Banshee noun a female spirit
‘“I doubt it extremely, Sassenach. She screamed like a banshee and kneed me in the stones …”’ (Dragonfly in Amber)
Banshees are, of course, traditionally associated with Ireland but they do also appear in Scottish folklore. According to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) a banshee is: ‘A female spirit, probably of a dead ancestress, who maintained an association with her own family and gave warning, generally by wailing, when death or disaster was at hand’. However, as early as 1769 the existence of banshees was being questioned, as the following indicates from Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland: ‘The death of people is supposed to be foretold by the cries and shrieks of Benshi, or the Fairies wife, uttered along the very path where the funeral is to pass’.
Writing in 1810, Sir Walter Scott describes the sound in Lady of the Lake: ‘The fatal Ben-Shie's boding scream’.
In John G Campbell’s Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands (1900) the identity of the Banshee is not up for questioning: ‘The Banshi is, without doubt, the original of the Queen of Elfland, mentioned in the ballads of the South of Scotland’.
By 1948, Scottish banshees are dismissed by Lewis Spence in The Fairy Tradition in Britain: ‘The Scottish evidence regarding the banshee proper, or so-called, is somewhat scanty, and rather obviously ancillary to the much richer and fuller Irish tradition’.
They still feature in songs and poetry though. Who hasn’t felt the pull of superstition in eerie situations. Stuart A Paterson puts it into words for us in Borders (2015), describing the high wailing of the wind (or is it?) along Barnhourie Burn: ‘Part of me wishes you here with your Brush-off urban logic, dismissing Superstitious whims of banshees, bogles, Shades, you who are out there, somewhere, Unaccounted for too.’
Ron Butlin’s banshee is at least confined in Near Linton Burn (2015): ‘Rain and ploughed mud. Rooks’ cries claw the air, A banshee trapped in corrugated iron shrieks To be released…’
The origin of the term comes from Gaelic ban-sith and Irish bean-sídhe, fairy woman or woman of the fairies or elves’.