What happened
Bridget Cleary, née Boland, was 26, a skilled dressmaker and milliner, and lived with her husband, the cooper Michael Cleary, in a new labourer’s cottage at Ballyvadlea in County Tipperary. In early March 1895, after a walk delivering eggs to Kylenagranagh, near a ringfort held to be a fairy dwelling, she fell ill – most likely with bronchitis or pneumonia. When the doctor’s medicine did not help, her husband and relatives turned to a local herbalist, Jack Dunne, who declared that the woman in the bed was not Bridget but a changeling left by the fairies. For several days the family forced her to drink herbs boiled in milk, held her over the fire and demanded to know whether she was Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary. On the evening of 15 March Michael doused his wife in paraffin and set her alight, then buried her body in a shallow grave. He said the real Bridget would ride out of the fort on a grey horse. The Royal Irish Constabulary found the body on 22 March. At Clonmel Michael was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years’ penal servitude; released in 1910, he emigrated to Canada. For years afterwards children in Tipperary chanted: “Are you a witch, or are you a fairy, or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?”
Witnesses
Neighbours and relatives who testified before the magistrates at Clonmel and at the July 1895 assizes; extensive coverage in the Irish and British press of 1895.
Explanations and hypotheses
There is nothing supernatural here: it was a killing, judged by the court to be manslaughter, committed in a world where belief in fairy abduction was still alive. The historian and folklorist Angela Bourke, in “The Burning of Bridget Cleary,” showed how the changeling story could serve as a language for tensions in the marriage of a childless, independent woman and a jealous husband. The case broke during the debate over Irish Home Rule – its opponents presented it as proof of Irish “superstition,” which amplified the coverage. Belief in changelings was nevertheless still being recorded in Ireland well into the twentieth century.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (Pimlico, 1999)
- Literature and Medicine (Project MUSE) – recenzja: Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary
- Atlas Obscura – The Fairy-Wife Murder: Bridget Cleary
More: Wikipedia (en)