BENSHI

or Banshee, an Irish word meaning 'fairy's wife,* and applied to a fay or elf said to attadi itself to a particular family, and to appear before the death of any of its members. It was considered rather an aristocratic distinction for any family to have a banshee attached to it, and in the last century every great family in Ireland boasted of that distinction. The Irish banshee is said always to have appeared as a woman, sometimes old and hideous, but sometimes also young and even handsome. Similar superstitions were at one time current with regard to different families in England and Scotland, sometimes a dove being the omen of death, sometime the wailing as of a woman in distre , and so on.