As a little girl in 1950s Belfast, I grew up surrounded by small, narrow cobbled streets and little rows of houses.  There were high walls enclosing tiny paved backyards, leading onto dark alleyways.  Those walls of uneven, whitewashed bricks cast many shadows in the glow of the moon or the gas street lights.  Like every other child in the world, I delighted in being terrified; I believed the stories of ghosts, headless horsemen and the wailing banshee.

Now the word banshee comes from the Gaelic, “Ban na Sidhe” roughly translated as “Woman of the Fairy Fort.”  Her cries, according to legend, or at any rate,  my granny, signified a death, the passing of a soul from this life to another.  Our district was full of banshees, it seemed to me at the age of eight.  I mean, you would lay your head on the pillow, after saying lengthy prayers to protect your loved ones from ghosts and such, and the wailing would begin.

Terrible yowls, howls and screams would rend the night, cutting through the gentle murmur of adult conversation downstairs.  Sometimes the banshees’ cries were punctuated by the sound of a heavy object hitting a wall, and the wails would subside for a little while.  Obviously, the headless horseman had arrived and had thrown his head at the fairy women.  I would lie in bed, afraid to look out of the window, for fear of what horrors I might glimpse.   I would be suffocating myself with blankets over my head, yet still straining my ears for those unearthly calls in that torturous manner of poking a tongue into an aching tooth.  Sleep always captured me before I died of fright or yelled for my mother to save me.

It took a long while and a lot of adult reassurance for me to accept the fact that we had quite a large cat population in the neighborhood.  My banshees were a Cat’s Convention,  held nightly on those backyard walls.  The heavy object I heard were irate neighbors throwing whatever came to hand at the vocal felines.

But that ghost who lived in the lane was not so easily dispensed with.   No,  indeed, because he had his origins in truth.  Some poor man had died one night in that back alley, about 50 years before I learned of his fate.  Children never, ever went down there after dark, but of course, there were show offs, usually boys, who told how they had seen him.  As we more cowardly mortals huddled around in delicious terror, glancing over our collective shoulders, they would give us a graphically scary report.  They told how he had lunged at them, waving ghostly arms to enclose them in a clammy embrace and carry them off to hell, wearing nothing but a sheet and an evil grin.  That alley was a great short cut, but even as an adult, I avoided it after dark, unless accompanied by a braver and bigger soul.

My mother used to tell me there were no ghosts; if somebody was in heaven, they would be too happy there to come back to earth.  If they were in hell, well, the devil wouldn’t allow them out of the place.  Despite the reasonable sense of this belief, I remain unconvinced.  But then, I remain a true Celt.  Which is another whole lot of stories.