ARE YOU A WITCH OR ARE YOU A FAIRY: The Burning of Bridget Cleary

The Horrific Murder Behind an Irish Nursery Rhyme | The Bridget Cleary Case

A children’s playground rhyme hides the story of a woman burned alive by her husband in 1895 Ireland.

Irish children still sing a nursery rhyme on playgrounds today. It goes: “Are you a witch, or are you a fairy, or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?” Kids jump rope to it, turn it into clapping games, pass it along without knowing where it came from. The song sounds innocent enough, playful even. It asks a simple question about witches and fairies.
The woman behind those words died screaming. Flames consumed her body while her father, her cousins, and her neighbors stood watching. Her husband set her on fire. Her family held her down during days of torture leading up to that moment. She was 26 years old, and she died in her own kitchen on March 15, 1895.

A Marriage of Contradictions

Bridget Boland was 18 when she married Michael Cleary. He was 27. They met in Clonmel in July 1887 and married about a month later, on August 6, at the Roman Catholic church in Drangan. Both of them could read and write, which wasn’t common for working-class Irish in County Tipperary at that time. That literacy marked them as different from their neighbors, maybe a step above in terms of education and prospects.
Michael made his living as a cooper. He’d spent years learning how to craft barrels and wooden casks by hand, shaping the staves, bending the wood, getting everything watertight. It was skilled work, the kind that took real expertise. The industrial revolution was already eating away at trades like his, though. Factories could produce barrels faster and cheaper than any craftsman working by hand. Michael could still find work in the late 1880s, but the world was changing in ways that wouldn’t favor him.
Bridget had learned dressmaking as an apprentice. She had talent with needle and thread, an eye for how fabric should fall and fit. More than that, she had ambition. She wasn’t interested in giving up her skills just because she’d gotten married and was supposed to settle into keeping house for her husband.
After the wedding, Bridget went back to Ballyvadlea to live with her parents. Michael stayed in Clonmel to finish up his work there. This separation, which might have been temporary at first, ended up lasting longer than either of them probably expected. During that time apart, Bridget’s independence grew in ways that would eventually cause serious friction in their marriage.
She bought herself a Singer sewing machine. This wasn’t just any sewing machine – it was cutting-edge technology for the 1890s, the kind of equipment that let women work faster and produce more, turning their skills into actual businesses. The same industrial advances that were making Michael’s coopering less relevant were giving women like Bridget opportunities their mothers never had. She could see a path to real income, maybe even financial independence, through her dressmaking work.
Bridget also started keeping chickens. She bought her own flock and sold the eggs to people in the surrounding area. This meant long walks across the moors in every kind of weather – through rain, through fog, through cold that seeped into your bones. She’d carry her basket of eggs from farm to farm, cottage to cottage, making deliveries and collecting payment. The moors weren’t just empty wetlands to walk across. They held significance in Irish folklore, meaning, and a great deal of fear.

The House on the Fairy Ring

Bridget’s mother died sometime in the early 1890s. After that, Bridget and Michael took responsibility for her father, Patrick Boland. Patrick had worked as a laborer for years, and that work history came with a benefit – he qualified for one of the laborer’s cottages that the Cashel Poor Law Guardians had recently built. These weren’t grand houses by any means, but they were solid structures. Two bedrooms, a loft, a kitchen, and a couple of small outhouses. They had slate roofs instead of thatch, glass windows instead of nothing but shutters. For rural County Tipperary in the 1890s, these cottages represented decent, comfortable living.
The particular cottage available to the Clearys had a lot going for it. It faced south, catching good light throughout the day. It sat with a view of Slievenamon mountain and looked out over the whole valley. Most families would have jumped at the chance to live there.
Most families refused it.
The cottage was built on top of a ring fort. Now, in modern times, we understand what these structures actually are – circular earthworks that date back somewhere between the Bronze Age and around the year 1000. There are thousands of them scattered across Ireland, remnants of old settlements that got abandoned and slowly sank back into the landscape. They’re archaeological sites, nothing more.
In 1895, people in rural Irish communities saw them differently. Ring forts were fairy forts. They marked places where the boundary between the mortal world and the fairy realm grew thin, where supernatural beings could cross over. These weren’t safe places to build a house. They definitely weren’t safe places to live.
Michael Cleary believed in fairies completely. Not the tiny, glittering creatures with butterfly wings that show up in children’s books. Irish fairy folklore described dangerous beings – kidnappers who stole children and replaced them with sickly imposters, tricksters who could curse your crops, destroyers who took offense at the smallest slight and punished entire families for it. The moors surrounding Ballyvadlea were said to be full of fairy paths and doorways, places where these beings moved between worlds.
Bridget walked across those moors every day. She went out in fog so thick you couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. She went in rain that turned the ground to sucking mud. She went alone, with just her basket of eggs and whatever thoughts kept her company on those long walks. To Michael, this wasn’t just concerning – it was terrifying. His wife was walking through fairy territory daily, tempting fate with every trip.
Then there was the matter of Bridget herself changing. She was becoming more successful, more confident, more financially independent. She was dressing better, speaking more freely, making decisions without consulting her husband first. The traditional Catholic marriage Michael expected – where the husband worked and provided while the wife stayed home and managed the household – wasn’t happening. Bridget was effectively supporting the family while Michael struggled to find steady work.
That reversal ate at him. His jealousy mixed with embarrassment, resentment, and religious conviction about proper gender roles. The combination was dangerous. Bridget’s daily walks through the moors gave Michael a ready explanation for these changes he was seeing in his wife. She was spending time in fairy territory. She was behaving differently. To someone who truly believed in the fairy realm, the logic seemed clear. The woman coming home to him might not be Bridget at all.

The Changeling Legend

The changeling myth held real power in Irish communities, especially in rural areas where old beliefs still ran deep. When someone you knew started acting strangely or fell ill with symptoms that didn’t make sense, when their personality seemed to shift or their behavior became unrecognizable, it might not be them anymore. The fairies could have stolen them away and left an imposter in their place – a changeling that looked like your loved one but wasn’t actually them at all.
The changeling would gradually waste away, revealing its true nature through increasingly strange behavior. The real person was trapped in the fairy realm, held prisoner by supernatural beings. Time worked differently there. Once the fairies took someone, you had exactly nine days to get them back. After that ninth day passed, they belonged to the fairies forever.
Getting someone back required specific rituals, and none of them were gentle. The point was to make the changeling so uncomfortable, so miserable in the human world, that it would give up the deception and flee back to where it came from. That meant exposing the suspected changeling to fire. It meant dousing them with urine, which was believed to have properties that fairies found repulsive. It meant forcing them to drink bitter herbal mixtures that would supposedly break the fairy spell. It meant violent interrogation, demanding that the changeling confess what it truly was.
These weren’t fringe beliefs held by a handful of superstitious people. Changeling fears ran through Irish culture going back centuries. The methods for dealing with suspected changelings – burning, holding people over fires, poisoning them with plant concoctions, drowning them – had killed people before. By the 1890s, the Catholic Church was actively trying to talk people out of these dangerous superstitions. Priests urged their congregations to trust in medical care and Christian faith rather than fairy lore. Still, in places like Ballyvadlea, the old beliefs held on.
Jack Dunne was Bridget’s first cousin. He walked with a noticeable limp and made his living as a storyteller and folk healer. People in the community knew him as a “fairy doctor” – someone who understood the supernatural realm and could provide help when fairy interference was suspected. Dunne wasn’t some charlatan working the edges of society. He was respected, known for his skill at telling stories about Ireland’s mythological past. When people in the area had problems they thought might have supernatural causes, they turned to men like Jack Dunne for guidance.
Another local herbalist, Denis Ganey, lived in the nearby area of Kylatlea. Ganey also practiced as a fairy doctor, mixing herbs and prescribing treatments for ailments that regular medicine couldn’t handle. Both men represented a traditional way of understanding illness and misfortune that existed alongside, and sometimes in direct conflict with, modern medicine and Catholic teaching.
Michael Cleary would soon be consulting both of them about his wife.

The Illness Begins

March 4, 1895, was cold. Snow still covered the dirt roads around Tipperary, unusual for that time of year. Bridget went out anyway to deliver eggs to her customers. She needed to make her rounds, weather or not. At some point during that day, she got sick. Maybe she caught a bad cold or flu. Some historians have suggested tuberculosis or pneumonia. Whatever it was hit her hard.
By March 5, she was confined to bed. The illness wasn’t improving. She developed a fever, a terrible cough, pain in her chest and head. After four days of watching his daughter get worse instead of better, Patrick Boland walked to Fethard to get the dispensary doctor, William Crean. That was on March 9.
Dr. Crean didn’t come.
Patrick went back on March 11. Still nothing. Michael made the trip himself that same day, trying to impress on the doctor that his wife needed medical attention. Crean remained evasive, putting them off. The reasons aren’t entirely clear. Maybe he was busy with other patients. Maybe the Clearys’ inability to pay much made them a lower priority. Maybe he just didn’t want to make the journey out to Ballyvadlea. Whatever his reasons, the delay would prove critical.
While the family waited for Dr. Crean, Jack Dunne came by to visit his cousin. He walked into the bedroom where Bridget lay fevered and sick. He looked at her – the pale skin, the confusion, the way she didn’t quite seem like herself – and he said something that would set everything in motion. Jack told Michael that the woman in the bed was not Bridget Boland.
Michael heard those words and they took root. From that moment forward, his belief that his wife had been replaced by a fairy changeling grew into certainty. All the paranoia he’d been building up, all the fear about her walks through the moors, all the resentment about her independence and success – it crystallized into this explanation. His real wife was gone, stolen by fairies. This sick, fevered creature in their bed was an imposter.
Michael went to see Denis Ganey. Ganey lived in Kylatlea and worked as an herbalist and fairy doctor. He never actually visited the Cleary home to examine Bridget himself, but he didn’t need to. Based on Michael’s description of the situation, Ganey provided herbs that he said contained “the nine cures.” These were to be mixed with new milk – and not just any milk, but “new milk,” the first milk produced by a cow after giving birth. This first milk, called colostrum, is especially rich in nutrients and protein. It also held special significance in Irish folk medicine and fairy lore.
Dr. Crean finally showed up on March 13. He examined Bridget and diagnosed her with severe bronchitis. He prescribed medication and gave Michael specific instructions on how to administer it. Bridget’s condition had deteriorated so much by this point that the local priest needed to be called. Father Cornelius Ryan came to the house to deliver communion and perform last rites, the final sacraments given to Catholics who are dying.
Father Ryan found Bridget alive, conscious, and agitated. Michael took the priest aside and told him something that deeply disturbed Ryan. Michael said he wasn’t going to give Bridget the medicine Dr. Crean prescribed. He explained that people might have their own remedies that could do more good than what a doctor could offer.
Father Ryan understood what Michael meant. He urged Michael to follow the doctor’s orders and warned him not to be overcome by fairy mythology. The priest knew the danger of these old superstitions. He’d seen what could happen when people chose folk remedies over proper medical care. He tried to talk sense into Michael, to convince him that his wife needed the bronchitis medication, not fairy cures.
Michael refused to listen. He had nine days to save his wife from the fairies. That clock was already ticking. Every day wasted on the doctor’s useless medicine was a day closer to losing Bridget forever. Father Ryan left the Cleary home that evening having failed to change Michael’s mind.

The Torture Begins

By the evening of March 13, relatives and neighbors started gathering at the Cleary house. Mary Kennedy came – she was Bridget’s aunt. Some of her sons came with her. William Simpson and his wife stopped by. Simpson was the caretaker of a nearby evicted farm, and he and Bridget were friendly, close enough that rumors had started circulating about an affair between them. Whether those rumors had any truth to them or not, they’d certainly reached Michael’s ears and added fuel to his jealous paranoia.
Michael prepared the herbal mixture Denis Ganey had given him. He boiled the herbs in new milk as instructed. The result was a bitter-smelling concoction that looked and probably tasted awful. He brought it to Bridget and told her to drink it.
She refused.
Michael called for help. Jack Dunne came to the bedside. Three of Bridget’s male cousins – Patrick Kennedy, James Kennedy, and John Kennedy – joined him. These men, her own relatives, pinned her down on the bed. They held her by her hands and feet, pressing her onto her back while she was sick with bronchitis, fevered, probably terrified and confused about what was happening.
Michael stood beside the bed with a saucepan and a spoon. He forced the mixture into her mouth. Bridget struggled. She was screaming through her illness-ravaged throat, trying to fight them off, but four men holding you down doesn’t leave much room for resistance.
People outside the house could hear the commotion. They heard someone – probably Michael – yelling, “Take it, you witch, or I’ll kill you!” Other voices started chanting, repeating the words in patterns of three: “Away with you; come home Bridget Boland, in the name of God!” This wasn’t random shouting. These were specific ritual phrases meant to drive out a changeling.
Michael kept asking his wife the same question: “Are you Bridget Boland, the wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God?” According to changeling lore, the imposter had to answer this question three times to prove its identity. If it refused, that refusal was proof of fairy deception.
When Bridget wouldn’t or couldn’t answer the third time, the men carried her from the bedroom to the kitchen. They brought her to the fireplace, where a low fire was burning. Then they held her over those flames. This was an ordeal by fire, a technique found throughout European folklore. The theory was that fairies couldn’t stand fire, that heat and flame would force them to reveal their true nature and flee.
Johanna Burke, another cousin, was there that night. Later, during the trial, she testified about what Bridget whispered to her. Bridget said she had a pain in her head. She said that Michael Cleary was making a fairy of her. Then she added something chilling – she said Michael had tried to burn her three months before this. This wasn’t the first time Michael had attempted to use fire against his wife. No one had intervened to stop him then, and no one intervened now.
The torture went on for hours. Various relatives and neighbors witnessed what was happening. Some of them probably believed Michael’s interpretation, thought they were helping Bridget by driving out the changeling. Others might have been too frightened of Michael’s violence to speak up. Still others might have been caught in that terrible space of not knowing what to believe – was this their loved one suffering, or something else wearing her face?
Jack Dunne actively encouraged what was happening. He insisted the treatments were necessary. He told Michael that the parish doctor’s medicine was useless because this wasn’t a medical problem – it was fairy mischief, and only fairy remedies would work.
After the ordeal on March 13, Bridget was put back to bed. That same night, Michael’s father died. Some family members left to attend the wake. Jack Dunne seized on this timing immediately. He told Michael that this confirmed everything – the fairies were using tragedy to distract the family, to pull watchful eyes away from Bridget so the changeling could continue wasting away unnoticed. This was exactly the kind of thing fairies did, according to the old stories.
Michael believed him.

The Final Night

On March 14, Bridget seemed better, or at least well enough that people declared her recovered. Whether she’d actually improved from the bronchitis or whether everyone had just convinced themselves the fairy cure had worked isn’t clear. She was pronounced cured – cured from her illness or cured from the fairies, depending on who you asked.
The next evening, March 15, the house filled with people again. Johanna Burke came to visit her cousin. At some point, Johanna and Michael got into an argument. The details of that argument aren’t recorded, but whatever they fought about set Michael off.
He went into the bedroom where Bridget was resting. He forced his sick wife out of bed, ordered her to get dressed, and told her to come out to the kitchen. When someone asked Bridget how she was feeling, she gave an answer that should have alarmed everyone in the room. She said she was only “middling” because her husband was trying to make a fairy of her. Michael snapped at her to hold her tongue.
Michael demanded, once again, that Bridget admit to being a changeling. She refused. This was the pattern that had been established over the previous days – Michael would accuse, Bridget would deny, and Michael would become more enraged by her refusal to confess.
Multiple people testified later about what happened next. Michael flew into a fury. He grabbed Bridget and tore off her clothes, stripping her down to nothing but her chemise, a thin linen undergarment. He pulled a burning stick from the fireplace and brandished it in her face, close enough that she could feel the heat.
The other people in the house tried to leave. They could see where this was headed, and they wanted no part of it. Michael blocked them. He threatened them and locked the door, trapping everyone inside. These witnesses – her family members, her neighbors – were forced to watch what came next. They retreated to the bedroom, trying to put distance between themselves and what was happening in the kitchen.
They heard Bridget scream, “Give me a chance!” Then they heard the sound of her head hitting the floor. Another scream followed that impact.
William Kennedy – one of the cousins who’d helped hold Bridget down during the earlier torture – gathered enough courage to go see what was happening. He came back quickly, his face probably showing exactly what he’d seen. “Bridgie is burned,” he said.
The court testimony later tried to establish exactly what happened in those final moments. Whether Michael deliberately set his wife on fire or whether her chemise caught flame accidentally during the violence wasn’t definitively determined. Multiple witnesses agreed on what they saw: Michael had set Bridget’s chemise on fire. Then he poured lamp oil over her body. The oil would have made the flames spread faster, burn hotter.
Then Michael sat down in a chair and watched her burn.
Some witnesses testified that even as Bridget’s body was consumed by flames, Michael kept shouting that it was only a changeling burning. He insisted the creature’s death would bring his real wife back to him. The fairy would be driven out, and Bridget would step back through the fairy ring any day now.
The coroner who examined Bridget’s body seven days later – after it had been buried and then exhumed by police – couldn’t say for certain whether she died from the impact of her head hitting the stone floor or from the burns that consumed her. Both injuries were severe enough to have killed her. The extensive burning had destroyed much of the evidence. The coroner also noted wounds to Bridget’s mouth and throat, injuries consistent with having noxious substances forced down her throat repeatedly over several days.
What’s certain is that Bridget Cleary died on the night of March 15, 1895. She was 26 years old. She died in her own kitchen, burned by her husband, while her father and cousins and neighbors watched it happen.

The Vigil

After Bridget was dead, Michael and Patrick Kennedy – one of the cousins – took her body out of the house. They carried her burned corpse to a field some distance away and buried her in a shallow grave. They dug just deep enough to hide the body, not deep enough for a proper burial. Then they went back to their lives as if nothing had happened.
Michael didn’t report his wife’s death to anyone. Instead, he took up a vigil at the ringfort of Kylenagranagh, one of those circular earthworks that people believed marked fairy territory. He stayed there, watching and waiting. When people asked what he was doing, he told them he was waiting for Bridget to return. She would ride out from the fairy fort any day now, he said. She’d be mounted on a white horse, leading a troop of fairies. This image came straight from Irish ballads and fairy legends, the kind of stories that Jack Dunne told and that scholars like W.B. Yeats were collecting and writing down.
Michael genuinely believed his real wife was coming back. He’d killed the changeling imposter. He’d done everything the fairy lore said to do. Now he just needed to wait for the fairies to return what they’d stolen.
On March 16, rumors started spreading through the community that Bridget was missing. The local priest had heard things that disturbed him. Neighbors had witnessed enough of the torture on March 13 and 14 to know something was seriously wrong. Word reached the Royal Irish Constabulary.
District Inspector Alfred Joseph Wansbrough initiated a search for Bridget Cleary. As police started asking questions, more witnesses came forward. They described the forced herbal mixtures, the holding over fire, the screaming, the violence. The picture that emerged was damning.
On March 20, arrest warrants went out for eight people from Bridget’s circle: Michael Cleary, Patrick Boland, Mary Kennedy, James Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy, John Kennedy, William Ahearne, and Jack Dunne. Denis Ganey, the fairy doctor who’d supplied the herbs, was also arrested, though he’d never actually visited the Cleary house or participated directly in what happened there.
Two days later, on March 22, police found Bridget’s body. The shallow grave hadn’t hidden it well. When they exhumed her remains, what they found confirmed the worst of what witnesses had described. The torso was severely burned, the body naked except for a few scraps of cloth that had once been her undergarments.
The coroner’s inquest took place on March 23. Twelve men examined the evidence and returned a verdict: death was caused by extensive burning. Then they added something odd – “how or by whom caused we have no evidence to show.” This despite multiple witnesses and a husband who’d been holding vigil waiting for his wife to ride out of a fairy fort.
Bridget Cleary was buried properly on March 27, in Cloneen cemetery. The Royal Irish Constabulary handled the burial, and they did it under cover of darkness. There was a reason for the secrecy – most of Bridget’s own family were in Clonmel prison at the time, charged with her murder.

The Trial

Nine people ended up facing trial for what happened to Bridget Cleary. The legal process moved relatively quickly for the time. Hearings ran from April 1 to April 6, 1895. During these preliminary hearings, one of the original defendants was discharged.
The formal court session began on July 3, 1895. The grand jury had to decide who would be charged with murder versus lesser crimes. They indicted five people for murder: Michael Cleary, Patrick Boland (Bridget’s father), Mary Kennedy (her aunt), James Kennedy, and Patrick Kennedy. All nine defendants were also indicted on charges of “wounding” – the injuries Bridget sustained during the torture sessions before she was killed.
The trial lasted two days and became a media sensation. Newspapers across Ireland covered every detail. British papers picked up the story. It made news in the United States, in Canada, even in Mexico. A Mexican newspaper, La Voz Del Pueblo, ran an article about the case on July 13, 1895. Publications printed large sections of the inquest report word for word, giving readers access to all the horrific details of what had been done to Bridget.
When the accused were brought before magistrates back on March 25, crowds had gathered to see them. People screamed at the defendants as they were led in. Public sentiment ran strongly against the killers, though the situation was complicated by the fact that some witnesses genuinely seemed to believe they’d been helping Bridget by driving out the changeling.
The defense strategy centered on that belief. The lawyers argued that everyone involved truly thought Bridget had been possessed by a fairy spirit. They hadn’t intended to murder anyone. They were attempting to restore Bridget to her rightful self using traditional folk methods that had been practiced in Ireland for generations. The door to the Cleary house had been left open during the torture. The shouting and screaming had attracted neighbors. Ten different people had witnessed the final burning. If these people had been planning a murder, wouldn’t they have been more secretive about it?
This argument found support in some intellectual circles. E.F. Benson, a writer who took considerable interest in the case, published scholarly commentary in the influential periodical The Nineteenth Century in June 1895, before the trial even concluded. Benson’s article essentially accepted the defense argument. He wrote about similar beliefs in what he called “savage tribes,” giving examples from various societies around the world. He discussed “the enormous force which such beliefs exercise on untutored minds.”
Benson pointed out that the door had been left open, that people had been allowed to witness everything, that ten people saw what happened to Bridget. He wrote: “It is inconceivable that, if they had wished to kill her, they would have left the door open, that they should have allowed their shouts to attract the neighbours, or that ten persons should have been admitted to witness the deed. Terrible and ghastly as the case is, we cannot call it wilful murder.”
Justice O’Brien, the judge presiding over the case, had a different take. He stated: “This most extraordinary case demonstrated a degree of darkness in the mind, not just of one person, but of several – a moral darkness, even religious darkness.”
The judge ruled out a verdict of murder. He explained that the accused had acted out of genuine belief, which meant they hadn’t had murderous intent in the legal sense. On July 5, 1895, verdicts came down. Michael was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years of penal servitude. That sentence was later reduced to 15 years. Jack Dunne received a three-year prison sentence for his role in encouraging and participating in the torture , even though he hadn’t been present for the actual killing. Patrick Boland and four of Bridget’s cousins were convicted of “wounding” and received lesser sentences, some as short as six months. Denis Ganey and Mary Kennedy were acquitted.
The relatively lenient sentences reflected the court’s acceptance that the accused genuinely believed they were acting in Bridget’s best interests, however catastrophically wrong they were. The jury and judge seemed to buy the argument that this was a case of dangerous superstition rather than cold-blooded murder.
Michael Cleary served his time and was released in 1910. He immediately left Ireland, boarding a ship bound for Montreal, Canada. After that, he disappeared from public record. There’s no evidence he ever expressed remorse for what he did to his wife. There’s no record of him ever acknowledging that Bridget had been Bridget all along, not a changeling.
Arresting officers testified during the trial about Michael’s behavior when they took him into custody. He’d been incredulous, they said. He seemed completely certain that Bridget would step back through the fairy ring any day and the entire misunderstanding would be cleared up. That belief apparently never wavered, not during his arrest, not during the trial, not during his years in prison.
Jack Dunne served his three years and then returned to the area. He went back to work as a laborer. People knew who he was, knew what he’d done, but he lived out the rest of his life in the same community where Bridget had died. Michael reportedly told someone, “God knows I would never do it but for Jack Dunne.” Whether that was true, whether Michael was shifting blame, or whether both men were equally responsible for pushing the situation to its deadly conclusion remains unknown.

The Propaganda Machine

The media coverage of Bridget Cleary’s murder went far beyond reporting the facts. This case happened at a critical moment in Irish history, and various groups with political agendas seized on it immediately.
Ireland was fighting for independence from Britain in 1895. The question of Home Rule – whether Ireland should be allowed to govern itself – was one of the most contentious political issues of the day. British Unionists, who wanted to keep Ireland under British control, needed arguments to support their position. They claimed the Irish were too backward, too superstitious, too incapable of rational self-government to be trusted with independence.
Bridget Cleary’s murder handed them perfect ammunition.
British and American newspapers ran headlines that dripped with contempt. “Gross Ignorance Amongst the Irish Peasantry” declared the Southern Echo in England on July 11, 1895. “Darkest Ireland” proclaimed The Anderson Intelligencer in South Carolina on July 10, 1895. These weren’t neutral reports about a tragic crime. They were deliberate attempts to portray the Irish as barbaric primitives.
One coroner examining Bridget’s body made a statement that got quoted widely: “Amongst Hottentots one would not expect to hear of such an occurrence.” The comparison to the Khoikhoi people of South Africa was meant to suggest that even colonized Africans would know better than to burn a woman alive over fairy beliefs. It was racist toward both the Irish and the Khoikhoi, and it was exactly the kind of rhetoric that British papers loved to print.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for Irish nationalists. The trial took place in July 1895, the same month as a parliamentary election and an archbishop’s silver jubilee. These three major events happening simultaneously gave newspapers endless opportunities to discuss Irish character, Irish capability, and whether Ireland deserved self-governance. Unionists used every bit of coverage to argue that the Cleary case proved the Irish were unfit to rule themselves.
Irish nationalists found themselves in an impossible position. They couldn’t defend what had happened to Bridget – the crime was indefensible. They couldn’t dismiss it as an isolated incident when the trial revealed that multiple people had participated, that neighbors had witnessed the torture and said nothing, that fairy doctors and folk remedies still commanded respect in rural communities. The case undermined every argument nationalists had been making about Irish readiness for independence.
Neighbors of the Clearys expressed outrage, but not necessarily about Bridget’s death. They were angry about the shame being heaped on their village, on their county, on Ireland as a whole. The international coverage made them look like superstitious fools stuck in the Middle Ages while the rest of Europe had moved on to modernity.
The Catholic Church faced criticism too. Church officials had been working for years to discourage followers from putting faith in dangerous superstitions like changeling beliefs. Father Ryan had literally tried to intervene, had urged Michael to use the doctor’s medicine instead of fairy cures. The Church’s efforts to modernize Irish Catholicism, to pull it away from pre-Christian folklore, had obviously failed to reach people like Michael Cleary and Jack Dunne. That failure became part of the story newspapers told about Irish backwardness.
Bridget became known posthumously as “the last witch burned in Ireland.” That label stuck despite being technically inaccurate – she was never accused of being a witch who’d made a pact with the Devil, which was the traditional accusation in witch trials. She was thought to be a fairy changeling, which came from a completely different strand of folklore. The distinction mattered to scholars and folklorists, but it didn’t matter to newspapers looking for sensational headlines. “Witch burning” sold papers better than “changeling burning,” so witch burning it became.

The Woman Behind the Legend

The real tragedy of Bridget Cleary extends beyond the horror of how she died. Her murder erased her as a person and transformed her into a symbol – of Irish superstition, of political debate, of cultural conflict between old beliefs and modern medicine. Media coverage turned her into a cautionary tale, a headline, proof of something bigger than herself. They rarely treated her as what she actually was: a young woman with skills and dreams who got killed by her husband.
Bridget Boland was born on February 19, 1869. She grew up in Ballyvadlea, in rural County Tipperary. She attended the primary school run by the Sisters of Mercy in Drangan, about four miles from her home. Not every girl in that area got schooling, so her parents must have valued education enough to make sure she attended. She learned to read and write, which would serve her well later when she was running her own business.
She was apprenticed to a dressmaker, possibly in Clonmel. She learned the trade properly – not just basic sewing but the skill to make garments that fit well, looked good, and held up to wear. By the time she married Michael, she was good enough at dressmaking to consider it a real profession rather than just a hobby or occasional work.
People who knew her described her as intelligent. She was attractive – multiple sources mention that, though we should probably be careful about how much weight we give to comments about women’s looks in historical records. She had what people called charm, meaning she could talk to people, make them comfortable, convince them to become customers. That’s a skill in itself, especially in a small community where everyone knows everyone and your reputation matters.
She dressed well, which made her stand out. In a rural village where most people owned maybe two or three sets of clothes, where women wore the same dress for years until it fell apart, Bridget had access to better garments because she could make them herself. She kept up with fashions from the cities. That kind of visible success, visible modernity, made her conspicuous in a community where most women dressed plainly and practically.
After eight years of marriage, Bridget and Michael had no children. That fact made them unusual in a Catholic community where large families were the norm. People would have noticed. People would have talked. In that era, childlessness often got blamed on the wife regardless of whose body was actually preventing conception. Rumors probably circulated about whether something was wrong with Bridget, whether she was doing something to prevent pregnancy, whether God was punishing her for some sin.
There were also whispers about an affair with William Simpson, the caretaker of a nearby evicted farm. Simpson and his wife were friendly with Bridget. Whether that friendship crossed any lines or whether jealous neighbors simply created scandal out of ordinary socializing, nobody knows for sure. What matters is that Michael heard these rumors. They fed into his paranoia about his wife, his jealousy about her independence, his resentment that she was successful while he struggled to find work.
Bridget was caught between two worlds. She believed in her Catholic faith and the sanctity of marriage. By all accounts, she loved her father and cared about her family. She wasn’t trying to destroy her marriage or abandon traditional values. She just also wanted to use her skills and support her household through work she was good at and enjoyed.
That shouldn’t have been a revolutionary position, but in 1890s rural Ireland, it was. Women were supposed to stay home. They were supposed to defer to their husbands in all things. They were supposed to be content with housework and child-rearing. Bridget wanted something different – not instead of marriage and family, but alongside it. She wanted balance, the ability to be both a good Catholic wife and a successful businesswoman.
Michael couldn’t accept that. His idea of what a wife should be was rigid, set in stone by tradition and religious teaching and his own masculine pride. There was no room in his worldview for a woman who walked alone across the moors selling eggs, who owned expensive equipment like a Singer sewing machine, who made more money than her husband. Every aspect of Bridget’s independence threatened him.
The children’s rhyme asks, “Are you a witch or are you a fairy or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?” The question carries its own answer. Bridget was none of those things. She wasn’t a witch – she attended Mass, took communion, followed her Catholic faith faithfully. She wasn’t a fairy – she was human, subject to human illness, human pain, human mortality. And by the time Michael killed her, she arguably wasn’t really “the wife of Michael Cleary” in any meaningful sense either. He’d stopped seeing her as his wife long before he set her on fire. To him, she was an imposter, a creature, something that needed to be destroyed.
Bridget was Bridget. A dressmaker who was good at her work. An egg seller who walked miles to serve her customers. A daughter who cared for her aging father. A woman trying to build something for herself in a world that kept insisting she had no right to want anything beyond what her husband permitted her to want.
She died in her own kitchen. She died while her family watched. She was buried twice – once in secret by her murderer, once in darkness by police because her family was in jail. She became a political symbol before her body was even cold. Her name turned into a nursery rhyme that children sing without understanding what they’re singing about.
Michael Cleary spent 15 years in prison for killing his wife. Fifteen years for torture, for burning a sick woman alive, for destroying the person who’d loved him enough to marry him. Bridget got days of agony followed by flames followed by a shallow grave followed by newspapers that turned her murder into proof of Irish backwardness.
The case continues to fascinate people more than a century later. In 2017, the Amazon Prime series “Lore” featured an episode called “Black Stocking” about Bridget’s murder. Books have been written examining the case from different angles – as an example of domestic violence, as a window into Irish folklore, as a study of how gender and class and superstition intersected in 1890s Ireland. Podcasts discuss it. Academic papers analyze it. The intersection of folklore, violence, religious belief, and the changing role of women in society in one cottage in County Tipperary still holds power as a story.
The nursery rhyme survives too. Children in Ireland still sing it, jumping rope and clapping hands to the rhythm. Their voices carry across the same Irish landscape where Bridget once walked. She would have crossed the same fields where kids now play. She would have seen the same mountains in the distance, felt the same fog rolling in from the moors, walked the same muddy paths with her basket of eggs.
Those children singing the rhyme don’t know they’re singing about a real woman who died screaming. They don’t know about the days of torture, the forced herbal mixtures, the holding over fire, the final burning. They don’t know about Michael sitting in his chair watching his wife’s body consumed by flames. They don’t know about the shallow grave or the newspaper headlines or the trial that turned a woman’s murder into political propaganda.
It’s just a silly song to them. A rhyme that asks a question: Are you a witch or are you a fairy or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?
Bridget Cleary was none of those things. She was a woman who wanted to work and be married, who wanted to use her skills and love her husband, who wanted to care for her father and build a business and walk across the moors without her independence being interpreted as proof she’d been replaced by supernatural beings.
She was 26 years old when she died. That’s all she got – 26 years, and at the end of them, flames in her own kitchen while her family watched.

References

Murder of Bridget Cleary – Wikipedia
“Darkest Ireland” and the burning of Bridget Cleary – RTÉ Brainstorm
The Haunting True Story of Bridget Cleary’s “Changeling” Murder – Atlas Obscura
March 22 1895 – Body of Bridget Cleary Found – On This Day In Tipperary
The Murder of Bridget Cleary – Compact Histories
Halloween histories: Step inside the stories of Ireland’s (alleged) witches – The Journal
The Burning of Bridget Cleary: Witches, Fairies and the Danger of Superstition – Waterford Treasures
The Tragic Murder of Bridget Cleary, the Irish “Fairy Wife” – Mental Floss
A Changeling or His Wife? The Brutal Murder of Bridget Cleary in 1895 Ireland – DIG Podcast
The Charred Remains of Bridget Cleary – History Collection
Fire, Fairies and Folklore – The Murder of Bridget Cleary – The Historian’s Hut
Cleary, Bridget – Dictionary of Irish Biography

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.