But there’s a mysterious something about Conor that draws her to him, and she takes him to the afterlife to see if he can change fate. What if, I thought, Ashling turns up in Conor’s room one night, telling him someone in his family is about to die? Conor will want to stop the death, won’t he? But what if Ashling was murdered in the fifth century, and is desperate to return to life? Her return depends on her success as a banshee, so she needs Conor or a relative to die. Three hours later, Ashling the banshee was a character with a story and a twelve-year-old human friend/victim named Conor O’Neill. I started thinking about such a maiden-how she met her end, how she’d like being a harbinger of death. ![]() Far from the dreadful death-spirit I remembered from Disney, Briggs’ version was a maiden who died before her time. I remembered Darby and his banshee years later, leafing through ABBEY LUBBERS, BANSHEES & BOGGARTS, an “encyclopedia of fairies” by the late great folklorist Katharine Briggs. The special effects are ridiculous by today’s standards, but I don’t think my young mind could have handled anything realer. ![]() When I was growing up in Massachusetts, with a half-Irish grandmother and Irish neighbors all around, the banshee-an ancestral spirit who wails when a family member is about to die-was as familiar to me as Santa Claus.Īs a child I was terrified of banshees-the fault of the old Disney movie “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” in which a cloaked, faceless, green-tinged phantom calls in the death coach. She’s online at, and also blogs at and . In this guest post, Booraem has ever so graciously unearthed banshees. She lives in coastal Maine with an artist, a dog, and a cat, one of whom is a practicing curmudgeon. Her earlier middle-grade fantasies are SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS (Penguin/DBYR, 2011) and THE UNNAMEABLES (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). Ellen Booraem’s TEXTING THE UNDERWORLD, a middle-grade fantasy about a scaredy-cat South Boston boy and a determined young banshee, hits bookstores in August (Penguin/Dial Books for Young Readers).
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