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Post by Memphremagog on Mar 17, 2004 19:58:16 GMT -5
According to one of the entries made on the general Highgate Vampire website concerning the Kirklees Vampire one of the descriptions of it closely resembles the banshee. It seems to hover and wail a great deal. This is typical of the banshee. Patricia Lysaght in her book entitled "THE BANSHEE: THE IRISH MESSENGER OF DEATH (copyright 1986) describes the banshee in minute detail. From the description of the various encounters with the Kirklees Vampire, especially from Mrs. Green and Sean Manchester there seems to be a striking resemblance to the banshee. I am not saying that the Kirklees case is a banshee instead of a vampire, one must consider the exsanguinations that accompany it. No banshee is known to have ever drank blood but only to harbinger an imminent death. Still it is something to ponder and perhaps resoind to.
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Post by Vampirologist on Mar 18, 2004 14:45:25 GMT -5
The banshee , from ban (bean), a woman, and shee (sidhe, a fairie), is an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death. Many have seen her as she goes wailing and clapping her hands. The keen (caoine), the funeral cry of the pesantry, is said to be an imitation of her cry. When more than one banshee is present, and they wail and sing in chorus, it is for the death of some holy or great one. An omen that sometimes accompanies the banshee is the coach-a-bower (coiste-bodhar), an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless horses driven by a Dullahan. It will go rumbling to your door, and if you open it, according to Croker, a basin of blood will be thrown in your face. These headless phantoms are found elsewhere than in Ireland. In 1807 two of the sentries stationed outside St. James's Park died of fright. A headless woman the upper part of her body naked, used to pass at midnight and scale the railings. After a time the sentries were stationed no longer at the haunted spot. In Norway the heads of corpses were cut off to make their ghosts feeble. Thus came into existence the Dullahans, perhaps ; unless, indeed, they are descended from that Irish giant who swam across the Channel with his head in his teeth.
(Courtesy of "A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, and Folklore," Ed. W.B. Yeats)
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