The Banshee

om the sea, either a death or some other great calamity is prognosticated. Such a belief is very prevalent along

a warning voice is discernible." To what extent this music is connected with Banshee hauntings it is, of course,

o was leaning over the bulwarks and gazing pensively into the sea, was astonished to hear the very sweetest sounds of music coming from, so it seemed to

nging. It is a woman, and she is singing some very tender

t sounds very like the description of it that my mother used to give me. I o

ubsequently discovered was a second cousin, stood not ten yards from him at the very moment he was

, who was in the temporary employ of an apple merchant at Medford, Jackson County

e nasal twang of the regular Yank. Everyone does who has lived in the Eastern States for any length of time. It's the climate. My name, however, is O'Hagan, and I was bor

was lying in my hammock, trying to get to sleep, which was none too easy, for one of my mates, an ex-actor, was snoring loud enough to wake the whole ship, I suddenly heard a tapping on the porthole close beside me. 'Hello,' says I to myself, 'that's an odd noise. It can't be the water, nor yet the wind; maybe it's a bird, a gull or albatross,' and I listened very attentively. The sound went on, but it had none of that hardness and sharpness about it that is occasioned by a beak, it was softer and more lingering, more like the tapping of fingers. Every now and then it

a very still night, and the sounds came to me very distinctly, above the soft lap, lap of the water against the vessel's side, and the mechanical squish, squish made by the bows each time they rose and fell, as the ship gently ploughed her way onwards. I was so intent on listening that I quite forgot the figure of the woman with the beautiful face, and when I turned to look at her again, she had gone, and there was nothing in front of me but an endless expanse of heaving, tossing, moonlit water. Then the musi

ds, she said it was the Banshee, and that it had haunted

S.P.R. authority. Yet, I believe, it was related to me in perfect sincerity, and the narrator had nothing whatever to gain through making it

the house of his ancestors. This statement does not, in my opinion, bear inspection. I am quite ready to grant that some kind of apparition-perhaps a family ghost he had inherited from one or other of his Anglo-Irish ancestry-was heard lamenting outside

"The Rosses," and this at one time was said to be haunted by several kinds of phantoms, inclu

329), relates the following case of a ghostly happening there, which, although not due to a Ban

on behind him, along the road leading to the "The Rosses," and, on reaching the estuary, he at once proceeded to cross it. After they had gone some distance, Miss Wilson, not

rawford answered, "for I see a horseman cr

n, who also saw th

and inquire the depth o

t hideous grin conceivable, and so frightfully white and evil that the luckless clergyman promptly beat a retreat,

by several phantoms, whose mission was invariably the same, either to foretell the doom by drowning of the person to whom they appeared

given the estuary a very wide berth in future; but no such thing. He again attempted to

our house every week with her wares, took a particular interest in me because I was Irish-one of "the real old O'Donnells." She was a native of Cork, and had, I believe, migrated from that city in the Juno, an old cattle boat, that for more than twenty years plied regularly every week between Cork and Bristol carrying a handful of passen

I will narrate in this chapter, and the other, which has no c

rently consider inseparable from the speech of the Irish peasant class. I cannot, for example, remember her ever saying Musha, or Arrah, or Oro; and, as for Erse, I am quite certain she did not know a word of it. Yet, as I have said, she was Iri

and from what I could gather they lived, at one time, in a little village just outside Cork; but Mrs Broderick was, she told me,

d fisherman, they pulled away steadily till they espied an old ship, so battered and worn away as to be little more than a mere shell, lying half in and half out of the water in a tiny cove. Then, as the weather was beautifully fine and no one was in a hurry to get home, it was proposed that they pull up to the wreck and examine it. The old fisherman demurred, but he was soon won over, and the two young men and Mrs B

s talking and laughing as they tried to steady themselves on the sloping boards of the old hulk; and presently, one of them, O'Connell, proposed that they should descend below deck and explore the cabins. Then their voices gradually grew fainter and fainter, until eventually

at once, from the wreck, from that side of it, so it seemed to her, that was partly under water, there rang out a series of the most appalling scr

of her friend, Mary Rooney, and, clutchi

, it's Mary. They

d this have happened for the whole blessed world. I with my mother so ill in bed with the rheuma

him tighter, whilst her teeth chattered. "Are you

enough, 'tis no human woman," and like the good Catholic that he was, he crossed himself

rooping on to the deck, showing no signs whatever of alarm, and when question

iously, "the kiss Mike Power

ring his absence his mother had died suddenly, and, in all probability, a