmallow leaves would be good to use too. By no means complete, here is a list of just a few herbs said to remove a curse or jinx that you can use to make your own 13 Herbs bath: Agrimony Alkanet Angelica Arnica Basil Bay leaves Black Pepper Blessed Thistle Boldo Cayenne Pepper Chives Eucalyptus Garlic Hyssop John the Conqueror Juniper Lavender Lemon Lemongrass Lime Marshmallow leaves Mint Mullein Onion Pine Rosemary Rue Sage Sandalwood Verbena White Rose Petals ...