THE BANSHEE AT SEA
Talking of phantom music, there is a widespread belief among Celtic races
that whenever it is heard proceeding from the sea, either a death or some
other great calamity is prognosticated. Such a belief is very prevalent
along the coasts of Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall, and Mr Dyer, in his
"Ghost World," p. 413, refers to it in Ireland. "Sometimes," he says,
"music is heard at sea, and it is believed in Ireland that, when a friend
or relative dies, a warning voice is discernible." To what extent this
music is connected with Banshee hauntings it is, of course, impossible to
say; but I have known cases in which it has owed its origin to the Banshee
and to the Banshee only.
During the Civil War in America, for example, a transport of Confederate
soldiers was making for Charlestown one evening, when a young Irish
officer, who 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 him, the very depths of the blue waters. Thinking he
must be dreaming, he called a brother officer to his side and asked him if
he could hear anything.
"Yes," the latter responded, "music, and what is more, singing. It is a
woman, and she is singing some very tender and plaintive air. How the
deuce do you account for it?"
"I don't know," the young Irishman replied, "unless it is the Banshee, and
it sounds very like the description of it that my mother used to give me.
I only hope it does not predict the death of any one of my very near
relatives."
It did not do that, but oddly enough, and unknown to him at the time, a
namesake of his, whom he subsequently discovered was a second cousin,
stood not ten yards from him at the very moment he was listening to the
music, and was killed in action in a sortie from Charlestown on the
following day.
A story of a similar nature was told me in Oregon by an old Irish Federal
soldier, who was in the temporary employ of an apple merchant at Medford,
Jackson County. I don't in any way vouch for its truth, but give it just
as it was related to me.
"You ask me if I have ever come across any ghosts in America. Well, I
guess I have, several, and amongst others the Banshee. Oh, yes, I am
Irish, although I speak with the 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 born in County Clare; and
though my father was only a peasant, I'm a darned sight more Irish than
half the people who possess titles and big estates in the old country
to-day.
"I emigrated from Ireland with my parents, when I was only a few weeks
old, and we settled in New York, where I was working as a porter on the
quays when the Civil War broke out. Like me, the majority of Irishmen who,
as you know, are always ready to go wherever there's the chance of doing a
bit of fighting, I at once enlisted in the Marines, for I was passionately
fond of the sea, and in due course of time was transferred to a gunboat
that patrolled the Carolina Coast on the lookout for Confederate blockade
runners. Well, one night, shortly after I had turned in and 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 left off, to go on again,
tap, tap, tap, until, at last, it unnerved me to such an extent that I
jumped out of my hammock and had a peep to see what it was. To my
astonishment I saw a very white face pressed against the porthole, looking
in at me. It was the face of a woman with raven black hair that fell in
long ringlets about her neck and shoulders. She had big golden rings in
her ears, that shone like anything as the moonbeams caught them, as did
her teeth, too, which were the loveliest bits of ivory I have ever seen,
absolutely even and without the slightest mar.
"But it was her eyes that fascinated me most. They were large, not too
large, however, but in strict proportion to the rest of her face, and as
far as I could judge in the moonlight, either blue or grey, but
indescribably beautiful, and, at the same time, indescribably sad. As I
drew nearer, she shrank back, and pointed with a white and slender hand at
a spot on the sea, and then suddenly I heard music, the far-away sound of
a harp, proceeding, so it seemed to me, from about the place she had
indicated. It was 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 music ceased, too, and all was still
again, wondrously still, and feeling unaccountably sad and lonely--for I
had taken a great fancy to that woman's face, the only what you might term
really lovely woman's face that had ever looked kindly on me--I got back
again into my hammock, and was soon fast asleep. On my touching at port,
the first letter I received from home informed me of the death of my
father, who had died the same night and just about the same time I had
seen that fairy vision and heard that fairy music.
"When I told my mother about it, some long time afterwards, she said it
was the Banshee, and that it had haunted the O'Hagan family for hundreds
and hundreds of years."
This, as I have already said, is merely a trooper's story, unconfirmed by
anyone else's evidence, and, of course, not up to the standard of 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 up. I did not
even offer him a chew of tobacco, for at that moment I was pretty nearly,
if not, indeed, quite as hard up as he was himself.
And now, before I finish altogether with Banshee hauntings that are
associated with war, I feel I must refer to a statement in Mr McAnnaly's
book, "Irish Wonders," to the effect that when the Duke of Wellington
died, the Banshee was heard wailing round 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 domain in question; but as the family to whom the
Duke belonged could not be said to be of even anything approaching ancient
Irish extraction, I cannot conceive it possible that the disturbances
experienced were in any way due to the genuine Banshee.
To revert to the sea, and Banshee haunting. On the coast of Donegal there
is an estuary called "The Rosses," and this at one time was said to be
haunted by several kinds of phantoms, including the Banshee, which was
reported to have manifested itself on quite a number of occasions.
Under the heading of "An Irish Water-fiend," Bourke, in his "Anecdotes of
the Aristocracy" (i. 329), relates the following case of a ghostly
happening there, which, although not due to a Banshee, is so
characteristic of Irish supernatural phenomena that I cannot refrain from
quoting it.
In the autumn of 1777 the Rev. James Crawford, rector of the parish of
Killina, County Leitrim, was riding on horseback with his sister-in-law,
Miss Hannah Wilson, on a pillion 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, noticing that the
water touched the saddle laps, became so alarmed that she cried out and
besought Mr Crawford to turn the horse round and get back to land as
quickly as possible.
"I do not think there can be danger," Mr Crawford answered, "for I see a
horseman crossing the ford not twenty yards before us."
To this Miss Wilson, who also saw the horseman, replied:
"You had better hail him and inquire the depth of the intervening water."
Mr Crawford at once did so, whereupon the horseman stopped and, turning
round, revealed a face distorted by the most hideous grin conceivable,
and so frightfully white and evil that the luckless clergyman promptly
beat a retreat, and made no attempt to check the mad haste of his panicked
steed till he had left the estuary many miles behind him.
On arriving home he narrated the incident to his wife and family, and
subsequently learned that the estuary was well known to be haunted by
several phantoms, whose mission was invariably the same, either to
foretell the doom by drowning of the person to whom they appeared, or else
to actually bring about the death of that person by luring them on and on,
until they got out of their depth, and so perished.
One would have thought that Mr Crawford, after the experience just
narrated, would have given the estuary a very wide berth in future; but no
such thing. He again attempted to cross the ford of "The Rosses" on 27th
September, 1777, and was drowned in the endeavour.
Among many thrilling and (so it struck me at the time) authentic stories
told me in my youth by a Mrs Broderick, a well-known vendor of oranges and
chocolate in Bristol, were several stirring accounts of the Banshee. I was
at the time a day boy at Clifton College, residing not very far from the
school, and Mrs Broderick, who used to visit 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 passengers, who, for the cheapness of the fare, made
the best of the rolling and tossing and extremely limited space allotted
for their accommodation. In later years I often travelled to and from
Dublin and Bristol in the _Argo_, the _Juno's_ sister ship, so I speak
feelingly and from experience. But to proceed with Mrs Broderick's Banshee
stories.
The one containing an account of a Banshee haunting on the sea I will
narrate in this chapter, and the other, which has no connection with
either sea or river, I will deal with later on.
Before I commence either story, however, I would like to say that though
Mrs Broderick spoke with a rich brogue and was really Irish, she used few,
if any, of those words and expressions that certain professors of the
Dublin Academic School apparently 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 Irish, and far more Irish
than many of the Gaelic scholars of to-day who, insufferably proud of
their knowledge of the Celtic tongue, bore one stiff by their feeble and
futile attempts to acquire something of the real Irish wit and proverbial
humour.
Mrs Broderick did not often speak of her parents; they were, I fancy,
peasants, or, perhaps, what we should term "small farmers," 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, very fond of the sea, and often,
when a girl, walked into Cork and went out boating with her young friends
in Queenstown harbour.
On one occasion, she and another girl and two young men went for a sail
with an old fisherman they knew, who took them some distance up the coast
in the direction of Kinsale. There had been a slight breeze when they
started, but it dropped suddenly as they were tacking to come back home,
and since the sails had to be taken down and oars used, both the young men
volunteered to row. Their offer being accepted by the old 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 Broderick's girl friend boarded the
old hulk, leaving Mrs Broderick and the old fisherman in the boat. The
shadows from the trees and rocks had already manifested themselves on the
glistening shingles of the beach, and a glow, emanating from the rapidly
rising moon and myriads of scintillating stars that every moment shone
forth with increased brilliancy, showed up every object around them with
startling distinctness.
Always in her element in scenes of this description, Mrs Broderick was
enjoying herself to the utmost. Leaning on the side of the boat and
trailing one hand in the water, she drank in the fresh night air, redolent
with the scent of flowers and ozone. She could hear her friends 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 all was still, save
for the lapping of the sea against the sides of the boat, and the gentle
ripple of the wavelets as they broke on the beach, and the occasional
far-away barkings of a dog--noises that somehow seem to belong to summer
more than to any other period of the year.
Mrs Broderick's memory, awakened by these sounds, travelled back to past
seasons, and she was depicting some of the old scenes over again, when all
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
screams, just like the screams of a woman who had been suddenly pounced
upon and either stabbed, or treated in some equally savage and violent
manner.
Mrs Broderick, of course, at once thought of her friend, Mary Rooney, and,
clutching the boatman by the arm, she exclaimed:
"The Saints above, it's Mary. They're murdering her."
"'Tis no woman, that," the old boatman said hoarsely. "'Tis the Banshee,
and I would not have had this have happened for the whole blessed world. I
with my mother so ill in bed with the rheumatism and a cold she got all
through her with sitting out on the wet grass the night before last."
"Are you sure?" Mrs Broderick whispered, clutching him tighter, whilst her
teeth chattered. "Are you sure it isn't Mary, and they are not killing
her?"
"Sure," replied the boatman, "that's the way the Banshee always
screams--'tis her, right enough, 'tis no human woman," and like the good
Catholic that he was, he crossed himself, and, dipping the oars gently
into the water, he began to pull slowly and quietly away.
By and by the screaming ceased, and a moment later the three explorers
came trooping on to the deck, showing no signs whatever of alarm, and when
questioned as to whether they had heard anything, laughingly replied in
the negative.
"Only," O'Connell added facetiously, "the kiss Mike Power stole from Mary.
That was all."
But for O'Connell that was not all. When he arrived home he found that
during his absence his mother had died suddenly, and, in all probability,
at the very moment when Mrs Broderick and the boatman had heard the
Banshee.