A Dublin ghost story: The Banshee of the Craigs
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- A short story in (simplified) Dublin dialect, related by the author, Turlough Conmee. This is one of "Thirteen Tales Told by a Dubliner", a collection of 13 stories of the supernatural. They are all "true": they stem either from the author's experience, or from tales told by his father and mother, Dublin folklore, or Irish history. For a description of this story, see below.
The Banshee of the Craigs
"Call for the mourning women, that they may come; and let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids gush out with waters. For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion, How are we spoiled! we are greatly confounded, because we have forsaken the land, because our dwellings have cast us out."
Jeremiah 9:17-19
The Craigs have moved to Dublin from Derry, but originally they were Gael of the Gael from Donegal. When Mrs Craig dies in 1929, her eldest son hears the Banshee keening. At first no-one believes it possible that this rural belief could manifest in the city. The well-to-do family is driven to the edge of madness, until Uncle James, who still belongs to both worlds, saves the day. But it has a price.
The "Uncle James" featured in this story is a historical person. He was JP Craig or Séamus Ó Creag, a pioneering Irish language scholar in the early 20th century. See:
www.dib.ie/bio...
This is a revised recording of a story published here a year ago.
Copyright for the series, both audio and print format, rests with the author. For more info on the project and dialect literature generally, see my website at dublindialect....
Photo: Giuseppe Milo, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikime....
Absolutely love every story narrated by Mr. Conmee. I surely hope there are more than 13 as I hope to listen every day this year.
Thanks. There may well be more. But at the moment I am concentrating on refining the existing 13 recordings technically.
In the meantime, feel free to explore the rest of my channel, which consists of dialect verse and prose, often macabre in atmosphere.
@@dublindialect3168 Will do - can't wait!!
@@dublindialect3168 Excellent stuff! New sub, thanks so much!
Best
Oh, and PS: shouldn’t they have tipped her, or something? Given her coffee, breakfast? 2/3rds done only so maybe this will answer itself.
Cheers from the States
Some people heard Drums 🥁 before they die ,
Such a sad beautiful story. Sad that there would be no more keening, indeed a privilege to be so mourned.😔 Thank you☘️☘️☘️
This one really got to me.
my aunt was married to a Craig man from Glenties. He may have been some relation of that family. I never heard of any stories of the Banshee though.
It seems that the area around Inis Caoil or Inishkeel was "Craig country". They were a distinguished family associated with the monastery on Inis Caoil. Great-grandfather Craig was in Rosbeg but was driven off his farm about the 1850s and went to live in Drimnasilla near Glenties. There was also at least one pocket of Craigs (Irish-speaking) in the area of Lough Eske in Donegal. I don't know if they were related. The family name was "Ó Creag". When grandfather Craig settled in Derry, their name was confused with the many Craigs of Scottish origin who came to Ulster under the British. For example, William Craig was a notorious Unionist Home Affairs minister in the 1960s. As for the Banshee, this story is a speculative reconstruction of a fragment of a story told to me by my mother, Annie Craig, when I was a boy. She told me that Uncle Joe heard the Banshee when "Mama" died.
It’s beautiful. My grans husband, Pops, my grandpa, I never knew. Was from Philadelphia., first generation, Peter Aloysius. She was of Alsace-Lorraine descent. Thank you, sir. Please continue as Ireland needs more “pops”
I’ve never heard of a banshee in this manner before. But it sounds like a good thing. It’s ashamed that the kids insisted that it be done away with.
Once again a wonderful tail told about Irish tradition.
I enjoyed the story tremendously!
Well, these are young 20th-century urban sophisticates, steeped in classical music. They don't want to be spooked by ancestral spirits weeping and wailing over the dead. The Craigs were Gael of the Gael in Donegal, but when they moved to Derry in the late 19th century they underwent a complete transformation to become prosperous English-speaking bourgeois. They kept that up when they moved to Dublin. As a child, I only knew the classical music side of them, not what went before. Each generation takes secrets to the grave. I believe our parents come through a door which they then shut behind them, and we never get to see what was on the other side of that door.
Great darned stuff. Very sad.
Yes, it is sad. And I have a pang of regret myself that, when my mother told me the story as a boy, I did not take it seriously.
@@dublindialect3168 well, we must excuse ourselves our childhoods, still I totally can relate, wish I took more advantage of my Gramps.
Cheers