Hens go quiet first. They do not scatter or roost early. They stand in the yard with their beaks a little open, like a choir that has lost its place. Dogs lie down with their chins on their paws. The stream below the house keeps running but sounds stuffed with felt. Only then does the banshee arrive, a tall gray woman-shaped length with hair past her knees and a mouth wider than any jaw should open. By the time she cries, every other sound has stepped aside.
The oldest account is not written. It is a lintel stone over a byre door at Vorrinach, where a mason cut a woman with her arms hanging and her hair running past the bottom edge of the block, as though he ran out of stone before he ran out of hair. The owners call the byre eight hundred years old; lichen hides any date. The next account is a song sung at wakes in Welketh, in which she is one of three sisters who froze in a hayloft. Singers have since dropped two sisters and kept the one.
Fergal Doon, who keeps sheep above Welketh, supplied the rest. When the hens go quiet, his household turns every cup on the table mouth down so her cry has nowhere to pool, and nobody speaks until the eldest turns them up again. He says the same banshee followed his family across the sea. I have no way to check that. What I can report is her routine: she stands beneath the north window, and when she is finished she wipes both feet on the boot scraper by the door, one and then the other. A hand-shaped frost grows on the inside of the glass, and that is how the household tracks her. Long white hairs sometimes snag on the gate wire and are gone by noon. On the night I sat up in Doon's yard I measured the cold with a spirit thermometer lashed to a broom handle. It read 41 degrees Fahrenheit at the doorstep and 19 beneath the north window, two paces off. I read it twice by lantern.
Everything above held until last spring. The hens went quiet, the cups went over, and she came and stood at the north window the whole night with her mouth shut. Nobody died. Toward morning Doon's daughter-in-law had a boy in the back room, loudly, and the hens started up again before the midwife had finished washing her hands. Doon says she came for that.
- Classification
- Mourning spirit, household-bound
- Habitat
- Farmyards, byres and damp upland doorsteps
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- nearly 7 ft tall, hair to the knee
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Wet uplands and the farms of their old families
- Binomial
- Plangor cinerea
- Diet
- None; drinks no water, eats no bread
- Temperament
- Grieving, methodical, indifferent to company