The Burning of Bridget Cleary — A True Story  —by Míchealín Daugherty In 1895, 26-year-old Bridget Cleary, who had caught cold and had a severe headache, took to her bed where she lived with her husband and her father in a cottage in rural Tipperary. A local doctor concluded that she had bronchitis. Her husband (Michael Cleary) however, goaded by a so-called "faerie doctor", believed something different.1 What he actually believed, as noted in newspapers of the time, tends to fluctuate between thinking she was a witch or thinking she had been kidnapped by faeries who had left a changeling in her place. In any case, he thought she was possessed.2 Convinced that a doctor's medicine was not curing her, he again took the advice of the faerie doctor and obtained herbs to banish the faeries and bring back his real wife. Then Michael Cleary, aided by several relatives, forced Bridget to swallow herbs that had been boiled in "new" milk (the first milk a cow produces after calving) and, while holding her over the kitchen fire, demanded that she confirm she was indeed Bridget Cleary. She was also was subjected to all sorts of other torture purportedly to banish the faeries, including having male urine thrown on her and having the group twisting her body to make the faeries leave it. Despite the abuse, Bridget had recovered sufficiently the next night after the herbal treatment to dress and sit in the kitchen and talk with a large group of relatives and neighbours. But her husband wasn't satisfied, and after not receiving the answers and compliance he expected from her, he flew into a rage and stripped her of her clothing, knocked her to the floor, covered her in paraffin oil and allowed her to burn to death while eight relatives — six men and two women — watched. Some of them remonstrated with the husband, who insisted that it was not his wife who was burning but a witch, whom he confidently expected to disappear up the chimney. When it became known that Bridget had 'gone missing', the relatives corroborated the husband's story, which was that Bridget had simply walked out the door and 'gone to the faeries.' Michael Cleary was seen for several nights at a local faerie mound, Kylenagranagh, weeping and supposedly waiting for Bridget to come back.3,4 However, on March 22, the police found Bridget Cleary's badly burned body buried eighteen inches under the ground in a swampy field a quarter of a mile from the Cleary cottage. Michael, Bridget's father, aunt and four cousins were arrested. Jack Dunne, the faerie doctor, would also later be arrested. NOTE: The book The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke discusses Irish folklore, Bridget's ordeal, and covers the trial at which relatives and the faerie doctor testified. This book can be purchased from Amazon. It is one of those kinds of books that you can't put down until you've finished it. Copyright © 2002 Ireland's OWN. Footnotes: 1 Faerie doctors were humans purportedly endowed with powers of divination and healing from the faeries. 2 According to the kind of stories often told at firesides and wakes, certain illnesses were supposed to be the work of the faeries, who could abduct a healthy young person and leave a sickly changeling instead: herbal medicines and ordeals by fire were both said to be ways of banishing such a changeling. 3 Irish faerie legends say that a husband could get his wife back from the faeries if he ventured out to a fairy gathering place on a particular night and cut the cords tying his wife to a white horse there. 4 A faerie ring (also called a ráth, rusheen or síd) is a mound of earth, often surrounded by rings of earth (ringforts or faerie forts) constructed in ancient times, most likely as dwellings or possibly for ceremonial purposes. Even to this day, they are regarded with superstition and many farmers will not plough over them.    Page last updated 10 June 2006 Website Design and Myths & Magic logo by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2006 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.