Banshees or winds?

[...] No Celtic Irishman or Gaelic Highlander will admit that there is any connection between the fateful banshee and the nocturnal waif of the wind, but a Southron has his suspicions. In days gone by in Ireland the banshees were very generally believed in. Every family that respected itself had its own attendant sprite - banshee is simply an anglicised version of Irish words meaning fairy-woman - whose office it was to wail beneath the windows and round the roof of the homestead, as a sign and warning that death would shortly enter the household.

An Irish balladist sings:-
To me, my sweet Kathleen, the Banshee has cried,
And I die - ere to-morrow I die;
This rose thou has gathered, and laid by my side,
Will live, my child, longer than I.

A collector of Irish lore noted some years since that in the days of long ago, when old servants who had been born, and would die, in the service of the same family were common, it was amusing to hear a dispute between such a servitor of an old and one of an upstart family. "The latter," wrote the observer, "for his own respectability, would swear he heard the banshee before one of his master's people died, and the other would laugh at the idea of any banshee being so mean as to cry for low blood: 'Arrah, now, Paudeen, don't be trying to come over us; you were drunk, and it was the cat you heard, or a mouse, or a rat in the press; don't try to think we believe that any banshee would so bemean herself as to cry for people who never had a grandfather!'"

It is cheering to know, however, that if "the upstart had good blood, as was often the case by money marrying blood, the upstart descended from the blood might claim a banshee." Apparently, family spirits might contribute an additional chapter to the "Book of Snobs."

Some banshees seem, like Dogberry, to have had everything handsome about them, for a Scottish Highland loch used to be haunted, so it was said, by a banshee attired in green silk. These curious sprites, however, are nearly extinct. Irish folk still talk of them, but it is not with the simple, unquestioning faith of old; it is but a half-respect and a fractional belief which are now accorded to the once dreaded banshee; and the suggestion that the legends of their wailings were often connected with the strange voices of the night winds would not arouse the contempt and anger which would once upon a time have been poured on such an idea.

From the Globe, 5th January 1903.