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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