I live in a small town in rural appalachia. The entire area was heavily settled by Irish immigrants over 150 years ago. They brought along their traditions, superstitions and folklore, and well, a few other things followed along as well.
As a child me and the neighbor boy Mike used to go down and play in the creek together. It was our favorite past time. We would catch minnows and crawdads, build little dams with rocks and mud and swim in some of the deeper pools. We used to spend every summer like this, that is, until the summer we both turned twelve.
It was a hot June day and we had been swimming in a deep pool that lies a couple miles downstream from our houses. When it turned evening time we started the long walk back. We were deep in conversation when we came around a bend in the creek and sitting there on a boulder beside the water was a small, beautiful woman. She was wearing an emerald green dress covered by a grey cloak. Her hair was incredibly long and she was brushing it with a silver brush.
We both froze and stared. We knew everyone who lived along the creek and neither one of us had seen her before. Her beauty was stunning. After a minute or two but what seemed like an eternity, she looked up at us. Her appearance immediately changed, soft and smooth white skin seemed to melt into grey lumpy clay. Her beautiful face now looked more like a half rotted corpse and her long, luscious hair fell off in clumps. And then this dead thing began to wail the most blood curdling and awful sound that I have ever heard.
We took off running and ran all the way to my Mike’s house. When we arrived we found his mother sobbing uncontrollably and she looked pale as a ghost. She informed us that Mike’s father, a mechanic by trade, had been working under a car when one of the jack stands had given way. His head was crushed and he died instantly.
Mike and his mother moved away a few months after that. I haven’t seen him or talked to him since then, though I often think back on this day. Mike’s family name was O’Brien and mine is O’Neill, as an adult I’ve started doin a lot of research on my Irish family heritage and I happened to come across old legends of the Banshee. It is said that each of the original families of Ireland had their own Banshee, a form of the fae that would herald the death of a family member with her awful wailing or keening.
And then yesterday, as I sat on my back porch sipping on my whiskey, I heard the most blood curdling and awful sound. That I’ve heard once before.
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