Irish Folk Tales (37 page)

JOSEPH
I heard the Banshee twice.

I might have heard it three times.

PETER
Well, tell us one experience of it anyway.

JOSEPH
Well, I was coming down one night. It was at one o’clock in the night.

And the house was over about John Carson’s. It would be about a quarter of a mile from where I was.

And
there
the crying started.

I stood.

And there it went on.

It would cease for a minute. Then it’d start again.

So I began to think then that it must have been the Banshee.

Then I had a long bit to go home. And a lonesome journey. I had to go up a place they call the Church Avenue and by a graveyard.

So then, they say when the Banshee cries that it’s always some person belonging to the family dead or dying or going to die.

So in a day or two after, we heared there was one of them dying. It was way up in Cork. He wasn’t living here, but he was one of the family; he lived up in Cork.

PETER
Aye, I heard it once too.

It started in a house just down below Carson’s.

And I came on up there, and I came just to that hill. And I was out there just on the head of that brae. You know it. First brae as you turn the road.

It
started to cry
. And the cries of it! And the river is very near there, it comes very close to the road.

And the crying was most terrific.

And it cried and it cried, as I thought along the river.

And then I had to turn up at the end of Stony Road, turn up toward Swanlinbar, across from old Drumane Bridge.

And says I to meself, says I, “It’ll get out. What’ll I do?” Says I, “I’ll be in an awful state. I’ll have to turn back and go back.”

So I came as far as Drumane Bridge, and it seemed to be a bit in on the field, about a hundred or two hundred yards from me.

I went on up the road, and when I was passing by that house just above Drumane Bridge, John Rooney’s (he’s dead now since you were here), the rooster slapped his wings. That’s a sign that there’s something very near, some evil thing near you when the rooster does that way. That was supposed in this country, you know.

And he started to crow and crow,

      and crow and crow,

   till I was frightened,

      the life was frightened out of me.

And the Banshee came on.

He still kept nearer and nearer.

He drew nearer.

He was just right beside the road.

And with that, the next flash he gave, he took a cut, and he landed away about two or three hundred yards from me. With the result, he went away back from me. “Well, God bless us,” says I, “what’ll I do if he comes out? And he’ll cross me path.” I had to turn right, and he was on the left-hand side. Says I, “What’ll I do,” says I, “if he happens to get in front of me?”

And I had a long journey to go then.

But, lucky enough, when I turned right, the cry started to fade out. There was a pretty rough wind, and with the rattle of the bushes and all, it just died out just as it started.

And the next day there was a person died just right beside it.

Well, it sounded really just like a young child there crying, middling
strong, we’ll say two year old. You often heard a two-year-old child there with a middling good strong rough cry, like that. And to die out like the same as you heard a thing there of a windy night or a windy day, and it would just fade away, the same as a car just revving up and dying out like that. It went like that.

And it died out and I got more content as it died out and passed away.

I got home and that was that. But this person died, and that made me believe surely that it was really the Banshee.

It cried from that wee house there, you know Andy Boyle’s. It cried on out that stretch of road, and then when I turned for Swanlinbar, it cried up
along
the road and landed up at Derryhowlaght Hill.

You know where Derryhowlaght is: that first hill as you cross Drumane Bridge. It cried that length.

Well, if it was another—if it was cats, you know, I’d know a cat there. You know cats yourself. A cat’s cry is quite different.

This was really a Banshee.

That was the only time ever I heard that I could just certify that it was a Banshee. But I heard a person saying—a very sensible woman; she was Hewitt; she was from Belturbet, and she was married to a man the name of Crawford in Kinawley—and she said the Banshee cried for her—I’m not really sure, but it was some of her parents anyway. And she said it came onto the windowsill.

And it sat on the windowsill.

And it cried the whole
night
.

And she was a very very nice woman, a very quiet person. And she told me the Banshee cried and cried. Well, she said it appeared very very much like an old woman of ninety or a hundred years; it was just faded out, you know, past recognition.

The Banshee was of that type. Well, in her explanation, or what it appeared to her.

JOSEPH
There was one man telling me:

Them all kneeled down to say their prayers one night by the fire. And there was a back door. And they were about in the middle of the prayer. The crying started outside the back door.

There was a cry outside the back door.

Ah
, they went up and looked, and wondered terribly at it. But they knew what it
was
.

It went on, cried on.

They kneeled down and finished their prayers. They were in this house belonging to another man. So the boss came down the next day, and this man was telling him about this, about the cry outside the door, the cry that riz when they were kneeling saying their prayers.

“Well,” he says, “no matter where they are in this world, there’s some of the Keenans dead,” he says.

So in a few days after they got word out of America: there was one of them had died and was buried.

Now wasn’t that the Banshee?

G
RANDFATHER’S GHOST

I can remember me sister and meself sitting on two creepies in front of the open fire; there was a hen with a flock of birds in the hole at the side of the brace. There was nobody in the house but our two selves. Ye know where the room door was yonder on the left-hand side? Well I looks up and there was a man standing at it with a long-tartled coat and a beard and a hard hat on him. He was a big man, just the full of the door; and he was a sort of bent over, standing leaning on two sticks. He looked at the pair of us, and turned on his heel and walked into the room again.

Well, me mother was out in the yard, and I called her and she came running in and we told her what we’d seen. And she went and got me aunt and they both went down the room together, but they could see nothing. When me father came home that night he tacked me with what I seen, so I told him what the old man looked like, and he just shook his head. “It was your grandfather,” says he. And mind ye, he was dead afore I was born.

T
ERRIBLE GHOSTS

This man, he started work one morning. And when bedtime came, he was showed his room.

He went into the room, lovely bed, very comfortable-looking.

The room was all furnished. It was one thing that he just remarked very much: that a bedroom was furnished so highly.

He knelt down and he said his prayers, and he got into bed.

And, of course, owing to it being a strange room, he didn’t sleep so quick after he got into bed, you know, as anyone will do. Well, it would apply to me for one, anyway, that went into a strange room, into a strange bed, I wouldn’t sleep for maybe half the night, till I’d get overpowered with sleep and I suppose then I’d sleep.

But anyway, he found the furniture a-moving, a-moving all through the room.

The rest of the occupants of the house was all fast asleep. And this went on. You’d think that the room was going to come down on top of him.

And on top of that: the weight went in on top of him into the bed.

And there he was in an awful condition; he thought there was tons and tons of weight on top of him.

And he was trembling.

And he started to sweat.

And he got into that great a temperature that the sweat boiled out through the clothes.

And out of that, he just went away in a swoon and remained that way till daylight in the morning.

He woke up the same as if he was in a fever. He wasn’t hardly fit to leave the bed.

He managed to get out of the bed, and get up and put on his clothes. Came down to the kitchen. Went out to his work.

So, there was another man hired, engaged in it. And says the man to him, he says, “Jimmy,” he says, “how did you get on last night, how did you sleep?”

“Oh,” he says, “I got on very badly,” he says. “I put in a terrible night.” Says, “I was nearly killed.”

He says, “I am very, very lucky to be
alive
.” He says, “There must be a terrible ghost in that room.”

“Ah,” says the fellow to him, “you’re only joking.” He says, “What happened?”

So he explained to him what I’m after explaining to you, what really did happen.

“Ah,” he says, “you only imagined it.”

He says, “I did not,” he says, “I’m going to put in the day and look for me clothes and get away.”

So, when they had the farmyard work done, they went out to the field to start to work, and he still kept at the fellow all the time—he was an old employee in the business—still asked him, “Is there a ghost in that room?”

He’d say, “Is there a ghost, now tell me the truth, for it doesn’t make a bit difference to me?” he says. “
Ghost
or no ghost, I’m not going to put
another night in it,” he says. “I put in a shocking night. I never thought that I’d have to undergo such a punishment,” he says, “as I underwent last night.”

“Aw,” says the fellow to him finally, “there is a ghost all right,” he says, “and they shouldn’t have done it. There’s a ghost stationed in that room, stationed,” he says, “for all time in it. And I wonder,” he says, “that they put you into it.”