Donal Hickey: Have you heard a banshee wailing? It might have been a barn owl

Ghostly white in plumage, this owl only moves around at night and then silently. You’ll sometimes see it in car headlights as it hunts for prey. Picture: iStock

It’s a time of year, especially on clear, frosty nights, when sounds carry for long distances in the countryside when you‘re likely to hear odd, chilling cries.

Many animals make noises that could well come from humans. Little wonder then that, in less enlightened times, people believed such screams were from the banshee, the fairy woman and harbinger of death.

The fox mating season runs from December to February and if you hear something these nights it could be a vixen trying to attract a male. The vixen comes into heat just once in the breeding season and has only three days of fertility. Understandable then how her calls can be frequent.

Mind you, it can be a blood-curdling cry if heard in a remote district in the still hours of darkness. And, now that foxes have also become urban animals, you’re just as likely to hear it in a built-up area, even in suburban gardens.

Even more piercing, however, is the cry of the hare, which is often compared to a child screaming out in fear and terror. And need we mention cats!

There’s also a bird we can’t rule out. The Irish name for the barn owl is ‘screachog reilige’ (graveyard screecher) and that explains why its nocturnal cry might unsettle folk. Ghostly white in plumage, this owl only moves around at night and then silently. You’ll sometimes see it in car headlights as it hunts for prey.

A banshee wailing. Picture: iStock

The school folklore collection from the late 1930s is replete with stories of the banshee. She is reputed to have been heard when a member of some old Irish families, whose surnames began with an O or Mac, was about to die.

In fairly recent times, I’ve known people who not only claimed to have heard the banshee but who also saw her: a mysterious woman in black combing her hair.

One story in the folklore collection came from the beautiful Borlin Valley, West Cork, with the teller, Mary O’Sullivan, revealing people there ‘firmly believed’ in the banshee.

A Borlin woman, who lived alone, heard cries at different times one night, even outside her window. Her mother’s people were named McCarthy and she guessed one of them had died.

According to Mary, the woman went to nearby Bantry next day where she heard a church bell tolling for a funeral. She was told an aunt of hers had died and was being buried that day. She should have known, but there was some mistake in sending her news of the funeral.

Without wishing to be a spoilsport, or casually dismissing the mystique of the banshee, is it reasonable to surmise that deaths people remembered 'hearing' were co-incidental with animal noises?