The banshee is alive and well on the western seaboard

It has been a while since I raced through the dormitories of the St Louis Convent in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, terrified that a headless earl of Essex was following me. The spooky story was all we incarcerated teenagers talked about in the lead-up to our Halloween break home. Of course, we didn’t know – or care less – that Robert Devereaux, the second earl of Essex, had been beheaded in the Tower of London in 1601, almost three decades before the castle was built by his son, the third earl.

It was on the foundations of this castle the St Louis nuns began to build their convent and boarding school in 1888, and it was through these creaky corridors the decapitated nobleman followed me one night on my return from evening prayers. I was 13 years old.

It is easy to conjure such memories as the season of Samhain approaches and the veil between this world and the next is as flimsy as the willow-the-wisps that flit through the bogs and boreens here in the wild west of Co Mayo.

It is not only our exposed land and seascapes that offer our imaginations a gateway to the metaphysical, the mysterious and the magical. Isn’t that yearning a foundation stone of all our cultures? The search for the metaphysical in a bid to dismiss the shackles of mortality is part of every culture’s genealogy.

It is no surprise, therefore, that with the loss of faith in our established churches, there is a new wave of interest in our rich treasury of folklore and mythology.

Medieval historian Gillian Kenny, who is attached to UCD school of history and a visiting research fellow at TCD’s centre for women’s gender and sexuality studies, is an expert on Irish folklore, the supernatural, witches and witch-hunting, as well as the banshee. Her interest in gender studies and how women have been excluded from the dominant male narrative of our history informs much of her work.

What is refreshing about this is that she presents her expertise through public talks under the aegis of Seed Talks. Established in London in 2021, and now hosted in various venues in Ireland, this events company was created to ensure academic knowledge became more accessible to the general public.

I knew nothing about Seed Talks until I got chatting to Kenny over a glass of wine at a cultural evening on Clare Island over the summer (seedtalks.co.uk). She was visiting the island as part of her research for her upcoming book, to be published by Yale University Press, on 16th century pirate queen and feminist Granuaile, whose castle dominates the entrance to the island’s harbour.

Kenny is also about to launch a new podcast with Emma Nagouse and Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, who present the popular BBC Sounds series You’re Dead to Me. Titled Unruly History and available on all platforms, the podcast series is about the stories, lives and beliefs the past tends to ignore. She says: “History is full of people, moments and ideas that have been quietly filed away: too inconvenient, too strange or simply too ordinary to make the official version. Unruly History opens those files.”

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Interestingly, one of the first episodes explores the mythology of Ireland’s death messenger, the banshee, or bean sídhe, and traces her origins through medieval sources to contemporary family memories.

In it, the presenters ask whether she is a fairy, a ghost or simply a chimera from our ancient past. This was a time when we sought comfort from the otherworld due to the harshness of life and our material privations.

Kenny says: “Many believe the banshee comes from older Irish beliefs about the spirit world, especially stories of powerful supernatural women who existed here in pre-Christian times.”

Well, for those of us with vivid imaginations living here along the wild west coastline, it is not too difficult to believe in her – whoever the hell she is – when the wind is howling and whispering through the trees late at night. I can assure you that when I am suddenly awoken at 3am with a cacophony of screeching sounds surrounding my house, and there is a tapping at my window, putting my heart crossways in my chest, I’m hiding right under the duvet like a scared cat.

It is no surprise then that those masked children who come trick-or-treating during Halloween provide comic relief from the terror of the real ghosts and ghouls that inhabit my dreams.

On the other hand, when you survive the ancient and anarchic weather-world of the western seaboard, as the nights lengthen and the cailleachs cackle as a full moon creeps across the sky, sometimes there is nothing for it but to open the bottle of poitín and watch A Nightmare on Elm Street.