ats 
1888. ] 263 [ Mooney. 
‘perhaps the person whom that cry lamented is not one of us, or it may 
be that he is far away.’ In a fortnight after they received intelligence 
from London that an uncle of theirs, a physician, had died there on the 
very night they had heard the Banshee cry. They were MacCarthys by 
the father’s side and O’Sullivans by the mother’s.’’ 
The spirits of the dead ar sometimes allowd to revisit the earth to 
join in the lamentations over the corpse of one of the family. On the 
river Flesk in Kerry is a high clif overhanging the water and taking 
its name from a young girl called Reinarth Bresnahan. Years ago she 
went out one day to look for some cows which had strayd into the 
mountains. She never returnd, but when last seen alive she was 
standing on the top of this clif and may have fallen into the water 
below. At each successiv funeral in the family from the time of her 
disappearance she would be seen to enter the room, appearing in dres 
and features just as she did on the day she left the houg for the last 
time, and would join in the caoine over the corpse. The others could 
see her, but wer afraid to speak to her. Once she was heard crying 
outside the hous, and soon after came the news that one of the family 
had died in America. The last of the Bresnahans died about fifteen 
years ago, when she came once more to join in the caoine and then 
disappeard forever. 
The belief that sickness and death ar due to the evil influence of spirits 
is common to all savage races as wel as to the uneducated classes 
among civilized nations. In Ireland, where the fairy mythology reachd 
a high development, this belief is carried stil further, and it is thought 
in many cases that the sickness or death is only apparent, the supposed 
invalid or corpse being merely a substitute left by the fairies instead of 
the real person, whom they hav carried away.* Altho seeming to 
lead a joyous existence, dancing by moonlight in the green fort to the 
sound of soft music, or holding high revel in their underground pal- 
aces, the fairies ar constantly haunted by the fear of eternal condemna- 
tion at the last judgment. To avert this doom they seek to ally them- 
selvs with the mortal race, and ar constantly on the watch to carry off 
‘men, women and children to serv as husbands, wives or nurses in the 
fairy court. The prisoner, however, must be releasd at the end of a cer- 
tain period, unless he should be so unwise as to taste of the fairy food 
in the meantime, in which event he becomes dead to his friends and can 
never return. Exactly the same belief is held by the Dakota Indians, as 
appears from ‘‘A Yankton Legend,’’ one of the collection of Siouan 
myths and stories by J. Owen Dorsey, which will appear in the forth- 
coming Volume vi of Contributions to North American Ethnology. The 
people tel many stories of persons who wer thus carried off by the fairies, 
but found means to warn their friends to leav food where they could get 
* For a more extended notice of the fairy influence in sickness, see the author’s paper 
on ‘‘The Medical Mythology of Ireland,” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical 
Society, xxiv, 133-166, Philadelphia, 1887. 
PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXV. 128, 2H. PRINTED DEC. 27, 1888. 
