Banshee

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**Banshees** are women who have the supernatural power to sense and predict when someone is about to die. As a result, they are considered harbingers of death and are often referred to as the "Wailing Women" due to the fact that they unconsciously scream to announce when someone has died, usually those killed by supernatural forces, though their scream can also be used for other purposes...

These women predict death through premonitions, which can be auditory, visual, or both, depending on the power level of the Banshee in question. When a Banshee has a premonition, the sounds and sights they perceive indicate various factors that will either lead to or directly cause the death of someone in their vicinity, which are usually people harmed by the supernatural or someone the Banshee knows.

However, these premonitions are not always literal and can require a certain amount of interpretation. Additionally, since the future is always in flux, a death that a Banshee has predicted may not come to pass if the events or cause of the death can be averted using the knowledge gained from the Banshee's premonition. This can be a very useful power for Banshees who are members of a pack, such as Lydia Martin, as it gives them a team of people to help them prevent the foretold deaths.

Known Banshees in the series include Lydia Martin, Lorraine Martin, and Meredith Walker, though it has been implied that there have been other Banshees in Beacon Hills as well, such as the one Sheriff Stilinski met several years prior to the start of the series who predicted the death of his wife, Claudia Stilinski. Another Banshee, Lenore, has been revealed to live in the "ghost town' of Canaan, a town whose entire population were captured by the Ghost Riders of the Wild Hunt in the mid-late 1980s; the trauma of watching her fellow citizens be taken caused her to unleash her powers in the form of a Banshee aura, permeating the town and giving her unprecedented levels of control over everything in its borders, to the point where she even created a ghostly manifestation of her dead son through whom she can use her powers.

However, Lydia has been referred to as an exceptionally powerful Banshee, and as such, she is the one whose powers have been explored the most in the series. Her Banshee nature was triggered after she was bitten by then-Alpha Werewolf Peter Hale in the Season 1 episode *Formality*, which activated her supernatural powers; it has been implied that these powers would not have manifested until after she turned eighteen, if at all, had she not been bitten at that time. Once Lydia recovered from the attack, she began going into fugue states during which she would walk or drive to the location of a recently deceased body, such as the Darach sacrifices and Deadpool murder victims she found in Season 3 and Season 4, respectively. This can also extend to the locations where a person who is about to die may be as well, as she was unconsciously drawn to Derek Hale's loft during the Deadpool so she could wail for his impending death, though it ultimately did not permanently come to pass.

In Season 3, Lydia was finally identified as a Banshee by Jennifer Blake, who seemed very shocked by this discovery. Because Lydia now knows what she is, she has had an easier time learning to understand and interpret the premonitions she receives, especially after she met fellow Banshee Meredith Walker, who has helped her learn to use aspects of her powers that she did not know she had, such as the ability to use her voice as a weapon. As she has learned more about her powers, she has become more powerful as well, with her premonitions evolving from being purely auditory to both auditory and visual. She has also gained a slight degree of control over her fugue states, where she can remain at least somewhat consciously aware of what she's doing as she follows her instincts to where the body is, whereas in the past, she would simply go into a full trance, find a body, and then become aware of where she was while having no idea why or how she got there.