banshees

Further to that dream thing.

Sometime around 1993, I sat down with my six year-old daughter to watch a Disney movie on videotape that I was sure I'd never seen before. It was called Darby O'Gill and the Little People, made in 1959, and all I really knew about it was the fact it had leprechauns and a pre-007 Sean Connery in it. As I said, even though it had been in release several times -- as Disney movies often were -- and probably even anthologized on Walt's TV show, I was convinced this viewing with my daughter was a green as the Disney studio fantasy of the Emerald Isle.

I sat and watched with my customary mix -- for adult supervision purposes -- of attention and distraction, probably with a magazine or newspaper on my lap, roused intermittently to full attention by one of my daughter's endless stream of questions. So while there's much of Darby O'Gill I didn't see, I did look up long enough catch the banshee -- as they called it in the movie -- flying up to the window.

Holy shit, I thought.


That's it. That's the image. This is where it came from.


See, ever since childhood I'd been plagued not so much by a recurring nightmare as a recurring image: something ghostly -- trailing tatters, with snarled white hair and a shrivelled screaming face --  flying toward my bedroom window, me struggling to get the shutter closed before the damned thing got in and got me. Soon as the terrible face filled the window, I'd wake up. Bejeezus scared.

I must have had that damned dream twenty times, and now I knew where it came from. I had seen Darby O'Gill and the Little People and nothing remained of it in my conscious memory.

My unconscious memory was another matter. It had absorbed that movie -- or at least that image from it -- as a potent, primally effective nightmare fodder. Absorbed it, stored and, every once in a while, as anxiety and nocturnal turbulence demanded, deployed it to scare the poop out of me. And there it was, over thirty years later, on my basement TV screen.

I wish I could say that ended it, that I'd never seen the banshee in the window again. But I did. More than once. But in different form. Might not be a window, and it might not be the same tattered shrieker, but the drill was identical: a frightening face rushing toward a window or mirror, me desperate to escape before it reached me. And then I wake up. Still do. Never fails.

And it's funny. It didn't scare my kid one bit.