Episode 8- Changeling- The death of Bridget Cleary- 1895

In March of 1895, in a quiet corner of rural Tipperary, a young woman named Bridget Cleary vanished from the world of the living and stepped—at least in the minds of her neighbours—into something far stranger. Her death would become one of Ireland’s most haunting and contested stories, a collision of folklore, fear, and a society caught between old beliefs and a modernising world.
This episode unravels the final days of Bridget Cleary, the so‑called “last witch burned in Ireland,” and asks what really happened in that small cottage near Ballyvadlea. It’s a story of superstition and control, of a community under pressure, and of a woman whose life—and death—still echoes through Irish history.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Mother Undergaslight. You can late Victorian Air Island's most gruesome crimes. Your host is Dunmortal.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

There is a children's skipping room. Still remembered in parts of Tipperary, it goes like this Are you a witch? Or are you a fairy? Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary? Children sang it in schoolyards in the years after eighteen ninety five. They sang it for generations. They may be singing it still. The woman at the centre of that rhyme was twenty six years old. She was a dressmaker. She kept chickens, and sold their eggs to her neighbours. She owned a singer sewing machine, state of the art at the time. She had a sharp mind, an independent spirit and a husband, who had decided in the second week of march eighteen ninety five, that she was no longer his wife, that she had been stolen by the fairies, that the woman lying sick in their bed was a changeling, a fairy imposter left in Bridget Cleary's place, and that the only way to get his wife back was to burn the changeling out. On the night of Friday the fifteenth of march eighteen ninety-five, in a one-story labourer's cottage in the townland of Ballywood Lee, County Tipperary, Michael Cleary stripped his wife to her chemise, doused her in lamp oil, and set her on fire.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

He did this in front of witnesses.

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My name is Don Mortell. This is murder under gaslight, drew stories of crime and justice from the Victorian age. Tonight's case is unlike any we have covered before. It is not a story of greed or political fury or cold ambition. It is a story about belief, about what happens when ancient folklore collides with a modern woman who refused to fit the shape her world had made for her. It is a story about domestic violence, and about the way that violence can disguise itself in a language of tradition and superstition. It is a story about a woman the British press would call Ireland's Last Witch, and about why that label tells us far more about the men who applied it than it does about Bridget Cleary. And it is a story about a children's skipping rhyme, and the question of why we turn the names of murdered women into songs. Bridget Cleary, born Bridget Boland, came into the world on the nineteenth of february eighteen sixty nine in Ballywood Lee, County Tipperary, in the shadow of the mountain of Sleevenamon. She was, by all contemporary accounts, an unusual woman for her time and place. She was beautiful. She was literate. She was in the vocabulary of the late nineteenth century, what some were beginning to call a new woman. Independent, self-sufficient, not entirely willing to be defined by the expectations of rural Catholic Ireland. She worked as a dressmaker and milliner. She kept her own flock of hens and sold their eggs to the neighbours. She had, in a community where most women had very little of their own, a measure of economic independence. She married Michael Cleary on the sixth of August 1887 in the Roman Catholic Church in Drangon. They had met in Clonmell, where Michael worked as a cooper, a skilled barrel maker, a tradesman with a steady income. They were, by the standards of Bally Vidley, a relatively prosperous couple. Their cottage was the best house in the village, with slate roofs and glass windows. It stood on a slight rise above the road. It also stood on the site of a fairy ringfort. Now this is not a trivial detail. In rural Ireland in 1895, the landscape was understood through layers of meaning that overlapped the practical and the supernatural. The Wraths, the ancient circular earthworks scattered across the Irish countryside, were understood in folklore to be the habitations of the Cedar, the fairy people. To build on or near such a site was considered deeply unwise. To live in a house built on a ring fort was to caught attention from the other world. Bridget Cleary had grown up in this landscape. She knew its law as well as anyone. Indeed, she was said to be personally fascinated by the fairy traditions of the area. She sometimes walked to Kylanagrana Hill, the site of a nearby ring fort which the local community considered particularly dangerous ground. Whether this was fascination was genuine belief or the curious interest of a modern minded woman in the old stories of her people, we cannot know. What we know is that it was noticed, and that when she fell ill in early March of eighteen ninety five, it would be used against her. On Monday, the fourth of march eighteen ninety five, Bridget Cleary went out into the cold to deliver eggs. It was a bitterly cold morning. February of that year had been the coldest on record in the United Kingdom. Snow had fallen the previous day. She walked two or three miles to deliver eggs to her father's cousin, Jack Dunn, near Kylinagraner Hill. She waited for a considerable time. He did not come. She walked home in the cold. That night she could not get warm. The following day she was in bed complaining of a raging pain in her head. She had, her doctor would later determine, bronchitis, possibly complicated by nervous exhaustion. It was serious, but it was treatable. She was twenty six years old and had been, until days before, in robust good health. Michael Cleary called the doctor. He called the priests to administer last rites. He called family members to attend his wife. He was, by all initial accounts, a worried husband doing the right things.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

And then Jack Dunn arrived.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

John Dunn, known as Jack, was a man of about fifty, a neighbour and local storyteller, what the Irish tradition called a shanky, a keeper of teller of old stories, a repository of folklore and community memory. He was a respected figure, and when he came to the Cleary Cottage and looked at the sick woman in the bed, he told Michael Cleary what he saw.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

He said it is not your wife, is there? Those words those five words set in motion everything that followed.

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To understand why those words had the power they did, you need to understand the changeling tradition. In Irish fairy law, the seed were known to steal away human beings, particularly women, particularly young mothers, particularly those considered exceptional in some way, and to replace them with a glamorant substitute, the changeling. A fairy being in human form, left to wither and die while the real person was held in the fairy realm. The signs that someone had been taken and replaced were well established in the oral tradition. The person would seem subtly different, perhaps taller, or thinner than remembered, or somehow changed in manner or temperament. They may refuse food, they might be less responsive than usual. They might behave in ways that seemed to those who loved them out of character. A woman who was sick and feverish, who lay in bed when she was normally active, who did not respond to her husband's voice with her usual energy, such a woman might in this interpretive framework be read as a changeling. Michael Cleary, according to later testimony, had already begun to harbour suspicions. He told people that the sick Bridget seemed somehow different to him. Two inches taller and too fine to be his wife. Whether this was the distorted perception of a frightened, sleepless man or something more deliberate, we cannot say with certainty. What we can say is that Jack Dunn's confirmation of his suspicions unlocked something dangerous in Michael Cleary. And Jack Dunn had a further suggestion. He told Michael to go and consult Dennis Gainey, the local fairy doctor. Dennis Gainey was a herbalist and practitioner of folk medicine. He never visited the Cleary Cottage in person. What he provided was a mixture of herbs to be boiled in new milk, the rich first milk from a cow after carving, and administered to the supposed changeling as a cure. The ritual was intended to drive the fairy out and restore the real woman. He also, it emerged, at trial, provided instructions, instructions that went considerably beyond herbal medicine. What followed over the next two days, Thursday the fourteenth and Friday the fifteenth of March, was a sequence of events so harrowing, so methodical in their escalation, that they defy easy comprehension. This was not a single moment of madness. It was a process, a ritual, carried out step by step with witnesses present inside a locked cottage. On the evening of Thursday the fourteenth of March, Mary Kennedy, Bridget's aunt, came to visit her sick niece. As she approached the cottage, she heard shouting. When she opened the door, she found Bridget pinned to the bed by six men. Michael Cleary was there. Jack Dunn was there. Three of Mary Kennedy's own sons, Patrick, James, and William Kennedy were there, and Bridget's own elderly father, Patrick Boland, was among those holding her down. Michael was standing over his wife with a saucepan of herbal liquid, forcing her to drink. He was asking her again and again, are you Bridget Boland, the wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God? She answered twice that she was. The third time she did not answer, or did not answer quickly enough. They lifted her bodily and carried her to the fireplace. They held her over the burning grate. Her chemise began to smoke. The burns on her forehead, her hip and her side would be visible on the body when it was eventually found. Someone witnesses disagree on who held a hot poker close to her mouth. They put her back in bed. They told one another she was a changeling. They told one another they were trying to save Bridget Cleary. Michael locked the cottage door and announced that no one would leave until midnight, the witching hour, lest the fairies return. What is perhaps most chilling about the testimony that would later emerge in court is the presence of so many people in that room, and the relative passivity of most of them. Relatives who heard Bridget screaming and crying, relatives who would later say that they were too frightened to intervene. Joanna Burke, a cousin of Michael's who had been nursing Bridget for days, later testified that she had begged him to stop. She was one of the few witnesses who comes out of the record with any credit. She also testified to something, said by Bridget herself in the days before the final attack. Bridget had whispered to her that Michael Cleary was making a fairy of her, and that he had tried to burn her once before three months earlier.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

Three months earlier. This was not the first time.

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The violence in that cottage had history that the community around Balliwood Lee had absorbed in silence. On Friday the fifteenth of March, a priest came to the house, Father Ryan. Bridget received Holy Communion. She was propped up on pillows, weak, answering in whispers. Michael watched. He later testified that watching her receive the sacrament only deepened his suspicion. He had apparently decided that the host would drive out the fairy, and when Bridget remained in her weakened state he concluded that the changeling was still present. That evening, neighbors, Patrick Tobin and Michael Smith, came to the cottage to settle a minor dispute over a shilling. They found Bridget sitting by the fire, dressed. They spoke with her briefly. She appeared weak, but coherent. They left. Within hours of their departure, Michael Cleary had made his final decision. He demanded that Bridget eat three pieces of bread and jam, naming her identity three times as he did. She ate two pieces and answered twice. When she did not answer the third time, he threw her to the floor. He knelt on her chest with his knee, and held her by the throat.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Is it down? Is it down? He forced the third piece of bread into her mouth with a hot stick from the fire.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

And then, with the remaining family members in the room crying and wanting to get out, and powerless or unwilling to stop him, he took a lamp.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

He threw the oil on her. He set her alight.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

Michael Cleary buried his wife in a shallow grave in a nearby field in the darkness of the night she died. He wrapped her in a sack. The grave was less than two feet deep. And then dressed in his best suit, he walked to Kylanagrana Hill. For three consecutive nights, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth of March, he kept vigil at the ring fort. He told anyone who would listen that the fairies had his wife, and that she would emerge from the fort riding on a grey horse. He would cut the ropes, tying her to the saddle, and she would come home to him. He was seen on the hillside. Neighbors watched him. He was carrying a large table knife. He had asked one neighbour to lend him a revolver to cut the bridle, and had been refused. He waited, night after night in the cold March wind, on a hillside above Balivid Lee, waiting for a woman who was in a grave, less than two miles away. By the sixteenth of March, the Royal Irish Constabulary were already moving. Rumours had spread through the community immediately. Within days nine people had been arrested in connection with Bridget's disappearance, including Michael Cleary himself. On the 22nd of March 1895, seven days after Bridget's death, her burns and partially buried body were found by police searching the fields around Bally Vidli. A coroner's inquest was held the following day. The jury returned a verdict of death by burning. The coroner, examining Bridget's remains, made a remark that tells you everything about the way the outside world would interpret this case. He said that among Hottentots, one would not expect to hear of such an occurrence. The word he chose, Hottentots, was a colonial slur for South African people, used by Victorian commentators to denote absolute savagery. The coroner of County Tipperary had decided that what happened in Ballyverdley was so barbaric as to place it beyond the category of civilized humanity. What he did not ask, what almost no one in official Ireland was asking, was what Bridget Cleary herself had endured for days, for weeks. For if her whispered testimony to Joanna Burke is correct, months. The murder of Bridget Cleary became an international sensation within days. It was reported in the Times of London, the New York Herald, the Freeman's Journal, and papers in Australia and Mexico. Between July and December of 1895 alone, over 60 reports appeared in British, American and Irish newspapers. The headlines tell you a great deal about whose interests the coverage served. The Southern Echo of England on the 11th of July ran the headline Gross Ignorance Among the Irish Peasantry. The Anderson Intelligencer of South Carolina on the 10th of July ran the headline Darkest Ireland. The context for these headlines was not difficult to identify. In 1895, Ireland was in the middle of a prolonged debate about Home Rule. The question of whether Ireland should have its own parliament. The Liberal Party under William Gladstone had twice introduced Home Rule bills. The Lords had rejected the second attempt just two years before Bridget Cleary's death. The question of whether the Irish people were capable of self-governance was live and loudly contested in the British press and parliament. The murder of a woman by a man who believed she was a fairy changeling was for those opposed to home rule a gift. Here was proof, concrete, terrible, undeniable, that the Irish rural population was sunk in superstition and barbarism. How could such people be trusted to govern themselves? Irish nationalists, for their part, found themselves in a wretched position. They did not want to concede the propaganda point, and so the coverage in Nationalist Irish papers focused instead on the sensational details of the case. The fairy law, the exotic horror of it, rather than the systematic failure of a community to protect a woman who, by her own account, had been subjected to abuse for months. Nobody in either the British or the Irish press seemed to be particularly interested in Bridget Cleary as a person. She was a symbol, a propaganda point, a witch, a fairy wife. A skipping rhyme. She was twenty six years old. She had a singer sewing machine and a flock of hens, and a life she had been building, quietly and determinedly in the town of Ballyverdle. The trial of Michael Cleary and his co defendants began at the summer sizes in Clon Mell on the third of july eighteen ninety five. It lasted two days. Ten people in total were charged in connection with Bridget's death. Five Michael Cleary, Patrick Bolland, Mary Kennedy, James Kennedy and Patrick Kennedy were indicted for murder. The remaining defendants faced charges of wounding. One defendant, William Ahern, was discharged. The case against Dennis Ganey, the fairy doctor who provided the herbal prescription, was ultimately dropped. The court chose not to give credence to his calling by prosecuting it. The defence argument led by Sergeant Patrick J. Kelly was one of temporary delusion. That Michael Cleary genuinely believed his wife to be a changeling, and that he had no intention of murdering Bridget, because he did not believe the woman he burnt was Bridget. This was the defence of a man who said as his wife burned, she's not my wife. She's an old deceiver sent in place of my wife. As part of the trial, the jury was led to the outbuilding where Bridget's body was being held. They were given the opportunity to view it, to see the extent of her burns, to verify her identity. What they saw in that outbuilding convinced them by all accounts of the immensity of what had been done to her, and they then accepted the defense of delusion. The charge against Michael Cleary was reduced from murder to manslaughter. The jury deliberated for three hours and returned a guilty verdict on the lesser charge. The judge, Mr Justice O'Brien, passed sentence, and before he did, he said something worth preserving. He said this most extraordinary case demonstrated a degree of darkness in the mind, not just of one person, but of several. A moral darkness, even more. Religious darkness. Michael Cleary was sentenced to twenty years penal servitude. He served his sentence in Maryborough Prison, now Port Leash, and was released in 1910, having served fifteen years. Jack Dunn, whose words it is not your wife is there, had arguably set the entire tragedy in motion. Was convicted and sentenced to three years on the basis that the idea had originated with him. He returned to Ballividley after his release, and continued to work as a labourer in the area. Patrick Kennedy received five years as a burial accomplice. James and William Kennedy received eighteen months of hard labour each. Michael Kennedy received six months. Patrick Bolland, Bridget's elderly father who had been present, who had helped hold his daughter down, was released, the court accepting that he had been elderly and coerced by grief. Mary Kennedy, Bridget's aunt, was also discharged. The lightest sentences in the room went to those who had held Bridget Cleary over a fire, and watched her burn. On the night of the verdict, neighbours went to the Cleary Cottage in Ballyverdlee. They doused it in paraffin and turf, and set it alight. By morning, only the stone gable ends remained, blackened, standing in the dark, like sentinels. Whether this was an act of communal shame or an attempt to erase what had happened there or simply the action of people who wanted the place gone, we cannot know. What we know is that the community of Ballyverley destroyed the building in which one of their own had been murdered. Bridget Cleary's body was buried by the Royal Irish Constabulary, by lantern light, in Clonine Churchyard. There was no one else willing to help. Not a single person, the record states, male or female, clerical or lay would lend any assistance to give Christian burial to the body. The police buried her. Her grave was unmarked for over a century. Michael Cleary, released from Maryborough prison in nineteen ten, went first to Liverpool. By July of that year he was in Montreal, Canada. He vanished into a new world and was never heard of in Tipperary again. He followed with terrible symmetry the same routes across the Atlantic that famine emigrants had taken sixty years before. He disappeared. Modern scholars have continued to debate the real nature of what drove Michael Cleary. In 2006, researchers H. O'Connell and PG Doyle proposed that the murder may have resulted from Michael's developing a brief psychotic disorder, specifically what is known as capgrass delusion, in which a person becomes convinced that someone close to them has been replaced by an identical imposter. Under stress and without sleep, and in a community whose folk traditions offered a ready explanation for exactly such a conviction, the delusion may have metastasized into what they called a folie à plusieurs, a shared madness, drawn in by those around him who accepted his interpretation of events. This is a compassionate reading. It may even be the correct one, but there's another reading. Bridget's cousin, Joanna Burke, testified that Bridget herself had said weeks before her death, that Michael had tried to burn her three months earlier. If that testimony is true, and there is no reason to disbelieve it, then Michael Cleary had attempted to kill his wife before. The fairy delusion, whatever its genuine or constructed nature, provided cover for violence that predated it. Modern scholars of gender have noted something else. Bridget Cleary was, by any measure, an unusual woman for her time and place. She was independent, she was economically self-sufficient. She was said to have a sharp tongue, she did not conform to what was expected of a rural Catholic wife in County Tipperary in 1895, and the accusations levelled at her, that she was uncanny, that she was other, that she was not quite what she seemed, sit uncomfortably close to the accusations historically levelled at women who refused to fit the shapes their societies make for them. Whether we call it a fairy belief or capgrass delusion, or domestic violence with supernatural window dressing, the fact at the centre of this case is immovable. A woman was killed by her husband in front of witnesses, while the community around her found reasons not to intervene. The rhyme troubles me. More perhaps than it should. That in itself is not particularly sinister. But it names her only as the wife of Michael Cleary, not as Bridget Boland, who grew up in Balliwood Lee, not as the dressmaker or the egg seller or the woman with the singer sewing machine. Not as the woman who whispered to her cousin that she was afraid and who was not listened to as the wife of the man who killed her. Angela Burke, whose 1999 book The Burning of Bridget Cleary is the definitive scholarly account of this case, made the point that the story of Bridget Cleary resonates because the forces that killed her are not historical curiosities. The impulse to render a woman strange when she does not conform, the community that witnesses harm and does not act, the framework of belief, religious, folkloric, cultural, that a perpetrator can use to explain away what he's done. These are not Victorian problems. Bridget Cleary was born on the 19th of February, 1869. She was murdered on the 15th of March, 1895.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

She was twenty-six years old.

SPEAKER_02 28:37

She is buried in Cloneen Churchyard, County Tipperary. For over a century, her grave was unmarked. In recent years, a memorial has been placed there, a small but quiet acknowledgement from a country that took a long time to give it. She was not a witch.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

She was not a fairy. She was not a changeling. She was a woman. And she deserved better.

SPEAKER_02 29:11

You've been listening to Murder Under Gaslight. I'm Don Mortell. Thank you for joining me this week.

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Murder under Gaslight is a West Meath Pocket cinema production. Historical advisor is Jason McKevitt. Murder under Gaslight is presented by Don Mortel.