Has anyone heard a real live (or dead) Banshee?

Count Dracula

I can only imagine that the notion alludes to the mourning cries of women who may have lost loved ones or endured the torture of a still born baby. Can you imagine what a childbirth would have sounded like in a Crannog or similar dwelling a few 1000 years ago? There were no epidurals or Caesarian sections to facilitate any complications either? Maternal mortality during childbirth was rampant, it was one of the biggest killers of young women up until the start of the 20th century. Such sudden and traumatic death could easily have led to hysterical outcries of pained emotion. Can you imagine the sadness an elderly grandmother might have felt witnessing the death of her daughter or granddaughter during childbirth?

Foxes fighting at night sound harrowing.

The intolerable moans and screeches of some of my lairs' more frustrated elderly vamps can indicate that it is feeding time. Female vamps can be unsufferable in the late summer evenings, especially if they have gone without for a few nights in succession. Hungry Vampires are completely impetuous and their hunger can manifest in all kinds of high decible croaks, screams and random growling. The long nights of winter are a god send for the serenity of vampire purgatorial existence. It is the small things in life that matter the most. Subtle niceties like feeding on fresh viril virgins during a cold long dark winter night is what gets us through the long fallow summers.

Stay safe mortals.

FrankLeeSpeaking

No. But my grandmother did in rural Laois. She and my great aunt also saw the Sidhe and were adamant the fairies were real. While it is easy to slag them off, they were both very successful and intelligent women. One ran a chain of successful children's clothes shops in the midlands and the other was an accountant and was the chairperson of an astomomy club.

I believe them, and I believe the Sidhe and Banshees are real. Rural Ireland was almost like another reality before the 1960s and people's sensitivity and engagement with the natural would be impossible for us to comprehend in this era.

Graces7

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120163342#Comment_120163342

There was shall we say an awareness, a dimension that we have largely lost.

20 years ago when I was having modernisation work done on an old cottage in wildest Leitrim, one of the older men doing part of the work had seen his gravestone in the middle of the road when he was driving one night. It was when he was young and a heavy drinker and his father told him it was a warning from the fairies. He never drank again.

I have visited places that had a .....dimension to them, before I knew their history. A large circle of uncultivated land amid a big field, that was very... atmospheric. No one local would touch it.

John_Rambo

Little knowledge of wildlife and a fertile imagination.

Graces7

 “There are more things in heaven and earth , than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

Many are sensitive to/aware of more things than others. Some places have characters formed by what has gone before

sonofenoch

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120156397#Comment_120156397

Yeah we have a fox in the back gardens.......the screams of it in the dark of night could be startling if you didn't actually know there were foxes about, I'd describe it more human like than any other animal ....it's like a dog bark but in the form of a high pitched human scream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmLdgCczb_g

saabsaab

Plus one on the fox. They can sound very human at times. No I never saw or heard a Beansidhe myself but a few older people I know have said they have.

John_Rambo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120169673#Comment_120169673

Well, I live where a lot of people have died, men women and children, some have had horrible deaths, I've found dead bodies washed up on the shore, I live near graveyards, there's one 50 metres from my house yet none of us see or hear banshees, spirits, ghosts, easter bunnies, fairies, goblins or ghouls.

Plenty of foxes, badgers, owls, herons, egrets & other wildlife that make scary & weird noises though.

Jim_Hodge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120169888#Comment_120169888

Much the same here. Beside an abandoned famine graveyard and an area where some of the 'disappeared' lay undiscovered for decades where the sound of wildlife echoes in the night air. Banshees etc were born of vivid imaginations, ignorance, yarn spinning and spoofing that some were more in tune with a wider spirit world than others.

The mating cry of a fox, or the spooky squawk of a heron in flight, combined with a low mist drifting over the bog at twilight is nothing more than nature.

saabsaab

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120169968#Comment_120169968

Probably. But is it nothing more? Country people are well aware of Fox and other cries but some still maintain they have heard and even seen something.

L1011

I've a house on an offshore island. When it's stormy, you'll definitely hear banshees there.

Or, more probably, wind going through the roof of the barn outside making a screeching noise.

John_Rambo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120171294#Comment_120171294

I believe there's a non-superstitious explanation for every one of them. I also believe there's a fair bit of spoofing going on, ghosts, banshees, moving statues etc...

Jim_Hodge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120171294#Comment_120171294

Nothing more. Think about those claiming to have heard something. The couple I knew who said they heard something knew rightly they didn't. One spun yarns and the other wouldn't have known a heron or fox call from a cow mooing. Country people don't have extra perception. Country areas are not far distant mystical lands just because there are no street lights. Older people aren't more in tune with mystic spirits. I was brought up on sagas about banshees, fairies and spirits; with so called family history including then all - total fairy tales.

FrankLeeSpeaking

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120169645#Comment_120169645

People who live all their lives in the coutryside and surrounded by wildlife have no knowledge of it???

Jim_Hodge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120171906#Comment_120171906

Surprisingly yes. I live in the countryside and old men born and bred to it know little or nothing about the wildlife. Farm animals, growing, seeding, harvesting sure but couldn't name a Bird correctly or recognise a call.

jackboy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120171906#Comment_120171906

Yes, it is surprising but the vast majority have no interest. I know a guy who goes hiking on to the mountains around Ireland most weekends and he can’t tell the difference between blackthorn and white thorn. WTF is he doing on the mountains. Most farmers can’t identify bird types that they have been looking at for decades.

John_Rambo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120171906#Comment_120171906

You could be right with that assertion if it's your experience. I remember years ago in the midlands there were reports of a seal in the river. I informed them it was an otter. Another time I asked a farmer friend if he had pine martins on the land and he told me "they roost on the grass" at night, I also introduced him to bats living on his land. He'd never seen them before!!

xzanti

Cats. Romancing each other.

NIMAN

Find it strange in the 21st century that many adults can't distinguish folklore from fact.

Do some of them also think Finn MacCool built the Giants Causeway?

Jim_Hodge

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120172587#Comment_120172587

That type of thing is constant. The old woman down a lane here who hears the cuckoo every February, when it's a woodpigeon. Farmers who can't tell a hare from a rabbit or a raven from a jackdaw. These are the reliable sources for hearing banshees? Laughable. It all stems from tales to pass a long otherwise boring night by the fire.

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120171906#Comment_120171906

Yes, many farmers are surprisingly ignorant of it. It's like they are in a battle against nature rather than working with it. Wild animals are seen as vectors of disease and raptors as threats to livestock hence the widespread poisonings and shooting. Trees and hedgerows are nuisances to the progressive ranch farmer.

I've noticed that town bred eastern europeans having been introduced to it at an early age, hiking/camping/foraging etc have more knowledge of the outdoors than your average irish farmer.

John_Rambo

Myself and my siblings were reared with a strong knowledge of nature, camping & backwood cooking/skills. I'm sometimes shocked at my rural friends lack of interest & knowledge when it comes to nature. They're not stupid, just not interested. One told me that Pine Martins attack people and suck their blood out. He's a well educated guy who grew up on a farm.

Leg End Reject

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120172664#Comment_120172664

I remember hearing that as a child and was convinced I heard a banshee, my parents had a great laugh at that one! 2 tom cats fighting is another ear- curdling sound.