The banshee at Lady Honor O’Brien’s window

When

c. 1650 date reconstructed from later accounts · first known record: 1676

Where

Lady Honor O’Brien’s house in County Clare (possibly Bunratty), Ireland

Verdict

Disputed

The English noblewoman Ann Fanshawe described a woman in white who cried out three times at her window – and by dawn someone in the house was dead.

What happened

In the winter of 1649–1650, during Cromwell’s campaign, the royalist Sir Richard Fanshawe was travelling through Munster with his wife Ann. After a stay in Limerick the couple spent three nights with Lady Honor O’Brien, youngest daughter of the Earl of Thomond. On the first night, at about one o’clock, Ann was woken by a voice. By the light of the moon she saw a woman in white leaning in through the open casement, with red hair and a pale, ghastly complexion, who “spoke loud, and in a tone I had never heard, thrice, ‘A horse’” and then, “with a sigh more like the wind than breath,” vanished – her body looking “more like a thick cloud than substance.” Her husband, whom she could not wake, put it down to Irish superstition. At five in the morning their hostess told them she had sat up all night with a cousin O’Brien, who had died at two, and apologised: it was “the custom of the place” that when one of the family lay dying, the shape of a woman appeared in the window every night. She was said to be a girl seduced long ago by the owner of the house, murdered in the garden and thrown into the river beneath the window.

Witnesses

Ann, Lady Fanshawe – memoirs written in 1676 for her son and first printed in 1829–1830; the account of her hostess, Lady Honor O’Brien.

Explanations and hypotheses

This is one of the oldest descriptions of a death-warning spirit attached to an Irish family and is often cited as a banshee – although Fanshawe never uses the word, and the folklorist Thomas J. Westropp noted that the figure differs from the classic banshee. The account was written a quarter of a century after the event, and the house itself is uncertain: scholars have suggested Bunratty or another O’Brien seat in Clare. Westropp dated the episode to 1642, but the context of the memoirs (the Earl of Roscommon’s death in Limerick, Cromwell’s campaign) points to 1649–1650. Belief in the banshee, who keens for members of the old families, was still being recorded by Irish folklore collectors in the twentieth century.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

More: Wikipedia (pl) Wikipedia (en)