Welcome back! Today, we’re heading back to Ireland for a bit, to talk a little bit about one of Irish folklore’s more popular figures: the banshee.

Banshees (spelled bean sidhe in Irish and ban sith in Scots Gaelic, but pronounced the same) are ghostly women who basically wail outside of a person’s house when someone in that house is going to die. They’re kind of similar to the Dullahan, in that they show up when people die, but unlike that figure, they don’t actually cause that person’s death themselves. They  just predict it. They also have an association with faerie mounds, as bean sidhe literally means “woman of the mounds.”

This creature actually has its roots in Irish and Scottish funerary tradition: the bean chaointe, or keening woman. This was a woman at a funeral who would wail, or keen, a lament for the person who died. This was actually a profession that one could pursue, and their services were actually in pretty high demand.

As for their appearance, well, that can actually vary significantly depending on which area of Ireland or Scotland you’re in. They almost always, however, take the figure of a woman with long, streaming hair, usually with eyes red from weeping. They’re also typically depicted with pale skin, red or silver hair, and either all in white or in a gray cloak over a green dress. They could be old, young, short, or tall. And by “short or tall” I mean anywhere between one and eight feet tall. So, yeah, there’s some wiggle room in the interpretation here.

Banshees often get a little bit of a bad rap in popular culture, what with the whole “death” association. But they’re not actively malicious, generally speaking: like I mentioned above, they show up when someone’s about to die, but don’t actually cause the deaths. In fact, there are a lot of accounts of various families in Ireland and Scotland having their own banshees.

Speaking of popular culture, banshees have a bit of a tendency to show up a lot in different things. Both DC and Marvel comics have had characters with “banshee” somewhere in their name, and the video game Mass Effect 3 has an enemy type called the Banshee. So I think it’s fair to say that they’ve got some staying power.

So, if you’re out and about in these trying times and hear what sounds like horrific wailing, it’s probably a good idea to be very careful.