A spirit woman whose keening cry is said to foretell a death in certain old Irish families.
The banshee ("woman of the sídhe") is said to attach herself to particular Gaelic family lines — the O'Neills, O'Briens, O'Connors, and O'Gradys among the families traditionally named — appearing or being heard keening (a mourning wail) before a death in the family. Unlike the Mythological or Ulster Cycle material, banshee lore comes down mainly through oral tradition and later folklore collections rather than a single medieval manuscript, so there is no one canonical source text for her — only a wide, fairly consistent body of regional testimony.