Editor’s Note: this story comes from Co. Laois in the 1970s. The grandmother foolishly takes a banshee’s comb with her.

My grandmother was telling me that she was going home from town one day. She picked up a lovely comb and brought it home with her. And that night there was an awful noise at the door and the old man said he would get up and see what it was. She told him not to. And he suddenly saw the comb and he put the comb on the tongs, you know, and sure he put the tongs out of the door with the comb, and the tongs was broken in his hands. (quoted in Lysaght 1998, 79)