Bridget Cleary

Disclaimer

This is NOT a page about Wiccans or neo-pagans, and I do not advocate the belief that Wiccans are Satan-worshippers and/or baby-killers. I am well aware that they are not. This is a starting point for historical research into the great witch craze of 1100-1700 AD. And please, don't ask me for spells.

Bridget Cleary

In 1894 in Clonmel, County Tipperary in Ireland, Bridget Cleary, the Faerie Witch of Clonmel, was burned to death.

An apparently mentally ill Michael Cleary began to suspect in March of 1894 that something was amiss with his 26-year-old wife. Along with appearing two inches taller, Bridget seemed more refined. Michael Cleary, whose mother had acknowledged going off with faeries, suspected foul play by the faeries.

Michael confronted Bridget and accused her of being a changeling. She denied it, and with the help of Mary Kennedy (her aunt), John Dunne (a neighbour), James, Michael, and Patrick Kennedy (three of her cousins), Patrick Boland (her father), and William Ahearne (a neighbour), Michael Cleary began to torture Bridget.

Residents of Clonmel noticed that Bridget hadn't been seen for a while, and some decided to pay a visit. They managed to cajole Micahel Cleary into letting them in. They were aghast to see Bridget, clad only in nightclothes, held spread-eagled on the bed while Michael tried to coerce her into drinking a mixture of herbs and milk. Michael Cleary kept asking Bridget, "Are you Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God?" Although Bridget cried out in the affirmative, Michael did not believe her. As he held the mixture (probably a faerie antidote), he said, "Take it, you witch."

Then Bridget was held over the kitchen fire. In faerie lore, "setting fire to someone is considered a foolprrof way to espose changelings and induce the fairy parents to return the stolen human." Bridget screamed, in vain, for help, insisting she was not a faerie changeling. Everyone but Michael Cleary believed her.

The next day, Michael Cleary approached a neighbour, asking to borrow a revolver. He said that Bridget with with the faeries at a faerie fort, Kylegranaugh Hill, and that he was going to "have it out with them." He also said "Bridget would ride up to the house at midnight on a big gray horse, bound with fairy ropes, which had to be cut before she could return as a mortal." The neighbour said he had no revolver, but later saw Michail Cleary heading for Kylegranaugh Hill wielding a large knife.

That night, Johanna Burke, a neighbour, visited the Cleary house and saw Bridget sitting by the fire, talking to her husband, her father, and Johanna's brother Patrick. Micahel Cleary threw Bridget to the floor and made her drink tea and eat bread and jam. (In faerie lore, faeries don't have to eat mortal food.) He tore off her clothes, grabbed a hot brand from the fire, and held it to her mouth. He refused to let anyone leave until his real wife came back. Then he poured lamp oil on Bridget and set her on fire.

Patrick Burke described what happened:

She lay writhing and burning in the hearth, and the house was full of smoke and smell...she turned to me and screamed out, "Oh Han, Han".... When I came down Bridget was still lying on the hearth, smoldering and dead. Her legs were blackened and contracted with the fire.... Michale (sic) Cleary screamed out, "She is burning now, but God knows I did not mean to do it. I may thank Jack Dunne for all of it."

Over a two-week trial, Michael Cleary, Patrick Boland, the Kennedies, Dennis Ganey (an herb doctor), William Ahearne, and John Dunne were found guilty of manslaughter. Michael Cleary received the harshest sentence of twenty years of hard labour. But even as he was sentenced, he believed the faeries had "stolen his wife and left a changeling witch in her place" (Guiley 1989 120, 121).

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Bridget Cleary is copyrighted 1997-1998 to Shantell Powell.