Where does the banshee really come from? Not from a horror movie, but from Gaelic Ireland, where the bean si, "woman of the fairy mound," was believed to wail outside a house the night before someone inside was going to die. Families across Ireland, and later Scotland, reported hearing her for centuries, and the tradition is recorded by folklorists well into the 20th century.
The word banshee is an anglicised form of the Irish bean si, literally "woman of the si," the si being the ancient earthen mounds scattered across the Irish countryside, long believed in local tradition to be entrances to the fairy world (the Aos Si). A woman connected to that world, appearing to keen for a family before a death, is one of the oldest recorded figures in Irish oral tradition, documented in Gaelic manuscripts and later gathered by 19th century folklorists such as Thomas Crofton Croker and Lady Wilde, who collected first-hand accounts directly from Irish households.
In many accounts, the banshee was said to be attached to specific old Irish families, particularly those whose surnames began with O or Mac, and her cry, the caoine, was described as unmistakable: not a scream, but a long, mournful wail carried on the wind.
The legend did not grow in a vacuum. Ireland had a genuine funeral practice called keening, from the Irish caoineadh, meaning to cry or lament. Hired mourning women, sometimes called keeners, would wail and sing improvised laments over the body at a wake, a tradition documented across rural Ireland from at least the medieval period and still remembered by ethnographers recording oral history in the early 20th century. The banshee, in that light, reads less like a ghost story and more like a supernatural echo of a very real, very human ritual: a woman's cry marking a death before the household even knew.
The third volume of Samuel Barbot's saga, Banshees d'Irlande (Banshees of Ireland), is set in the village of Ballanroe, beneath the ruins of Dunmore castle, on the eve of Samhain, the Gaelic festival that later gave us Halloween. The book does not invent the bean si: it builds its haunted village around the same tension folklorists have always described, a community that recognizes the wail before it dares to say out loud what it means.
That same rule runs through every ScaryTraditions story: the creature always starts from a legend that real people actually believed, and were prepared to act on.
Yes. The banshee comes from Gaelic folklore as the bean si, the woman of the fairy mound, and families across Ireland and Scotland reported hearing her wail before a death for centuries.
Banshee comes from the Irish bean si, meaning woman of the fairy mound (si, the ancient burial mounds believed to be fairy dwellings).
This was the tradition of keening, or caoineadh, a ritual lament performed by hired mourning women at wakes across Ireland, recorded by folklorists into the 20th century.
Want the full story? Banshees of Ireland is available in the ScaryTraditions shop, and as an audiobook on Organizen Editions, told the way it was meant to be heard: in the dark.