bibe

plural bibes

1. IrelandNewfoundlandA type of banshee whose cry indicates someone's impending death.

   Sophie's face grew serious. "Not the bibe. She comes when we dies."

   2006, Coralie Hughes Jensen, Lety's Gift

   3 more examples

   "[…] But when Jack lies on his low death-bed, with the clammy dews standing on his brow, the moaning bibe combing her yellow locks, and singing the death-wail at his casement, then will this, and all poor Delaney's other actions, appear to his darkening eye in their true colours."

   1822, “All Hallow Eve in Ireland”, in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, volume IX, number XV, page 257

   Down there where the Bibe had her hole out of which she would howl to the rising moon and to the fairy peoples that would be peeping out at the new moon only to withdraw their small heads as they heard the cry of the Bibe.

   1952, Shaw Desmond, Love by the Dark Water, page 11

   He never believed in the bibe although the people were always talking of her.

   1992, William Nolan, Thomas P. Power, Waterford history & Society, page 628