The wailing woman of Irish tradition whose cry arrives before a death in certain families.
Documented
The fairy mound's herald
The bean sídhe, woman of the sídhe mounds, is attested in Irish texts and later folklore collections from the fourteenth century onward, attached to particular old families whose deaths she announces by keening.
Assessment: Documented in manuscript and collection. The families kept lists of who she cried for.
Stories
The comb and the washerwoman
The stories: find her comb on the ground and leave it, or be claimed. By the ford she becomes the washer at the water, rinsing the grave-clothes of the about-to-die.
Assessment: A folklore of anticipation: grief arriving early, dressed in grey.
Interesting claims
A funeral singer made supernatural
The claim: the banshee preserves the memory of the professional keening women who led ritual lament, a role the church fought for centuries and pushed out of the graveyard and into legend.
Assessment: The suppression of keening women is documented history. That suppression seeded the legend is a strong reading, not a proven one.
Sources and further reading
Irish manuscript attestations of the bean sídhe
Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825)
Ó Crualaoich on the keening tradition
Church records on the suppression of keening women
Worth asking
When the church banned the women who sang at funerals, the singing continued in a ghost. What does your culture do with its banned jobs?