Fantastically Wrong: The Surprising Truth Behind the Horrifying Banshee

A resting banshee, from Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1834). Flying around people’s houses and screaming at all hours of the night, it turns out, is hard work. And that castle over there has a ridiculous perimeter to cover.

In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the Grim Reaper visits a lovely little dinner party to inform the guests that unfortunately they’re dead. After refusing wine and poking a man in the eye, he leads them to heaven, where there is, of course, a nice musical number.

Conspicuously absent for a British production, though, is the banshee of Irish and Scottish mythology, an ugly, nasty hag clad either in white or gray. A kind of fairy, she’s said to soar around your house, screaming like a manic demon to not so subtly let you know you’re about to die, usually in a violent manner. But unlike the Grim Reaper, this lady doesn’t murder you herself. She’s more of a hands-off type of death omen.

A fixture in U.K. myth-telling for some 1,000 years, particularly among elite families with a penchant for making death particularly dramatic, the banshee can also take the form of a beautiful woman weeping instead of wailing, all upset about your looming death. Also known as the Washer of the Ford, she can sometimes be seen scrubbing her bloodied robe in a river and preening her long hair with a silver comb.

Have you seen this woman? Do you suspect she’s been buzzing your house? Here’s how to prove it.

Wait until night falls, then put a caged rat in your front yard (stick with me here). When you hear that banshee come screaming and rattling that cage, hit the lights. You’ll find one of the night’s most majestic creatures, the barn owl, probably looking a bit pissed off about its rudely inaccessible dinner.

This ghostly creature has gorgeously white underparts and a scream like you wouldn’t believe (have a listen below), and has for centuries served as the likely source of the banshee myth. Far from the legend, though, this is an exceedingly graceful critter whose wails echo across every continent save for Antarctica.

Hunting primarily at night, the barn owl gathers the scant light with its large eyes and uses its entire heart-shaped face to funnel the waves to ears right next to its peepers. Its ears are actually shaped and oriented differently, with one pointing down and the other pointing up, like sloth from The Goonies.

With each ear processing sounds quite differently, the owl’s brain analyzes the variations between the ears to pinpoint prey. It’s so effective that the owl can hunt with sound alone, homing in on rodents rummaging around in the grass below. Once it locks on, it dives and pounces with its unusually long legs—an adaptation to hunting in tall grasses.

As for that beautiful plumage, it might seem odd for a nocturnal hunter to be clad in white. It’s likely a measure, though, to break up its silhouette. This is known as countershading. If moonlight hits, say, a uniformly brown owl, it creates a gradient of a lighter top side and darker bottom side, manifesting as a silhouette for potential prey on the ground. With its bright white underbelly, the barn owl counteracts this shadowing effect, thus breaking up its profile. And the owl’s brownish top side helps it blend with the foliage below, masking it from its own predators above, such as eagles.

The feathers are also highly adapted for silent flight, with extremely fine fringes that reduce turbulence, and therefore noise. The owls are positively packed with these soft, velvety feathers that help absorb sounds, far more than most birds their size (the critters are positively scrawny without their feathers on—like, hilariously so). And the intense curvature of their wings boosts lift, so the owls can cut down on the number of wing beats required to stay aloft, yet another way to reduce noises that potentially scare off prey.

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