Editor’s Note: this relates to Co. Roscommon.

I remember one night years ago – my father and mother  were then alive. It was a Sunday night, a cow had calved and I was up. When I fed the calf I came in and sat by the fire and had a smoke and a shot of tea. ‘Well’, I said to myself, ‘before I go to bed I will go out and have another look at the cow and her calf.’ Well the very minute I got up off the chair the cry started again outside the window. Well, it was put the hair standing on my head. There was a lot of us, big and small, in the house at the time, and the cry woke the lot. ‘What is that?’ said my father, down out of the room. ‘It is outside the window’, said I. ‘Put out that light’, he said, ‘and go to bed’. ‘Why?’ said I. ‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘Well’ said I, ‘I thought I would have another look at the cow.’ ‘Now’, he said, ‘don’t mind the cow, go to bed.’ I took him at his word and went to bed. Next morning I asked him about the cry. ‘Ah, what was it,’ he said, ‘but the banshee.’ A week later word came from America that a first cousin of his had died.’ (quoted in Lysaght 1998, 46-47)