The Banshee of Ballymore

There is a rocking chair in a house in the seaside town of Ballymore. As the walls decay, the chair remains, vacant and yet moving. Sometimes just for a moment, a flash and then it is over, leaving anyone who saw it to wonder if it even happened at all. There are times, when the wind coming from the sea howls and seems to settle on that house and then perhaps, you might see her. The owner of the empty chair. She sits, in her white gown, rocking back and forth, combing long, thin and wet black hair with bony fingers and fixing dead eyes on a fireplace that no longer burns, moving the chair back and forth, back and forth with dirty feet. There are times, when the wind coming from the sea howls and then perhaps, you might hear her. As she rocks, as she combs, as the wind howls, she wails and the wails become the howling and the howling wind carries a name to the people of Ballymore and they know, that death is coming.

There are those who believe and those who do not, but everyone who lives there knows the story of Whinny O'Shernan. Once, there lived a girl in Ballymore, no more than sixteen named Marie, who had a son out of wedlock in a time when such a thing was still a sin. The church that she had loved all her life abandoned her and the Priest who has served the people so diligently for so many years, was quite suddenly and quite surprisingly quietly, moved from their Parish to another. Her friends she had grown up with shunned her. Her family gave her up to the world, all save one Aunt. Her father’s sister, a spinster, though only forty and considered by all to be a witch. She was as shunned as her niece, but she was a cunning woman. When the girls found themselves in trouble, they knocked on her door. When the women could not give their husbands a child, they knocked on her door. Oh yes Whinny O'Shernan was a cunning woman and when her niece found herself in need of a midwife, she knocked on Whinny’s door.

Whinny O'Shernan did not care much for men. She found them odious and stupid creatures far too fond of leaving women to pick up the pieces of the lives they tore through like hurricanes and far too eager to blame the fairer sex for all their woes. So, when she found herself now helping to look after a male child, she vowed that she would help her niece to raise him to be better than his kind. The women named him Ruaidrí, after the last true King of Ireland, but the boy was sickly from the first and when it became clear to Whinny that he was a Fairy Child, frail and fine, not long for this world, her heart broke. It was not long before She came. One cold night as Whinny walked back to her little house with medicine for the child, she heard the wail of the Banshee. Upon her little roof as smoke billowed from the chimney, there sat a woman, combing her long hair and calling for Ruaidrí O'Shernan. The wailing never ceased. Night and day came the call of death for the child Whinny had grown to love.

“You will tell me what to do,” said Marie to her Aunt as she rocked her sleeping child by the roaring fire in their little living room. “You know more of this realm than what we see. Tell me how to save him.”

“The keening demands a death,” was the only reply the spinster gave and as Marie began to sob, Whinny wrapped her shawl about her and without so much as a backwards glance, went to the sea, leaving the only two people she had ever loved behind, while the banshee cried on into the dark.

Cunning Women are not witches, but they do have a touch of the Fae about them and the Queen of the Banshees has always been a Fairy who lost her first life to the sea. Whinny O'Shernan looked out at the black waters from the shore and for the first time in her life, felt the cold of the night air in her bones. She dropped her shawl upon the sands and let her black hair fall loose about her shoulders as she stepped bare footed, into the ocean.

“Clíodhna,” she called softly into the night. “Clíodhna the drowned Queen, hear me. Take me.”

As Whinny walked deeper and deeper into the cold, black waters, she repeated her plea over and over again, her voice growing louder and more desperate as the water engulfed another part of her quivering body until she was completely submerged. As the weight of the sea took her under, she saw through the nothingness, the figure of a woman and as her lungs burned with the salt, bony fingers reached out and touched hers, dragging her deeper and deeper.

Whinny O'Shernan was a cunning woman, with a touch of the Fae about her and her Queen, answered her call at the bottom of the Irish sea.

Marie never questioned what happened to her Aunt. Her child grew healthy and she took up her Aunt’s house and her mantle as a Cunning Woman. Her life was not lonely. Her boy grew well, married and remembered his mother in his adulthood. Marie lived content. In her final days, she heard once more the wailing woman and knew that this time, She came for her. Marie sat in her favourite armchair by the fire, across from the rocking chair she nursed her son in and as she drifted into her final sleep, it began to move and there in the chair was the Banshee and once cunning woman, combing her wet drowned hair and heralding the death of the niece whose love, she gave her life for.