Respect for the Unseen

Stories with the Respect for the Unseen theme:

• The O’Neill Banshee Aug 13, 2025

  

  There are banshees who howl like broken weather and banshees who keen like a thread drawn through cloth. The O’Neills knew theirs by the latter sound—a soft lament that ran under the wind like a river under ice.

  On the night the old lord took to his bed, a milk-grey mist wandered up from the fields and a hawthorn at the gate grew suddenly white with bloom though it was not spring. The keen began just before the lamps were lit: three notes and a fall, three notes and a fall, as if someone were teaching sorrow to count.

• The Púca of Ballynure Aug 13, 2025

  

  The púca comes after harvest when the nights edge earlier and the moon looks large enough to pluck. It is not wicked, exactly, but it is unpredictable as a foal and twice as quick. In Ballynure, where lanes fold between hedges like tucked blankets, everyone has a púca story.

  There was the miller, Seán Mór, who found a fine black horse outside his door one Michaelmas. It tossed its head, and Seán—who trusted horses more than men—swung up without asking. At once the horse became spring and shadow. It carried him over hedges as neatly as if the world were a book and the púca turned pages. They leapt the river in a single clean brush; they ran along the ridge of a stone wall without knocking one cap from its lichens. Seán laughed until tears washed the flour from his beard.