>>1071Whoops late reply. Also LOVE that picture, it makes my shiver. Here are some things I found creepy as a child:
∙ The banshee cries before someone dies. If you hear one, it means someone close to you is going to die soon but you have no indication of who or when or even how.
∙ The person about to die is the only one who can't hear her. So if everyone in the house is like "What's that weird noise?" and you can't hear it, it's bad news for you.
∙ It's supposed to be a comforting sound, like someone crying at a funeral but is unintentionally creepy.
∙ Banshees drop things like combs, hair accessories and even fingernails. If you pick one up and bring it home, she'll come looking for it. My friends used to tell me that they knew people who did that and she'd come to their house every night and tap on the window with her fingernails or scratch at the door until she got her item back or it was destroyed in the fire.
∙ Banshees will cry outside the homes of the families of soldiers or fishermen. So if the family woke in the middle of the night to hear crying, they knew that their husband/father/son died at war or at sea.
∙ She punishes people who try to impersonate or follow her.
∙ Apparently she also wanders around graveyards and if things go missing, it's a sign that she was there and took something.
And then there are changelings:
∙ Fairies replace newborn babies with elderly fairies who are about to die.
∙ The only way to get rid of a changeling is to threaten to throw it in the fire and they leap out of the chimney (scary to think that people actually did this to their sick children/wives and if they weren't killed, they were severely injured).
∙ Changelings look like children but are actually adults so people have accidentally walked in on them playing instruments or they'll ask men for cigarettes or a glass of whiskey in perfect english.
∙ There's a story about a fairy woman who visits a human woman and admits that their children were switched and asks for her fairy child back, suggesting that not even fairy women are on-board with the practice which is sad af.
∙ Basically anyone who had a sudden change or got sick rapidly was accused of being a changeling.
