The Wail of the Banshee
A Banshee
Those who think that the notion of unknown exotic and alien beings living in close proximity to us is nonsense only have to reflect on the peculiar life-forms inhabiting our world. Imagine what Captain Cook would have made of the surreal-looking kangaroo during his exploration of Australia. The existence of such an animal, carrying its young in a pocket-like pouch was entirely unexpected. Another comical-looking animal which eluded zoologist until 1937 was the giant panda of northern China. In 1912, another unusual creature was discovered when a pilot was forced to make an emergency landing on an island off Malaya. He was confronted with a living dinosaur; a huge 10-foot-long monitor lizard now known as the Komodo dragon. This fearsome 135-kilogram animal has a long tail and enormous jaws which can kill a man.
Nearer to home, on your clothes and in your bed, there are hordes of grotesque microscopic monsters known as dust mites, prowling all over you as they munch avariciously on the tiny detached flakes of your skin. These minute creatures look like some nightmarish bug-eyed monsters from an Hieronymous Bosch painting under the electron microscope, but thankfully, because they live on another scale of reality, we are never aware of them crawling about in the carpet and in our beds.
Similarly, could there be undiscovered species of weird but intelligent creatures living alongside us in a parallel dimension, perhaps secretly observing us and occasionally meddling in human affairs? Would this hypothesis explain poltergeists, the mysterious 'greys' allegedly responsible for global abductions, angels, and perhaps even some UFO sightings? In recent years, many respected researchers into the paranormal, including ufologists such as Jaques Vallee and John Keel, have presented convincing conjectures suggesting that some unknown agency outside space and time has been preying on the collective subconscious of mankind for many millennia, manifesting itself as angels, demons, visions, fairies, spirits, will 'o the wisp and various other supernatural guises. In this chapter [featured on this webpage] we will take a look at one of these sinister entities: the banshee.
The banshee is one of the most well-known figures of Irish folklore. The name is derived from the Irish Gaelic 'bean sidhe', meaning 'woman of the fairies'. According to tradition, the banshee's mournful cry is said to foretell death. The banshee is described as having long straight white or red hair which covers her face, and she combs her hair as she wails outside the family home of the person who is about to die. The person who is about to pass away never hears or sees the banshee, and once the death takes place, the crying ceases and the eerie apparition immediately vanishes. Although we're living in the modernistic hi-tech age of computers, genetic engineering and space travel, it seems from the following cases that the chilling Celtic mourner is still doing her rounds, and not only in Ireland; she is evidently active all over the world.
In Ellesmere Port, England, in the autumn of 1997, a 50-year-old housewife named Sarah Wayne was sitting up late one Saturday night, waiting for her 18-year-old daughter Cheryl to return from a nightclub. Sarah hadn't been keen on her teenaged daughter going out to the club, but Cheryl had argued that she was old enough to look after herself and added that Liam, the boy she was after, went to the club on a Saturday night.
Sarah's husband Derek was in Nottingham driving a heavy-goods vehicle to a depot. Derek was very protective towards his only daughter, and certainly would have done his utmost to prevent Cheryl from going to the nightclub.
The time was 2.30 a.m., and still there was no sign of Cheryl, so her mother dimmed the lights in the parlour and peeped through the net curtains at the deserted street outside. A wind was starting to stir, and a clutter of dried leaves scraped by on the pavement. Sarah scanned both ends of the road for twenty minutes, but Cheryl was nowhere to be seen. Around 3 a.m., Mrs Wayne sat sipping a cup of tea in the living room, watching the BBC News 24 service on the muted TV. At around 3.30 a.m., she fell into a light sleep, but a sound woke her up minutes later. Sarah opened her eyes, startled, and saw Cheryl walk past the living room in the hall outside. The girl was sobbing, and her platinum blonde hair was a mess. It hung down in front of her face.
'Cheryl! What's wrong love? Where have you been?' Mrs Wayne bolted from the armchair and followed Cheryl, who had headed straight to the kitchen. Sarah assumed that her distraught daughter had been rejected by Liam at the club, but when she walked into the kitchen, the woman got the shock of her life. The kitchen was empty; Cheryl was nowhere to be seen.
Then came the sounds of a yale key rattling in the front door. Cheryl came in with her friend Jacqueline, laughing and talking about boys they'd danced with.
Cheryl had her long blonde hair piled up in a bun on her head and wore a bright red mini skirt and a white sleeveless top. The figure her mother had pursued to the kitchen had its hair draped over its face and seemed to be wearing black clothes. Sarah Wayne suddenly realised that she had mistaken a weeping ghost for her daughter, and her heart somersaulted. She told Cheryl and her friend about the weird apparition, and the girls and Mrs Wayne became so scared, they all refused to go into the kitchen until it was dawn.
Later that morning, at 8.30 a.m., a policeman and policewoman called at Sarah Wayne's house to inform her of her husband's death in Nottingham. He had left the cab of his lorry at 3.30 a.m. that morning and suffered a fatal heart attack. The death happened at the precise time when the crying ghost walked through the Waynes home. Was the apparition just a so-called 'open-eye' dream of Mrs Wayne, who had just woken up, or was it a banshee? Mrs Wayne believes it was a banshee, and was so unnerved by the experience, she later moved from the house and now lives in Bebington, Merseyside.
The second report of a banshee comes from three witnesses. It all began in the early hours of a Wednesday morning in August 1998 when Freda Piers, a 44-year-old housewife of Saltney, Chester had difficulty sleeping. Freda usually had no trouble getting to sleep, but on this balmy morning at 2 a.m. she became restless, and insomnia began to steadily set in. Freda therefore left her snoring husband and went down to the kitchen to make a coffee. She turned on the radio and for about a minute she listened to Magic 1548, a Liverpool-based station. She was just about to tune into the MFM radio station, when the disc-jockey Jon Jessop urged listeners to go and look out their window to see if there was any sign of a lost snow-white terrier named Brandy, because its owner was frantic. Freda dimmed the lights, opened the window blinds, and gazed out at the moonlit close. She then heard a low howling sound which sent a shiver down her spine. The DJ then said that the terrier had been lost in northern Liverpool, so Freda realised that there was no hope of the dog being outside of her house in Saltney. She took a quick look through the gaps in the blinds - and saw a hooded figure in black standing across the road. The figure looked like a monk wearing a black habit and cowl. What's more, the figure seemed to be the source of the uncanny weeping, and it was looking up at the bedroom window of the house opposite. Red curtains were drawn in this window and a faint bulb burned behind them.
Freda telephoned her best friend Eunice, who lived next door to the house where the strange figure was lurking. After some twenty or so rings, a bleary-eyed and grumpy Eunice answered her phone, and Freda told her about the figure in black standing in the neighbouring garden on the lawn. Eunice took her cordless phone to the window and peeped out. She told Freda that an old white-haired woman was looking up at next-door's window with a sorrowful but demented look, and she appeared to be crying. Eunice was so frightened at the sight of the deranged old woman, she hung up on Freda, dialled the police and shook her husband awake. Eunice's husband, Kevin reluctantly hauled himself out the bed and took a look out the window. He too saw the eccentric old woman in black. He opened the bedroom window, despite his frightened wife's pleas not to, and he shouted down to her, 'What's wrong love?' The creepy-looking woman failed to reply, and continued to stare up at next door's window and started to make a bloodcurdling howling noise.
Freda, meanwhile, was attempting to awaken her husband Sam from his slumbers to tell him about the crazy old woman on the other side of the close.
A police car zoomed to the scene with its roof-light flashing. Eunice and Kevin were distracted from looking at the old woman by the blue flash of light from the police car, and when they glanced back at the lawn, the nocturnal visitor had inexplicably vanished, in what must have literally been the blinking of an eyelid. Two policemen rushed from the squad car with high-powered torches and flashed their beams across the garden where the mysterious figure had stood. Eunice felt so stupid and confused at the woman's vanishing act, she withdrew from the window and pulled her husband back too. Seconds later, out of burning curiosity, she chanced a peep through the net curtains and the blinding beam of a police torch singled her face out at the window. Eunice had no option but to lean out the window and admit that she had rung the police because of the strange prowling woman.
The police listened, then knocked on the front door of Eunice's neighbour. A middle-aged man came to the door not long afterwards and invited the police in. About fifteen minutes later, an ambulance roared into the close. The ambulance men hurried to the house next door and were admitted in by the policemen. By now, Freda, Eunice, and their husbands were standing on the pavement near the house that was the cynosure of all the activity. Eunice and her husband recalled that an Irish couple named O'Brien had recently moved into the house.
About fifteen minutes later, the covered body of Mrs Obrien was taken to the ambulance on a stretcher. Later that morning, Freda and Eunice heard from neighbours that Mrs O'Brien had died in her sleep. Her husband Pat had awoken at 2 a.m. to the sounds of someone crying outside in the distance. He had tried to wake up his wife Philomena to tell her about the strange sobbing sound, but Mrs O'Brien failed to respond, and wouldn't wake up. Mr O'Brien panicked when he felt her neck and got no carotid pulse. She felt cold, and Mr O'Brien realised his wife was dead.
Mr O'Brien claims that his own mother's death 25 years earlier was foreshadowed by the wailing of a banshee, and has no difficulty accepting that a banshee cried for his late wife in the early hours of that warm August morning.
The aforementioned banshee reports are just a couple of examples of the many cases I've looked into, and a majority of the accounts are difficult to rationalize as hallucinations or outright lies, given the calibre of the witnesses. In many instances, the ghostly mourner was seen by several unrelated observers simultaneously, which surely rules out some sort of subjective mirage in the mind of the witnesses. A classic case in point is the doomed Piper Alpha oil platform disaster in 1988. Derek Ellington, a rig fitter, and many of his workmates on the oil platform heard an eerie screeching noise which sounded like a woman crying hysterically. Less than a minute later, an enormous fireball engulfed the Piper Alpha rig and 160 workers perished. Derek Ellington was one of the lucky survivors who was later plucked from the icy waters of the North Sea. He was later asked to describe the strange sound which seemed to be some portent of the disaster, and he recalled it was 'like the wailing of a banshee'.
www.ghostcity19.freeserve.co.uk
The Liverpool Valentine Ghost
The Devil in the Cavern Club
The Song that can Kill You
The Last Dance
The Welsh Werewolf
George Washington's Vision of the Future
The Phantom Matchmakers
The Thing in Berkeley Square
The Zodiac Murders Mystery
Cheshire Timewarps
Merseyside Timeslips
The Penny Lane Poltergeist
The Kennedy and Lincoln Coincidences
The UFO that Crashed in Wales
The Mysterious Spring-Heeled Jack
The Rings on her Fingers
or e-mail Tom personally with any comments or queries:Tom Slemen
