The Tragic Murder of Bridget Cleary, the Irish “Fairy Wife”

The policemen had been combing the green yards and fields of Ballyvadlea, Ireland, for a week when they finally found Bridget Cleary. The 26-year-old’s body had been wedged beneath several inches of clay and a jumble of thorn bushes, but her corpse showed wounds caused by something much worse than branches: Her spine and lower limbs were so badly burned that parts of her skeleton were exposed. She was naked, except for a stocking and one gold earring, and her head was encased in a sack.

The judge would later describe the events leading up to Bridget’s death as demonstrating “a degree of darkness in the mind, not just of one person, but of several—a moral darkness, even religious darkness.” It was the end of the 19th century, not exactly the Middle Ages, but those involved in the end of Bridget’s life had become convinced that she wasn’t really herself—and that a supernatural creature had taken her place.

Gone With the Fairies

Bridget was the wife of a cooper named Michael Cleary, and the pair were regarded around town as a relatively happy couple. They shared their cottage, in a remote townland near Tipperary, with Bridget’s father, Patrick Boland, and had no children. Michael was nine years Bridget’s senior and earned a decent salary; she brought in some extra income by working as a seamstress and egg-seller. By all accounts, they were more prosperous than their neighbors, likely thanks to her resourcefulness. As a literate, independent, and fashionably dressed working woman, she was part of an emerging class in a rural society that had long been based in agriculture and the oral tradition.

It was also a society steeped in legends of the supernatural. Fairy belief, in particular, was pervasive in Irish rural societies at the time, and had long coexisted with Christian doctrine. Children grew up hearing legends of the Little People from their earliest days, and learned how to appease them by leaving untasted food on the table, for example, or saying “bless them” whenever the fairies were mentioned. The fairies were blamed for everything that went wrong—lost items, spoiled milk, bad crops. As one County Sligo man interviewed at the start of the 20th century told an anthropologist, “Nothing is more certain than that there are fairies.”

Bridget herself was known to be fascinated by the beings, and to take trips to the most fairy-ridden spots around town. She may have visited such a spot on Monday, March 4, 1895, when she went to deliver eggs to her father’s cousin, Jack Dunne, near Kylenagranagh Hill. The area was home to a ringfort, an early medieval circular fortified settlement believed, in Irish folklore, to be a “fairy fort,” and thus to be avoided at all costs. Yet Bridget often visited the fort, and she likely spent time there that Monday after delivering the eggs.

It was a cold morning, the mountains still covered in the snow that had fallen the previous day, and after the two- or three-mile walk Bridget couldn’t seem to warm up once she got back home. She spent the following day in bed, shivering and complaining of “a raging pain in her head.”

That Saturday, her father walked four miles in the heavy rain to ask the doctor to call on her. But the doctor wasn’t able to visit until the following Wednesday, and by then her husband had also gone to summon him twice. They should have been reassured by the doctor’s diagnoses—“nervous excitement and slight bronchitis”—but it wasn’t this ailment that worried Michael. He was convinced that the bed-ridden woman in their cottage was “too fine,” in his own words, to be his wife, and that she was “two inches taller” than the woman he had known. At some point, Michael had developed the belief that Bridget had been replaced by a fairy changeling as she passed near the fairy fort on Kylenagranagh Hill.

“Are You Bridget Boland?”

It is likely that this idea was planted in Michael’s head by his confidante, Jack Dunne. According to Irish historian Angela Bourke, who has researched the case extensively, the 55-year-old Dunne was a charismatic man rumored to have the power of divination. He was known in the area as a seanchaí, a sort of storyteller well-versed in fairy mythology.

On Wednesday afternoon, after the doctor’s visit, a priest visited. He wasn’t overly concerned about the illness, but decided to administer the last rites in case it worsened. The ceremony emphasized the fact that Michael could lose his wife, which distressed him even more. He talked to Dunne, who urged him to act immediately, or the “real” Bridget would be lost forever. “It is not your wife is there [sic],” the older man reminded him. “This is the eighth day, and you had a right to have gone to Ganey”—the local “fairy doctor”—“on the fifth day.”

The cooper duly visited Ganey following morning. He came back with a mixture of herbs that needed to be boiled in “new milk,” the nutrient-rich first milk produced by a cow after calving.

That night, Michael forced the bitter concoction down Bridget’s throat while Dunne and three male cousins pinned her down in bed. Relatives outside the house heard someone—likely Michael—shouting, “Take it, you witch, or I’ll kill you!” The men threw urine at her and shook her, yelling, “Away with you; come home Bridget Boland, in the name of God!” Other relatives and neighbors came and went, witnessing her ordeal and hearing her screams, but were too scared to intervene. Michael asked his wife to answer her name three times: “Are you Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God?” The men then brought her to the fireplace and held her over the grate—ordeals by fire were known to drive out the fairies—while they repeated the questioning.

By midnight Thursday night, the ritual seemed to be completed. Bridget was “wild and deranged,” according to her cousin Johanna, but her husband seemed satisfied, and her relatives thought there had been some sort of catharsis. The following morning, at Michael’s request, the priest said mass in Bridget’s bedroom in order to banish the “evil spirits” that were left in the house.

“It Is Not Bridget I am Burning”

On Friday, March 15, for the first time in 11 days, Bridget got out of bed and dressed in her usual, fashionable clothes “to give her courage when she would go among the people,” as Johanna later told the magistrates. Several family members had joined them in their cottage for tea later in the day when an argument erupted. Bridget had asked for some milk, which had rekindled Michael’s suspicions; fairies are known in folklore to yearn for fresh milk.

Bridget was probably exhausted, and she didn’t want to be questioned any more. “Your mother used to go with the fairies and that is why you think I am going with them,” she told her husband. Michael was furious. He demanded that she eat three pieces of bread and jam—perhaps to reinforce his control over her—asking her to say her name again. She answered twice and ate two of the three pieces, but when she hesitated for a moment with the third, her husband flung her on the ground and threatened her: “If you won’t take it, down you will go.”

Michael jabbed his knee into her chest, forcing the bread and jam down Bridget’s throat. He began tearing off her clothes, leaving only her chemise, then grabbed a hot stick from the fire and held it close to her mouth. He struck her head against the floor, then set her chemise alight. Within a few minutes, he had also poured paraffin lamp oil over her, encouraging the flames.

As her body was burning, Michael said in front of shocked relatives: “She’s not my wife. She’s an old deceiver sent in place of my wife.” Relatives yelled at Michael to put out the flames, but Bridget “blazed up all in a minute,” according to their later testimony. They huddled in fear in a nearby bedroom, the flames soon barricading their way.

Once the flames had died down, Michael wrapped her body in a sheet and shoved it in an old bag. Then he left the house, locking Bridget’s relatives inside with the corpse. They waited for about an hour, praying. When Michael returned, he was wielding a knife and threatened to kill Bridget’s cousin Patrick Kennedy if he didn’t help him bury Bridget’s body. “Come on out here now,” he shouted. “I have the hole nearly made.” The two men carried the body to a boggy area about a quarter-mile uphill from the cottage, and buried it in a shallow hole. Back in the cottage, Michael made the rest of the family swear they wouldn’t tell the authorities.

On a White Horse

The following morning, an agitated Michael arrived at Drangan church with Dunne. Dunne wanted Michael to speak to a priest, but when the priest saw him kneeling in front of the altar—weeping, tearing his hair, and asking to go to confession—he thought he wasn’t fit to receive the sacrament. He spoke to Dunne instead, who hadn’t been at the cottage at the time of Bridget’s death, but told the priest that Michael had claimed to have burned his wife the previous night. “I’ve been asking them all morning to take her up and give her a Christian burial,” Dunne added. Bewildered, thinking them both insane, the church minister reported their conversation to a police sergeant.

For the next few days, the police searched for Bridget and questioned her friends and relatives. Even though Michael spoke about emigrating or dying by suicide to escape the law, he still hoped his “real wife” would come back: For three consecutive nights starting the day after visiting the priest, he waited at the ringfort on Kylenagranagh Hill, where he believed she would appear, galloping on a white horse. He said he would only have to cut the ropes that bound her to the animal so she would be his forever.

On Wednesday, March 20, the Royal Irish Constables issued arrest warrants for eight people from Bridget’s circle, as well as Denis Ganey, the “fairy doctor.” Two days later, police found Bridget’s body. The prisoners were brought before the magistrates on March 25, ushered in by the angry screams of a crowd who had learned of the case through extensive press coverage. On July 5, 1895, after a two-day trial, Michael was found guilty of manslaughter and imprisoned, along with Jack Dunne, Patrick Boland, and four of Bridget’s cousins, including Patrick Kennedy. The judge ruled out a verdict of murder, explaining they all had acted out of genuine belief.

Michael was released in 1910, after which he boarded ship for Montreal. Dunne served a three-year prison sentence before returning to the area, where he kept working as a laborer. “God knows I would never do it but for Jack Dunne,” Michael had reportedly said not long after burning Bridget. “It was he who told me my wife was a fairy.”

Illness—or Infidelity?

During her illness, Bridget was visited by her aunt, Mary Kennedy, and told her, “He [Michael]’s making a fairy of me now. He thought to burn me about three months ago.” Her words suggest this wasn’t the first crisis of its kind.

Although we can only speculate about the couple’s disagreements, there were rumors in Ballyvadlea that Bridget had a lover. Contemporary newspapers reported Michael saying his wife “used to be meeting an egg-man on the low road,” but the rumors pointed to young caretaker William Simpson, who had visited the Clearys’ cottage with his wife the night before Bridget’s death. In his court testimony, Simpson explained he had arrived as the four men were restraining Bridget, and he had asked them to leave her alone.

Although Michael and the other people involved in the killing were never formally psychiatrically assessed, a 2006 article from the Irish Journal of Medical Science suggested that Michael may have been suffering from a psychotic state known as Capgras syndrome, which involves the belief that a person has been replaced by an impostor. The authors suggest Michael “may have developed a brief psychotic episode” as he struggled to deal with his wife’s illness, sleep deprivation, and the recent death of his father—news of which had reached him in the middle of his attempted “cure” on Thursday night. In Capgras syndrome, the socio-cultural context of the sufferer determines the nature of the impostor, which can be another person or even a supernatural being, such as an alien or a fairy changeling.

In her discussion of the supernatural beliefs related to the case, Bourke notes that the message of fairy legends is that “the unexpected may be guarded against by careful observance of society’s rules.” Bridget Cleary was ambitious, independent, and childless; a modern woman. She didn’t conform to the patriarchal norm, which may have made her appear, to some in her life, as closer to the fairy realm than to their own.

Even today in Tipperary, her story hasn’t been entirely forgotten. The local children have a nursery rhyme that goes, “Are you a witch or are you a fairy, / Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?”

A version of this story originally ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2024.

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