One of the last banshees in the county, the Omagh Banshee, yesterday announced her retirement from general ghouling and wailing in the Omagh area after weeks, if not months, of unsuccessful spooking at night. The ‘woman of the fairymounds’ had serviced the greater West Tyrone area since the Battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598 before concentrating on the county’s capital after the Home Rule Bill of 1886. Recently, though, she had been making sporadic appearances as rumours persisted of ill-health and deteriorating mental capacities.

“The time has come to hang up the comb,” the Omagh Banshee (known as the Oul Hoor in Omagh) told us on a frequency picked up on an old CB. “People are living longer and I’m sitting there whiling away the time hoping for an illness or two to savage a family. There bes days when I just take a chance and yap away outside a house in the hope that by sheer luck someone croaks it. Taking those chances were wrong and I’m just another failed run-of-the-mill mythological Irish spirit”

The Oul Hoor, depressed, yesterday

The Oul Hoor has been suffering greatly from arthritis because of the recent wet summers, making her existence a miserable all-year round affair now.

“It’s just not worth it. My once frightening keen is now like a kettle whistling. The young’uns just fire bottles and shoes at me as they see all the horror movies they want now. I’m just a joke to them. I blame the parents. In their day all I had to do was leave a comb lying about and they’d have nightmares for months. The only way to frighten youngsters now is to steal their computer games or iPhones. I might be a maggot-ridden fictional miserable old woman, but I’m not a thief.”

The Oul Hoor plans to spend her retirement playing bowls and hanging out with Finn McCool, Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Cuchulainn.