Blindboy Boatclub is an Irish artist and author, who has a weekly podcast on which he talks about pretty much whatever he thinks is interesting. Sometimes the topic is Irish folklore.
On a recent edition of the Blindboy Podcast, he recounted an eerie experience of being out for a walk and hearing a disturbing, shrill scream that he initially took for a child being tortured. He followed the noise and eventually found he had come into contact with a Banshee, or as he later figured out after doing additional research, a female fox with a cough. (No spoiler there, that's the actual title of the episode: "I Thought I Heard the Banshee But It Was a Fox With a Cough.")
What struck me most about this story wasn’t the twist ending, amusing as it was, but the folkloric richness Blindboy unpacked along the way. As he explained the origins and traditions surrounding the banshee, I was reminded of my own encounter with another famous weeping woman of folklore: La Llorona. While these spirits hail from different cultures -- Ireland and Spanish-speaking countries, respectively -- they bear a striking resemblance in form and function. Both are ghostly women linked to death, grief, and deep, unresolved sorrow. Both are known more by their behavior than by individual names or personalities. And in both traditions, the figure is as much a cautionary tale as she is a supernatural presence.
My own La Llorona encounter can be found here.
And as Blindboy explains on his podcast the history of the Banshee, it seemed to me that it sounds to be a very similar type of spirit in traditional folklore -- though the Banshee is not one specific woman but any of a number of women who could be turned into Banshees after death and left to haunt a particular location. He tells one tale, of a similar nature to the classic La Llorona, in which a woman who was having an affair with a bishop was murdered by him and she became a Banshee who haunts the bridge by the castle where he lived. (Compare the classic La Llorona story where she either married or had an affair with a wealthy man who then abandoned her and her children. Usually her murder of her children is part of the story but the setup for what put her on the path is similar.)
The parallels are fascinating: both tales involve women who were destroyed -- whether by their own actions or by betrayal-- and who return to weep, not just as symbols of personal grief, but as omens for others. Both are deeply entwined with themes of shame, injustice, and a society’s judgment on women who transgress certain boundaries, whether that’s taking a lover, losing children, or speaking out against the powerful.
There’s something tidy and terrifying about the way a keener becomes a banshee. One minute she’s the town’s designated mourner, letting folks grieve without having to make too much noise themselves. Next thing you know, she’s a walking omen, a shrieking specter nobody wants to see. She stops being a woman doing a job and turns into the job itself: stripped of choice, swallowed by the role. And it’s not hard to see how that shift might come out of real-life discomfort: the shame of failing your neighbors when it’s your turn to cry, or the quiet punishment society doles out to women who emote too freely in public.
Blindboy’s tale of a Banshee turned fox is funny on its surface, but the stories it touches on go far deeper. They show how much folklore functions as a mirror -- reflecting not just our fears of death, but our deeper concerns about guilt, injustice, gender roles, and the proper handling of grief. Whether it’s a ghost crying on a riverbank in Mexico or a wailing spirit hovering by an Irish window, these figures endure because they express something beyond language: the keening sound of loss, the echo of things unresolved, the sorrow that waits just outside the door.
And sometimes, of course, it’s just a fox with a cough.
