The 'Changeling Murder' of Bridget Cleary

The story goes that in 1895 Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her husband who believed she was a 'changeling' fairy. In today's episode, Anthony and Maddy interrogate the stories we've been told about this murder in rural Ireland and if an interesting story of supernatural belief has gotten in the way of the brutal truth. Was there a genuine belief in fairies by Bridget Cleary's husband? Is this ultimately a story of domestic abuse? And how much of this is a colonialist projection by the British? Edited by Anna Brant. Produced by Stuart Beckwith and McKenna Fernandez. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. After Dark is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello After Darkers. Now brace yourselves for a public service announcement.

• 0:04Anthony Delaney?

  History Hit, the production company behind After Dark, also makes documentaries. And I'm talking beautifully shot, fantastically told, immersive histories on screen. There's hundreds and hundreds available to watch right now, online at historyhit.com, with a new release each week.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  There's a lot to digest there, but guys, take a deep breath because there is more. Anthony and I have made two new History Hit TV documentaries. I have recently made one about London's most notorious haunting, the Cock Lane Ghost, based on my new book Hoax, that is releasing for Halloween.

• 0:36Anthony Delaney?

  And I've got one following that, about the Great Irish Famine, which is coming soon.

• 0:41Speaker 00

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• 0:48Anthony Delaney?

  1895, rural Ireland. A woman is dragged towards the fire in her own home. She is held down as her clothes catch a light, her husband watching as the flames consume her. But he believes that the woman before him is not his wife at all. He believes that the fairies have taken her. Are you falling for this? Because that's what they want you to believe, and that's what we've accepted for far too long. How could belief in fairies lead to Bridget's murder at the very end of the 19th century? And do we buy the idea that the people who surrounded Bridget on her final day genuinely believed that they were saving her?

• 1:34Anthony Delaney?

  This is a complicated history that all too often has been taken at face value. Well, we believe Bridget Cleary deserves better, so we're going to try to unravel the story from the history on this episode of After Dark.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.

• 1:57Anthony Delaney?

  And I'm Anthony.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  Today's episode is an eerily modern tale. It's a really difficult history. It's one that is full of reputed folkloric beliefs, and they do result in the death of a woman in 1895 in Ireland. That woman is Bridget Cleary. There's a nursery rhyme from this period that goes like this. Are you a witch? Are you a fairy? Are you the wife of Michael Cleary?

• 2:26Anthony Delaney?

  It doesn't quite work in an English accent.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  No, can you give it to us in an Irish one, please?

• 2:30Anthony Delaney?

  No, I'm not going to. But actually, as I was listening, I was like, that doesn't rhyme.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was like, that, yes.

• 2:34Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I'm not going to do an Irish accent for Anthony, so...

• 2:38Anthony Delaney?

  Maybe at some point, this is not the episode for it, but at some point, I should get you to do that on the podcast, just for the cra-.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  That is never, ever happening. Pure cancellation territory. This is a, this is a difficult history. This is a, one that we've wanted to do for a really long time, isn't it?

• 2:54Anthony Delaney?

  And we've touched on it before, but we kind of, and we have had requests to go back to and do it a little bit.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  We have. It's been a popularly requested one.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  It's, it seems like a contradiction. This is a true crime story. It's a story that involves folklore, that involves fairies. Let's start. There's going to be a lot of detail in here, and there's going to be a lot of talking about the archive that we have for this, what that evidence can tell us, what we can pick out, what we can pick apart from that. But I think let's, let's start with the context that we need going into this. And we have spoken a bit on this show before about specifically Irish ideas of fairies. But can we start with that as a sort of a cultural touch point before we go into this very real history?

• 3:51Anthony Delaney?

  I'm going to give you that, and then I'm going to give you something else. But I think, yeah, let's start with what the folklore is, right? That there are fairy beings who exist in the landscape, who hark back to a more ancient time, specifically the Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish folklore. And they are this people who have gone underground and...

• 4:19Speaker 00

  So they're sort of of the land in every sense.

• 4:21Anthony Delaney?

  Absolutely. And you will find them in the water, in the trees, depending on the type of fairy that they are. And that they are mischievous. They can be, it can go from being mischievous but friendly to being downright diabolical, and they can really have this adverse effect on everything and everyone around them. Physically, what we tend to see, they, they look like a kind of French medieval nobility.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:50Anthony Delaney?

  Which is kind of ridiculous in itself.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Well, and also interesting that this is a 19th century history and thinking about sort of medieval revival in Britain and Ireland in this moment, in terms of art, in terms of literature, that medieval Chevalier world is in people's imagination.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  You know, just as a sort of, a side note to this particular history, it's sort of not surprising that that's how they're imagined in this moment.

• 5:17Anthony Delaney?

  They can, they can shape shift. That's going to become important to this story. They, there's this idea of the glimmer or the glamour, sometimes it's called, where they will appear as something and then maybe with the reflection of a light or with, by candlelight, or when a breeze comes, you see it shake and shimmer, and suddenly you start to see the real face of the fairy behind whatever shape they've taken. So they are, they are believed to be, let me rephrase that, actually. They are reported to be this ancient belief system that people genuinely believe inhabits the land.

• 6:01Anthony Delaney?

  And, and they are reported in folklore, in written and oral testimony, ancient in both cases. But here's the other side of it that I wanted to say to you. We are in the 1890s here, and this goes into the 20th century too. And one of the things that unsettles me, well, there's so many things that unsettle me about this history, but one of the overall things is that this idea that people in Ireland, especially rural people in Ireland, at the end of the 19th, 20th century, into the 20th century, are poppin' around the place believing in fairies willy-nilly.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  It feels like a very English colonial viewpoint.

• 6:43Anthony Delaney?

  I want to stick that out there throughout all of this.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  This is a story of belief and disbelief.

• 6:50Anthony Delaney?

  And it's, and it's a story of how we might be able to, I'm starting to think, be able to manipulate stereotypical beliefs around certain cultures when we need to. And, and there's a hint of me, and I haven't heard anybody else saying this when they retell this story, but my skepticism is high alert in this, in terms of the role that the fairy, the fairy folk are supposed to have paid in this, played in this. I want to give Irish people at the end of the 19th century, who by the way, have just been through two generations earlier, a, a country-defining famine.

• 7:34Anthony Delaney?

  That's a very real bloody thing. And so we are not an airy fairy nation of, you know, fiddly eye, bejesus, begara fairy folk.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 7:46Anthony Delaney?

  This is something that people are living their lives in very real terms, but yet that seems to have escaped from this story, and now we have a story of, of fairies. And when I was researching for this, it's just a fairy story. Well, it's a fairy story with a 21st century thing going, ah, but domestic violence. Now, domestic violence is here. It's, this is a story about domestic violence.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Undeniably so, yeah.

• 8:10Anthony Delaney?

  But, but it's still 90% a story about fairies. Can you imagine they believed this? I'm not so sure that that's what's happening here.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  I think, yeah, in terms of how this particular history has been remembered and rewritten, it is absolutely in terms of the belief in fairies, not the violence at the centre of it, because this kind of violence has been happening since human beings existed, not to detract from the terribleness of it, but the murder of women is not unusual across cultures and times. This idea of belief in something supernatural, and specifically in fairies, in terms of this Irish context, is what has defined this and how it's remembered.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  And I, I agree. I think we're going to kind of undermine that and interrogate it a little bit today.

• 8:58Anthony Delaney?

  And I want to just also add on to that, because you mentioned earlier about this kind of colonial idea of Irishness put on top of Irish people themselves, which is absolutely the case and absolutely true. And also, if these are the type of people who believe in this kind of thing, then we can't trust them to run themselves. Bear in mind, Ireland is part of the British Empire at this point, as being essentially ruled from London. Nonetheless, I think we also need to address the ways in which Irish people themselves have then and continue to perpetuate that idea of, of almost a, a pre-colonial ideal in which fairy folk and the belief in the supernatural equal peacefulness and, and

• 9:43Anthony Delaney?

  a real default, a real Irish default of magicalness. We have to be aware that actually there's something going on there.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  I think one thing that stands out for me in this history, and we can talk about this as we go through, is the relationship to the landscape. And I think, you know, you've mentioned the Great Famine as defining generations of suffering and starvation, but also in terms of the relationship to the land itself, right? And the scars that are left in that landscape, the empty cottages, the, the roads, all, all of this that is, that is coming into, to play. And I think what is interesting is that the, the version of the Irish landscape in this that is evoked in the moment and in the history, how it's been retold and retold,

• 10:32Speaker 00

  sits uncomfortably with the 19th century Irish landscape as it is actually experienced by Irish people. And I think it is both in the, the sort of colonial retellings of this, but also in the Irish people who are involved in this story that kind of create almost a veil across some of that reality for their own ends, potentially.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  We'll get into the events that we're going to talk about in a minute, but there's just one element of fairy belief that we need to nail down first, and this is crucial to the story. And it's the ideal, the idea of a changeling. Can you just talk us through that?

• 11:15Anthony Delaney?

  I love the word, first of all, like, it's such a great word.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  It's such a terrifying idea.

• 11:20Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah. So changeling is somebody who, at lunchtime, we were here, I went out to the loo, when I came back, you were still physically here. But over the course of this recording, there was something about you that either didn't sit right, or seem right, or whatever. And I was like, it looks like Mary, but there's just something.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  That happens every recording, to be honest.

• 11:42Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, depends what day of the week. And it's like, this is a fairy folk tradition that they come in and they switch, or they take over, or they possess.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  It's often babies as well, isn't it?

• 11:55Anthony Delaney?

  Very often babies, yeah. And the reason behind that is interesting in itself, because often it's supposed to help to propagate the fairy population. So that's kind of bizarre as well. But what I also really want to pin down there is that those are folkloric beliefs. Every person in Ireland is not going around thinking. Because, again, yeah, I have heard fairy stories growing up, of course I have. There is the whole thing about fairy forts. One is going to be mentioned in this story. But it's always said with a wink and a nudge. And it is.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Which is interesting, because I think, you know, if you, if you come across on social media, or you have Googled anything to do with Ireland and fairies, the sort of outsider viewpoint is very much kind of not with a nudge and a wink. And it's actually like, wow, they believe this. You know, you'll see things about like, you know, oh, the Irish were building a motorway, but they had to loop around a fairy tree because they didn't want to disturb it and stuff. And, you know, there's kind of, and I'm not saying that that belief isn't there and that that doesn't happen, but there's, yeah, but there's a kind of, that's the pervasive narrative, I think, when it comes to this.

• 13:03Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, we get the fiddly eye thing, but I'm far more comfortable, of course I am, I suppose, in the kind of the lands of, the land of saints and scholars than I am in, in this idea of Ireland. Because I think, I think it caricatures us in, in some ways, or can be used to. But as we're, as, and this is my hypothesis, I think, we might be seeing some of that in use by Irish people themselves, potentially. I think it's, it's a question.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Okay, so, we have the idea of changelings. You know, and this is, just to say, it's a centuries old idea, you know, we get it in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare has this idea of, you know, a changeling boy who's stolen by fairies. And there's a sense as well in that kind of folklore, that you can sometimes get the person who's been stolen back.

• 13:48Anthony Delaney?

  Yes.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Which is important, and that there's, there's a kind of sacrifice to be made there, or an offering, and, you know, that's all going to kind of come into play. We're just going to go to a short break. And when we come back, Anthony, you're going to take us into this history and tell us who Brigid Cleary is.

• 14:03Anthony Delaney?

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• 15:43Anthony Delaney?

  So Brigid Boland, as she is born, is born on the 19th of February 16, 1869, rather, in Ballyvadley in County Tipperary. She is married to Michael Cleary. She's young when she marries, I think she's 18. And he's a cooper, and they get married on the 6th of August 1887. Oh, yeah, she is, I did my maths there, well done.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, well done.

• 16:06Anthony Delaney?

  They had been married for eight years, but they'd had no children. Now, people use this as a thing of going, unusual, that marked them out. And while it did, it's not utterly damning. It's not like it never happens, or it never occurs.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  No, and actually, I mean, one thing that I'm always kind of fascinated with in history is, you know, we often think, when we do family histories and things like that, that, you know, you have a clear line of descendants, and especially if you have any Irish in your family, that there might be Irish Catholic big families, you know, with lots of children. But actually, when you start to look into, particularly in the 19th century, actually, you know, the generations are blurred, sometimes people might not have had their own children, but might be given other children to care for from within their family. You know, like, if someone's sister has got 15 children, you might have one of them. You know, there's, there's blurring of the lines. And I think often, even with

• 17:09Speaker 00

  families where there's no obvious childlessness, there, there will be more complicated things. So I think it is unusual, but it's not unheard of. And actually, you know, infertility, if that's what they were faced with, is as common then as it was now. So, it is now.

• 17:28Anthony Delaney?

  And people, again, it's this idea that there is a thought process in these modern people's minds, that the only cause for not having children would be something to do with the fairies. Because there is this talk later, that because she didn't have children, that's why the fairies were interested in her. But actually, we're dealing with relatively modern people here. So I don't want to just dismiss their understanding of what's happening, or even the fact that they would highlight this as that. But nonetheless, that is the situation. They don't have children. Most people in this society do, but it doesn't make them that much of an anomaly. Like, they have reference points for this. The

• 18:12Anthony Delaney?

  other thing that's narratively often pointed out as an anomaly was the fact that Michael would work away, about an hour away from the village where Brigid, where she lives. Now, they eventually end up living together before this story is out, and we'll see them come together. And this is also held up as this thing going, oh, unusual, something marking the difference here. But I really want to point out, particularly in a rural community, the idea of moving for work is not that unusual, particularly in a society that's two generations gone from a famine.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:43Anthony Delaney?

  So, you know, what's held up narratively as, wow, look at how strange they were, look at how not typical.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Their marriage was unconventional at the time, yeah.

• 18:53Anthony Delaney?

  Certainly, it's not what everyone on the ground is experiencing. But I don't think we should fall into the trap of going, there is some magical aura around this marriage before anything even happens. Because that's not representative of how Irish people would understand those dynamics within, within a marriage in the late 19th century.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  I suppose one thing that is potentially a little bit unusual about Brigid is that she has some economic independence from her husband, right?

• 19:21Anthony Delaney?

  I wonder, is it? Because the economic independence that she has is, is, and she certainly does. But again, I'm so suspicious of all of this now, that has me questioning everything.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:34Anthony Delaney?

  And so.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Sorry.

• 19:36Anthony Delaney?

  No, no, no, go, go, go.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  No, okay. But she, she does make her money. So she, she, while Michael's working away, she sells the eggs from her chickens. She's trained as a dressmaker and a milliner. She's, you know, she, she's using a sewing machine, people are bringing her clothes to repair or to make. She, she has sort of carved out a space for herself in that community. She's offering a service. She is trading her skills for money, and while Michael is not in the, the family home.

• 20:07Anthony Delaney?

  She is. And now, ask yourself how unusual it might be for people in a rural community to sell eggs. Probably not that unusual.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:17Anthony Delaney?

  Now, ask yourself how unusual, okay, it might be for a woman with a skill to enter dressmaking as that skill. Now, she did own a singer sewing machine, that's a valuable item of, of kit. It is, it is more than a landlaborer skill. So there is an education that's involved in that, and, and, you know, an apprenticeship of sorts. She has gone through that system. But it's not like other women weren't doing it.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  No, no. And, you know, being a dressmaker or a milliner is not uncommon. I think one of my ancestors at the end of the 19th century was a milliner and owned a little shop. And she was married and had children. You know, it's not, it's not necessarily unusual. But I suppose, I think what it does, what it does give me is a sense of Brigid as a sort of fully rounded person, because I think so much has been stripped from her. So I think that's, these details are important for establishing who she was.

• 21:10Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, I think they're vitally important. And I, but I think they're vitally important because what I think has happened is, in, in free Ireland, with the Catholic Church being as important as it was, and we're talking post 1930s here, there was an idea that when a woman, not just an idea, a rule essentially, that when women got married, they did not work. But we don't have that luxury. It's not a luxury, it's an imposition in the 1930s. But, but that's not necessarily the mind frame that's in operation here.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  In the 1890s.

• 21:40Anthony Delaney?

  At this point. I mean, think about all the industries that are happening in London, in Birmingham, in Belfast.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:46Anthony Delaney?

  These are things that are, so, so again, I'm just wondering how many layers we've placed on top of this in order just to tell a good story, as opposed to going, actually, there was loads of women who were able to eke out livings for themselves, because women are able to do that.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  What is interesting, I think, is that after her death, and obviously we are building to this, Brigid is described and remembered as being a little bit strange, and a little bit on the outside of things. We've got a quote here from March 1895 in the Cork Examiner, and this isn't a spoiler of what is going to happen in the story, but. Um, it describes Bridget, once she's dead, as be having in life been a bit queer in her ways. And this they attribute to a certain superiority over the people with whom she came into contact. Her attire is not that of every woman in the same social plane.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  So there's a posthumous marking out of Bridget as different, as unusual, as this description here as being a bit queer, being uncanny in some way.

• 22:50Anthony Delaney?

  I don't even buy it. See, this is how skeptical I am of this.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  But this is what I mean, that there's.

• 22:55Anthony Delaney?

  But they're saying it, so of course there's.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  This is, you know, a post death application of these, these things on to her.

• 23:01Anthony Delaney?

  What I hear is she may be guilty of having a few notions, as we say in Ireland. Where she's like, I actually am gonna put myself together, thank you very much. But why would she not? She's a dressmaker. She, she understands style, she understands that. Being a bit queer, like potentially she sounds like she might be a little reserved, removed, or, or, or I don't know. But, but no sin is being committed here, from what I can say, she's well dressed. That, that seems to be all they're saying.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:28Anthony Delaney?

  Her attire was not that of her social class. God love her. I mean, stay in your place. No.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  So we have, we have a woman who, the very minimal, we can say, earns her own money. Husband works away sometimes.

• 23:43Anthony Delaney?

  We have a smart, independent 19th century woman in Ireland at the end of the century.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:47Anthony Delaney?

  That's what I, she's quite skilled.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Um, the next bit, I suppose then is that Bridget's mother dies. And then her and Michael, her husband, are responsible for caring for Bridget's father, right?

• 23:58Anthony Delaney?

  And this is where they uh come and live together, because now they, they are able to have that house. So it's intergenerational living, it's not unusual.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Absolutely commonplace for the 19th century across Ireland and Britain.

• 24:10Anthony Delaney?

  And in so much of the world, and we're seeing so much of it now again, right? Like, we're gonna re-enter into that thing of, of, of intergenerational living because of the economy. And so many things that are happening are going to echo this. So it's not that unusual even for us now. But yes, this is where they become a household and where we, we start to get the setting of.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  But this is in the same village, right?

• 24:33Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is in their same village. So she's still in her home village.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  And the cottage that they move into with Patrick Boland, Bridget's father, is said to stand within a supposed fairy ringfort. And this is important.

• 24:51Anthony Delaney?

  Is it?

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Well.

• 24:52Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, see, now, the, no, but, and by the way, every time I say that to you, you are going from what the story is.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Well, it's important in the story how, in terms of what, how it has been told so far.

• 25:02Anthony Delaney?

  And I just got really annoyed with this last night, as if you can, you can probably tell. And, and over the course of looking at this, because we have, not you and I, the generations of Irish people who tell this story and who know this story quite well. If you mention the name Bridget Cleary, everyone will know what that means in Ireland. Well, they'll have a, a sense of it.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:19Anthony Delaney?

  Um, I, I was saying to Maddie before we started recording this, can we, someone, and it might even be me, needs to go back to the primary sources in this. Because I, I'm worried about the way in which we're telling her life and subsequently her death. And how we may have sacrificed the history for the story. Because that sounds great, but two things are contradictory here. Oh, her father's house that they're now living in might, and by the way, this is gonna be a cottage, but it's a decent cottage. I will say that it's a decent um working class or a peasantry cottage in Ireland. But it, it is, oh, it's built on land that was a fairy fort. But literally, five minutes ago, you said, and there's this concept that Irish people

• 26:04Anthony Delaney?

  change their roads to go through, to make sure they're not going through fairy forts.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  But they've built cottages.

• 26:09Anthony Delaney?

  But they're gonna just plonk a cottage. So which is it? Like, are we believing in them or are we not believing in them?

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:14Anthony Delaney?

  And also, when does that happen? Is everyone in that village talking about, God, the man that built on the fairy fort? Or is it, well, now that she died in this horrific way, his house is on a fairy fort? So I really think we need, she's due a revisit of the primary source material. So I, I, I wanna keep that in mind throughout all of what we're about to discuss here. Because I'm, I'm, I'm getting senses of layers of lie on this, to be honest.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So just, just let's do a quick note on the sources that, that we're drawing on in terms of this. Because you're gonna take us in a minute through the days leading up to the murder and the murder itself.

• 26:57Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Um, and the way we're gonna do this is you're sort of gonna tell a story as it has been handed down to us, using the sources that are commonly cited. And then we're gonna break it down a little bit and look at it in a bit more um sort of interrogatory detail. Um, but the sources that we, we have, there's testimony from one of Bridget's cousins, Joanna Burke.

• 27:20Anthony Delaney?

  Yep.

• 27:21Speaker 00

  Um, we're gonna hear from her. She's one of the key witnesses for the prosecution.

• 27:25Anthony Delaney?

  She is.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  In the trial that is gonna follow. Another source is the Irish Times, uh, national newspaper, on the ground, reporting at the time.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  You know, I hope, well, we all use newspapers in our own work since the printing press began. So, you know, a sort of standard go-to source. Um, and then another source, I mean, we, we're talking off mic about how many books have been written on this, actually. But one of the sources, um, sort of definitive books that uh was written on this, this case, is called The Burning of Bridget Cleary, which was published in 1999. Um, and I think that's maybe quite an interesting moment in the zeitgeist in terms of Irish history to, for this story to have been revisited, actually. Um, and so these are, these are the things that we're drawing on in this discussion. Um, let's, let's move to this, the, the point of this episode then.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  And the murder that is very unfortunately coming. Um, we have, we have this set up. We have Bridget and Michael living together now after slightly separate lifestyle while they both work in their different spheres. They're living with Patrick, Bridget's father, in this labourist cottage. The mother has died. How do we end up with a crime being committed?

• 28:47Anthony Delaney?

  The one thing to point out about the general setting of this, uh, what unfolds here is that the township within which this crime takes place, everybody knows everybody. So you're about to encounter names now and a network of people that become important to the events and the murder. But that are also the daily people that all of these people are encountering just in the, in the boring things of everyday life, right? So on Monday, the 4th of March, Bridget, in her highly unusual and idiosyncratic way, goes to sell her eggs to, yes, like totally marks her out for fairy possession, to her father's cousin.

• 29:30Anthony Delaney?

  Now bear that in mind too, everyone's related, not everyone, I'm, I'm over exaggerating. But, but there's a lot of familial links in this township.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  And it's a community in which everyone has stakes because of that.

• 29:42Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, and she goes to Jack Dunn.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Who's her father's cousin.

• 29:45Anthony Delaney?

  Who's her father's cousin, and delivers some eggs. Grant, we'll leave that there.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Normal, everyday activity.

• 29:51Anthony Delaney?

  Normal, everyday activity. It is March. On her way back, it's cold, it's wet, it's rainy, there's some kind of a storm. And within a few hours of arriving, or a few, a few days of arriving back, uh, she's feeling terrible. She's caught some kind of a cold, she's, she's down in the dumps, she can't get out of bed, she's, she's just laid low, right? Um, a few days later, Jack comes to the house. Again, initially you might think, well, that's very convenient, she was just in his house selling eggs. No, this is a community that moves within itself in this way. It's not, this isn't necessarily just a narrative trope. Um, he knows Bridget, he knows her father, because he's his cousin, he knows Michael.

• 30:34Anthony Delaney?

  He's also apparently very au fait with fairy folklore.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 30:38Anthony Delaney?

  Um, and he says, kind of initially at least off the cuff, that's not Bridget, or I'm paraphrasing, but something to that effect, that's not Bridget, that's not her. And, okay, fine, there is a sense that maybe there's something a little, because Jack is supposedly so aligned, Jack Dunn is so aligned with the fairy folk, that he suggests getting a herbal remedy of milk, unpasteurized milk, and some herbs to help her get better.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  So, so hold on, so Bridget is taken to her bed because she's got a cold.

• 31:14Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Her father's cousin has said, that is not her, that is a changeling, that's a fairy.

• 31:20Anthony Delaney?

  We hear after the fact this, yeah. Now, he apparently hasn't said changeling yet, so there's, there's.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Okay, but he said that's not Bridget.

• 31:28Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, he, he is going to say it's a changeling, though.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:33Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  And this is accepted, that, so Michael in the household, as the head of, of that family, says, sure, I'll go and get this herbal milk remedy.

• 31:45Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, I mean, thi- this is the story we have, and this is the story we have from witnesses at the time. But again, I'm gonna, I'm gonna want to question that a little bit further on when we come to the idea of the trial, right? But yes, the summation is what we have narratively. Now, what I would just say here is, there is a very long tradition in every country in the world of folk remedies, what we now understand as folk remedies, being used to treat everyday maladies like colds. So is heated milk and some, some herbs?

• 32:23Speaker 00

  It's like having.

• 32:24Anthony Delaney?

  The only explanation that it has, they, they wanted it to be fairies? Or is it just a, we gave her some hot milk?

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like having honey and lemon in your tea if you've got a sore throat or something, right?

• 32:34Anthony Delaney?

  I just think we have to question it. I'm not saying, I'm not saying that they weren't full at 100% believe in fairies. I just think we've been retelling this story in the same way for so long, I'm now questioning everything about it. But anyway, she has this drink and Michael puts it together, so the husband puts it together. This is said to be um a fairy remedy, but she's not necessarily feeling all that much better. She's still taking it. Um, and then Jack Dunn is, is supposed to have said, it is not your wife is there. You will have enough to do to bring her back. And this is where the idea of a changeling comes in. So he, he apparently lands the idea that Bridget's been switched.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  And to to sort of deepen these suspicions, Bridget does become much more ill than a cold. She's really quite unwell. And a priest is called, well, a doctor visits her first of all. And then a priest is called and she's given the last rites in case she dies.

• 33:33Anthony Delaney?

  So I've read a couple of accounts of this, right? And some of them are slightly woolly, so I it would be interesting to know a little bit more. On the first instance, yes, he goes to, Michael goes to a doctor, just to be, the husband goes to a doctor to be like, come here and come and see her. She's not well. And that takes a bit of a journey to do that because they're not next door.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  And presumably a fee.

• 33:53Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, well, it will be a fee if he comes, yeah. Now, he initially doesn't come. He's like, I don't know why, he says, he doesn't say no, but he doesn't come straight away. It takes them, I think it's a little over a week before he arrives to the house. In the meantime, yes, she's had a priest in now. That'll be something that's a little bit more easily accessible. He doesn't come straight away either, though. So part of that you could read into it going, well, there's no need yet. Come back to me in five days if she's still unwell. This is also a time in which people are dying of TB very often, pneumonia, as we would now understand it is going to kill you. And so if she has these versions of these things, I mean, we don't know. We don't get a chance to ever find out what is wrong here.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:35Anthony Delaney?

  And because it's just said to be fairy, that the last rites would be administered just in case. But there is also this thought that because the priest administer, I've heard it said, that because the priest administers the last rites, it subconsciously paves a path for Michael and the other villagers to allow what happens to happen because she's already received the last rites. That's quite dark.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  That's really quite dark.

• 35:08Anthony Delaney?

  I don't know how true it is, but it's part of the lore, part of the story.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is, okay, that's, it's quite grim, isn't it?

• 35:15Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Um, okay, so she, we had her on the 4th of March, which was a Monday, going to deliver the eggs to Jack. Um, Thursday, 14th of March now, she's still not well. There's more visitors to the house.

• 35:29Anthony Delaney?

  There's an attempted visit now from Joanna Burke. So this is the person at the start of the episode that you said, we're going to hear testimony from her. So she comes to the house, again, she's local.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  She's Bridget's cousin.

• 35:40Anthony Delaney?

  She's related to Bridget. She's going to be related to a lot of other people who come into this story as well.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 35:45Anthony Delaney?

  But again, not unusual for the village, you know what I mean? They all have ties in one way or another. But she is not allowed in. And according to her testimony, when she's outside, there's a commotion in the house. And she says she hears someone say, take it, you bitch or you witch.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:02Anthony Delaney?

  So, a- and it being this fairy remedy of milk and herbs.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 36:08Anthony Delaney?

  So they are in some way trying to administer this concoction to her to rid her of the changeling fairy. So by this point, it's probably worth saying narratively, as the story goes, where everyone in that cottage is all in on believing Bridget is a fairy now.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, if we are to take this this narrative at face value.

• 36:27Anthony Delaney?

  Can I also point out that people, other people in this house right now are Joanna's brothers?

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Okay, so hold on, so that we, inside the house, so Joanna's not allowed in.

• 36:38Anthony Delaney?

  No, no.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  But inside is Michael, obviously Bridget unwell in bed. And then some other men, Joanna's brothers.

• 36:45Anthony Delaney?

  Bridget's father's in there too, Patrick.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 36:47Anthony Delaney?

  Uh, and an unknown number of Joanna's brothers are in there as well, but it's a couple. We think it's about, it's a couple.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:54Anthony Delaney?

  But I also have a feeling from accounts that there's other men in there too.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:59Anthony Delaney?

  But we know that Joanna's brothers are some of those men.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Which is interesting and worrying. This has already become a sort of male dominated space in which Bridget, who is unwell, is being treated and subjected to, you know, whatever is happening.

• 37:15Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, and and it's, it is the interesting, I think, that Joanna is told she's not allowed in, that it's not a, it's like, who is policing that? We don't, I I I don't see that in the narrative. And that's what makes me want to revisit these primary source materials.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  I mean, it feels to me as well as a sort of gathering of a council of men to deal with, you know, potentially, if we are going to bind to this idea of the changeling, compared to, you know, Bridget, presumably traditionally in a community like this, would have been attended by women if she was ill or dying.

• 37:48Anthony Delaney?

  Sure.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  You know, once the priest and the doctor have come, who of course will be male, that in childbirth and sickness, it's women at your bedside. So this is unusual that Joanna is not allowed in.

• 38:00Anthony Delaney?

  That's a good point, yeah, yeah, I hadn't thought about that.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  And there's a sort of isolating of Bridget as well, which is quite sinister.

• 38:06Anthony Delaney?

  But in another way, that starts to poke other holes in this narrative that we've received going, well, that, it's not men by your bedside. So why isn't she allowed in?

• 38:19Speaker 00

  What do you mean, it's not men?

• 38:20Anthony Delaney?

  As in, like, it's not men by your bedside. If you're a sick woman in the late 19th century, you will have women, like you say.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  So why isn't she?

• 38:26Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, so why, why are there not, why is there not more of a female presence in what's going on there?

• 38:31Speaker 00

  So she's been given the herb and milk remedy by Michael.

• 38:35Anthony Delaney?

  And interestingly, narrative trope number one here, she's taken it twice.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:42Anthony Delaney?

  They are trying to force her to take it a third time.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  As is the case in any fairy tale.

• 38:48Anthony Delaney?

  And they're holding her down by her hands and her feet in order to force feed this milk into her as the story goes.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Okay. Um, and of course, that's the thing, and that's a trope in fairy tales as well, that, um, if you are, changelings, I think, can't eat or drink in the same way as humans can. So there's, this is almost a test, right? And if she's rejecting it or can't actually take this medicine, then she's, she's not human.

• 39:19Anthony Delaney?

  So, yeah, so we get this, we get this idea that she is, she is being, uh.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Tested.

• 39:29Anthony Delaney?

  Tested, a- and also like physically restrained, that's the word I was looking for, that she's being restrained in this house. And then you get this irony, right? Which is Michael saying to her, are you Bridget Boland, the wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God?

• 39:50Anthony Delaney?

  Now, everything else has not been done in the name of God.

• 39:54Anthony Delaney?

  Is, as a matter of fact, is explicitly running contrary to the name of God.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 39:59Anthony Delaney?

  So what are we playing at here?

• 40:01Speaker 00

  What is the belief system operating on?

• 40:02Anthony Delaney?

  What is the belief system? And I'm not saying it has to be monotheistic and it has to be very simple and and straightforward. Sometimes these things are complex.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  But also, you know, speaking those words and believing in the power of those words. But then they're also doing things like, um, using fire to threaten the so-called fairy. So they they heat up a poker, don't they, in the fire and threaten her with that, threaten to burn her? And also, is it urine that's thrown over her? Because it's believed that'll make the fairy flee the scene.

• 40:33Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  So, you know, there's kind of powerful, what is essentially powerful spells being done? And then the speaking of Christian words is another kind of spell.

• 40:43Anthony Delaney?

  And look how many times that was answered. She answered this once or twice, but she didn't answer it three times.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and again, this is just a trope of of the fairy tale.

• 40:54Anthony Delaney?

  Uh, yeah, the trope of three.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:56Anthony Delaney?

  So that's what's happening on the 14th. Things are pretty dire. If anything like this is happening in that house, we have transgressed significantly the laws and expectations of Ireland in the late 19th century. This is not what's happening in rural households up and down that country.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 41:14Anthony Delaney?

  So even if there's no, nothing being shoved down her throat, even if there's no hot poker, even if there's no urine, and and the account says there is, by the way, so so let's take it at face value that all of that is happening. Even if that is the case, that's not, that we are, we have well surpassed anything that's acceptable within the laws or the religion or the morals of this country.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  The social norms as well.

• 41:39Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  I mean, literally just the fact that, you know, Joanna, Joanna is being brought out of bed and put back to bed by these men every time. Sorry, not Joanna, Bridget. Um, let's move to the next day. And so we've been in the the 13th, so the 14th of March, when, you know, Joanna's hearing, um, this sort of frustration as Michael's trying to get her to take this this concoction, they're threatening her with the the heated metal, with the urine, all of this. We move to the next day. This is when a priest is called.

• 42:10Anthony Delaney?

  Hmm. So if you can bear with me for a couple of minutes on this, I'm gonna take you through almost everything that happens this night.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  According to the version we have, okay.

• 42:22Anthony Delaney?

  According to Joanna's version, which comes to inform the whole story, basically, right? I'll take you through each piece and then we'll come back to it at the end, once we, once we get to the initial conclusion, right? So Michael Cleary has fetched a priest who performs mass in Bridget's bedroom where Bridget is lying. Not in itself wholly unusual.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 42:45Anthony Delaney?

  That night, Bridget is dressed and she's brought to the kitchen. Joanna, her mother, Mary Kennedy, Bridget's father, Pat Boland, Joanna's brother, Patrick Kennedy, are all there too. So let me just, let me just give you that ensemble again.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, give me that list.

• 43:01Anthony Delaney?

  We have Joanna, we have Joanna's mother, Mary, we have Bridget's father, Pat, and we have, uh, Joanna's brother, Pat Kennedy, as long, along with Bridget herself, right? So we've got a pretty full house. Note, there are women back in the, in the fold now, so.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  To witness what's.

• 43:23Anthony Delaney?

  That that in itself starts to become interesting. Joanna says, they were talking about the fairies and Bridget said to her husband, your mother used to go with the fairies and that's why it is that you think I am going with them.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Ooh. Interesting.

• 43:38Anthony Delaney?

  Do you guys use the phrase, she's away with the fairies?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:41Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah. So when that's used, I don't want to talk about it in the context of the late 19th century, but when that's used now, we don't literally mean she's away with the fairies. But obviously it's harking back to a point where maybe there were folk beliefs that thought that that was the case.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Absent behaviour or being not quite present, being.

• 44:04Anthony Delaney?

  But also this, she was mentally unsound. She had some form of mental disturbance. And now you think I have some form of mental disturbance too. Just because you've seen it in your mother. I don't know, I'm offering it as a, as an alternative that.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  I mean, it sounds like an accusation against Michael, right? Of like, because in your family, you've experienced this, you're now projecting this onto me. I'm just, I've just got a cold, I'm sorry.

• 44:30Anthony Delaney?

  And I will say, there's Bridget's voice, or supposedly reportedly Bridget's voice, just saying, cop yourself on.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:38Anthony Delaney?

  Right? Like, that, that must mean something.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 44:42Anthony Delaney?

  Michael then prepared three pieces of bread and jam, demanding Bridget eat all three.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  I'm gonna predict now that she can only eat two.

• 44:52Anthony Delaney?

  She can only eat two.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Surprise, surprise.

• 44:54Anthony Delaney?

  When she did not answer the third time that she would have the next piece of bread, he forced her to eat the third bit, saying, if you won't take it, down you will go. This is what Joanna says.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:06Anthony Delaney?

  Okay.

• 45:08Anthony Delaney?

  He threw then, because she wouldn't, wouldn't or couldn't eat that third piece, he threw her to the ground and mounted her with a knee on her chest and a hand on her throat. Swallow it, he said. Is it down? Is it down? So all we know, according to Joanna, is that Bridget says, leave me alone, you've lost your mind. Just because your mother wasn't well, doesn't mean I'm not.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  And then we witnessed some domestic violence.

• 45:32Anthony Delaney?

  And then she's on the ground with hands around her throat, being force fed bread. That's what Joanna's telling us.

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:38Anthony Delaney?

  Joanna testifies that she heard Bridget's head strike the floor and then a scream.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 45:45Anthony Delaney?

  As you put, I mean, if, if your head has, and those are, you know, hard stone floors.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:52Anthony Delaney?

  Michael grabs a hot stick from the fire and holds it close to her mouth. This is not my wife, Michael said. I am not going to keep an old witch in place of my wife, so I must get my wife back. Those present are starting to become a little bit uncomfortable now. Joanna apparently says, Mike, let her alone. Don't you see? It is Bridget that is in it.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  So, okay, and here we have the disbelief element coming in, right? This isn't just a community, they're like, oh God, the fairies have arrived. There are people present, significantly here, a woman, who is saying, what are you on about? Leave her alone. And as far as Joanna's concerned, she's just watching a scene of violence meted at by her husband.

• 46:37Anthony Delaney?

  Michael then strips the clothes from, off his wife, except down to her chemise. Mary Kennedy, this is Joanna's mother.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 46:46Anthony Delaney?

  Rushed to the kitchen where she saw Bridget Cleary lying on the hearth. Her clothing is now on fire. So something has transpired between, they think it was because, you know, the hot poker that they were holding to try and entice the fairy out.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:01Anthony Delaney?

  That cinders came off.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Okay, so is that why Michael stripped the clothing off? Because it's become on fire or?

• 47:07Anthony Delaney?

  No.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Is he doing this to sort of humiliate her and then?

• 47:11Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also I think that's a really good, let's come back to that, actually. That's, put a pin in that, because that's really useful, in terms of interrogating this.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:20Anthony Delaney?

  Testimony. Michael says, it is not Bridget I am burning. You will soon see her go up the chimney. According to Mary Kennedy's testimony, Michael Cleary said, I believe she is dead. It is at this point that Mary Kennedy saw Michael Cleary reach for the lamp from the table and drench his wife in paraffin oil until she was consumed with flames. This is what Joanna says. She was burning on the hearth. The house was full of smoke and smell. When I looked down to the kitchen, I saw the remains of Bridget Cleary on the floor, lying on a sheet. James Kennedy then testifies that, he cried out to Michael, for the love of God, don't burn your wife.

• 48:04Anthony Delaney?

  And Cleary replied, she is not my wife. She is an old deceiver, sent in place of my wife. She's after deceiving me for the last seven or eight days and deceived the priest today too. But she won't deceive anyone anymore. As I began it with her, I will finish it with her. You'll soon see her go up the chimney. Two o'clock in the morning comes. Patrick Kennedy, Joanna's brother, then helps carry the remains of Bridget Cleary, who is now dead, from the house in a sheet and buries them in a buggy area near to the home. That.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Do you know what? There's not, there's not a lot of history now that gets me on this.

• 48:45Anthony Delaney?

  After everything, yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  After the topics we've covered.

• 48:49Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  I mean, I feel flawed by that.

• 48:53Anthony Delaney?

  I want to talk about the fact that we have two families essentially in this house together, right? We also have a brother of Joanna who's giving most of this testimony, now becoming an accomplice to disposing the body. Do bear in mind, we're hearing Joanna say that her mother and her brother both tried to say, don't do this to your wife, it is Bridget, this is the real person. And yet, her brother says, okay, well, she have done it now, apparently. I might as well wrap the thingy. So that's one thing that I'm just putting out there for people to question, that Joanna's not unbiased here. I think it's really useful that we have.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  People to protect.

• 49:33Anthony Delaney?

  She has people to protect. It's, I think it's really useful, we have a woman's voice in this, given the context of what's going on. I think it's good that she's saying, we have some testimony that's saying that some people don't believe what Michael is saying, is, is what's happening. But at the same time, her brother's playing an active part in the disposal of remains.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:55Anthony Delaney?

  So I, I really think we need to be more interrogatory when we're looking at this story that just keeps getting handed down again and again and again. Because what you're losing, I, I don't think there's any doubt that this is happening to Bridget's body. Don't get me wrong, that's not what I'm suggesting for the moment. I'm suggesting we've become clouded in what even they understood that was going on.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the scene, the scene as Joanna gives it to us is Michael in this sort of crazed state, convinced that his wife has already died and that he is trying to rid himself of a fairy presence, with everyone else in that scene going, what are you doing? Stop, don't do that.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  I mean, look, it's, it's so hard, isn't it? And Jesus, you know, it's, it's so, it's so dark and it's so, so violent and poor Bridget.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  But in a, how is it that Michael is able to do this in a room, in a house full of people? That he is, he has enough opportunity to beat her to the floor, to remove her clothes, to threaten her with a hot poker and then to douse her in oil and set fire to her without anyone intervening?

• 51:16Anthony Delaney?

  I have so many questions. And I, so the, all of that, there is enough people in that house, if they are apparently saying, what the hell are you doing? If that's what's transpiring that night, there's enough people in there to stop it. So A, why wouldn't they? B, I think you brought up a really good question, it hadn't occurred to me before, but when you did, I was like, huh.

• 51:39Anthony Delaney?

  The, the sequence of events is that he tears her clothes off, leaving her just in her chemise. Then, her clothing, we, we must assume it's the chemise, is set on fire and then the paraffin oil on top. You asked the question, oh, is he tearing the clothes because they were on fire?

• 51:57Speaker 00

  On fire.

• 51:58Anthony Delaney?

  But that's not the sequence we're told the narrative in. And so there you go. Okay, so was it just the chemise that went on fire? Then, when Mary Kennedy, Joanna's mother, comes into the kitchen, bear in mind, these houses are not multi-roomed. You might have two rooms, maximum.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  What I'm picturing is like a low, single story Irish cottage, is this correct? Like the sort of, you know, stone walls, maybe thatched on top, maybe tile, but the, the sort of, where there's like the long living quarters and then there'd be like a sleeping room as well.

• 52:27Anthony Delaney?

  It's certainly what's described. I don't have a picture of it, I don't think anybody has a picture of it, but it's certainly what's described. And it would make sense within the vernacular of that type of house.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  So there could, there's a world in which some people may be in the other, the other space, but it's, it's not a large space.

• 52:43Anthony Delaney?

  Down there.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  It's metres away.

• 52:45Anthony Delaney?

  I can see you. You know what I mean?

• 52:46Speaker 00

  They can see everything that's going on. They're aware of it.

• 52:49Anthony Delaney?

  Then when Mary comes in, it's, the testimony is, there is a sheet under the body now, suddenly. So where's that come from? So there's just a few, look, again, something here to me needs further investigation because, or investigation again. I think we're relying on an almost 30-year-old account of this. And I don't mean to disparage anybody's credentials or anything, but as a historian, I have alarm bells all over the place with the received history we've gotten on this. And it makes me so, so super uncomfortable.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Do you know what I would be really interested to hear would be like a murder detective's take on this scene? If you were taking this testimony down from people who witnessed this.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm interested in the removal of her clothes down to her underwear.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Did Mike, is there a world in which Michael accidentally sets fire to her clothing when he's threatening her with a poker, realises that she's on fire and is trying to take the clothes off her, but she is already injured to the point of death? And he then tries to cover things up by throwing the paraffin oil on her? Is that an accident? And then we get into this whole fairy element to try and make sense of it. Is it, but then also I don't want to take the agency and the crime away from Michael. He's killed his wife. You know, the version we have that Joanna gives us is that he's pinning her to the floor and doing this to her.

• 54:26Anthony Delaney?

  I think he's in a frenzy. I think even if the, even if the flame, the initial flames are accidental that have come from the poker or whatever, the addition of the paraffin oil is just going, an act of outright deliberate violence, you know.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  I, I also think, I mean, the details of this is so, so grim, but you know, Joanna talks about the house being full of smoke and smell, which I think is a really visceral description. And there's no sense, I think, here of the time between that passing and what I have here is the next sentence in her testimony. I don't know if there's a, if there's more in between in the full transcript, but then she says, when I looked down to the kitchen, I saw the remains lying on a sheet. Have hours passed? Is this minutes?

• 55:16Anthony Delaney?

  It, it, well, it may be hours by then, but when her mother, Mary sees the body, instantly it's now on a sheet. Nobody's mentioned a sheet before. So, so I can buy the sheet being there. The sheet is used to wrap the body and to bury it, by the way. But like, why is it there when Mary Kennedy runs into the kitchen, when she's hearing all this commotion? Unless they grab it off a settle bed or something, like it might just be in the kitchen. It might be to hand, but certainly the way Mary describes it, Joanna's mother, is that it's laid out on a sheet. Already dead, she's already dead. So it doesn't add up. And then the way this testimony is received by us now, if I bring you into the next day, this doesn't make sense either.

• 56:01Anthony Delaney?

  Because what we're told is Bridget's disappearance is noted the next day.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  But she's been ill in bed, so she's been disappeared from public view for days anyway.

• 56:13Anthony Delaney?

  And apparently the police, which is the Royal Irish Constabulary at this point, they investigate, but sure.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  From the next day.

• 56:20Anthony Delaney?

  Who's, why would they? Unless somebody goes and says, I know exactly what happened. I don't know where the body is, but I heard this going on or whatever. So it makes it sound like people missed her and then an investigation was launched. But I, I, that can't be the case because it doesn't add up in terms of the logic of what's going on here. And it's not until the 22nd of March that her body is discovered.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  So hold on, she's, what day is she killed on? The 15th?

• 56:49Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  She's killed on the 15th.

• 56:52Anthony Delaney?

  So it's a week?

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, I mean, this, this makes no sense. So she's, she's, she is murdered. The next day, the police launched an investigation. If that is, if that is the accurate timeline, they have obviously been tipped off.

• 57:10Anthony Delaney?

  Must have been.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  But it takes them a week to find her body. Now, this, this bit of the story about Michael and what his, the mindset that he's in, I find this deeply troubling and it's, this for me is the question of the case because it rests on whether he really, really believed that she'd been taken by fairies or whether this is a lie and he has, I mean, he's murdered or either way, but whether he, whether he meant to kill her, not a changeling version of her as we, as we have it. And that is that in the intervening time, so between her death and the 22nd, when her

• 57:51Speaker 00

  body's found, he spends, and again, we have it in the story, three nights, thinking that she's going to come home and he waits for her at the fairy fort close to the body? Is that right?

• 58:04Anthony Delaney?

  Uh, well, yeah-ish actually. Turns out, I hadn't really thought about it like that, but it is in the vicinity, but everything's in the vicinity, so it's not too far. So this is at a spot called Cailnaganna. Here's my other question. How many bloody fairy forts are we supposed to believe is in this relatively small area? It's not that it's impossible for there to be numerous fairy forts, and actually there can be a collection of fairy forts. It's not impossible, but like, there was a fairy fort on her parents' house, the cottage land. There's a fairy fort where he's gone to wait for her to come back now, apparently for three days again.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  For three days. And then the fact that when, it's a very kind of, a specific folkloric imagery, right? That he's, he wants, he's expecting to see her, she will emerge on a white horse.

• 58:46Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  He will cut her free from the horse and therefore she will be rescued. Like this is, is this a man who really believes the specificity of this? Is he expecting to see his wife arrive on a horse, the wife he has set fire to?

• 58:59Anthony Delaney?

  At this point, with the information that I have available to me through the narrative secondhand telling of this, I can't say for certain.

• 59:06Speaker 00

  We have to take it at face value.

• 59:08Anthony Delaney?

  This is what we're being told. Exactly. So I, I, I have my doubts, but we start to get maybe, no, I was going to say we start to get a little bit more clarity, but actually maybe only get more questions once a trial becomes involved. And we're going to take a break now, but when we come back, we'll get into some of the details of that trial.

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• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  And so nine people, including Michael, are charged with Bridget's death or offences related to the death. And of course, the, the Royal Irish constables that have been sent to, to find her have found her body and the coroner rules that inevitably she has died from burning. What does this trial look like? And how, how does the legal system at the time make sense of this narrative that Joanna and others give?

• 1:01:05Anthony Delaney?

  So then those nine people are taken up, as you say.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  These are the people who were in the house.

• 1:01:10Anthony Delaney?

  Who were in the house. The jury is shown the body before burial. And remember in Ireland, we like to bury those bodies officially relatively quickly.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Is that unusual to be shown, for the jury to be shown the body? Is that a part on the prosecution's side to really, you know, make sure it makes an impact?

• 1:01:31Anthony Delaney?

  It's unusual given the time span, because this has happened in the middle of March. We're now in April, so weeks have passed now. I mean, it may sound speedy to us and it is relatively in terms of that coming to trial, but we're working in a slightly different system here. We're also working in a Royal Irish system that's not necessarily jam packed with murder cases. So this can come relatively quickly, but certainly within reason, Bridget would be in the ground almost a day or two after she had died, if things had transpired normally. So it's unusual in that respect. I mean, certainly we know that in the 18th century, 17th century, bodies were, bodies thought to have been murdered were put on display, but we're talking within hours and days of the incident. This is weeks later now.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:02:14Anthony Delaney?

  Anyway, they see the bodies, which is obviously very helpful in them seeing the extent of the violence that is meted out on her. The, the testimony that is key to this is Joanna's. And that's the testimony that we've been hearing throughout this. And it's testimony that's corroborated by, guess who? Joanna's brothers. Now we're talking about four brothers, by the way. Do you remember I mentioned, I've mentioned two of them before.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  And now we have four standing trial.

• 1:02:42Anthony Delaney?

  Kennedy brothers.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  So we should say that five of the nine defendants, the nine people who were in that house are charged with murder, including Michael, of course.

• 1:02:49Anthony Delaney?

  No.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:02:51Anthony Delaney?

  Manslaughter.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  Manslaughter.

• 1:02:53Anthony Delaney?

  And that is because the defence successfully, you could argue, uses the idea that he believed that his wife was a fairy and in which case that distorted belief led him unwittingly murder his wife.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  Unwittingly, doing a lot of heavy lifting.

• 1:03:17Anthony Delaney?

  And Mr. Justice O'Brien said that this showed a moral and religious darkness in the mind, not just of one person, but of several. And so we have, we have those convictions, not of murder, but of manslaughter coming. And this is where I get severely suspicious, because fairy commutes this sentence from murder to manslaughter, as far as I'm concerned. He ends up getting 20 years' penal servitude and, which is longer now than you get for manslaughter, a murder charge now is 21 years, right? Or something? And he then emigrates and has a whole other life in Canada.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 1:03:57Anthony Delaney?

  So if your name is Cleary and you live in Canada, start checking your, your family background. I don't know if he had a, a further family, but as well as Michael, we have seven others who are convicted.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  So I mean, so this is really interesting to me, right? Because in the version that we have from Joanna, actually, Michael is doing the murder. He does everything to Bridget himself.

• 1:04:20Anthony Delaney?

  Sure.

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  Other people are witnesses and help dispose of her remains.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  But the version that we have, and the quote that you gave from the judge, this idea that there's a darkness in the mind, not just of one person, but of several, that this is some kind of community hysteria.

• 1:04:40Anthony Delaney?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  This is some kind of, you know, rural folkloric belief gone astray. This is kind of folk horror territory of like, these, you know, oh, these rural Irish people who they haven't been able to control themselves and they've got carried away kind of thing. The fact, that fact, the sort of framing of that as a communal activity, and the fact that Michael is not convicted of murder, it's, it's, yes, it's, it's this fair, this sense of the fairies that has committed that sentence. But also, there's a sharing around of the blame there that I feel deeply uncomfortable with. Joanna has seen this man pin his wife to the floor and set fire to her, essentially.

• 1:05:22Anthony Delaney?

  And Mary has.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  And Mary has.

• 1:05:24Anthony Delaney?

  And Joanna's four brothers have. And Michael.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  And.

• 1:05:29Anthony Delaney?

  And Paddy, Patrick.

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Bridget's own father.

• 1:05:32Anthony Delaney?

  Boland has seen it too.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  Bridget, you're telling me Bridget's own father was there and didn't intervene?

• 1:05:36Anthony Delaney?

  So, I, I don't, I don't know the ins and outs here, but I ain't buying this story.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:05:43Anthony Delaney?

  You know what I mean? And I, I want to know the ins and outs. And I think we've actually been, we've denied Bridget the ins and outs. Because we've, instead of actually prioritizing what the crime is here, we have, and I don't just mean me and you, but I mean generations of Irish people, and then now people around the world, have actually made a subconscious decision to go, this story is more interesting if we really concentrate on, on the fairies and the fact that they believed fairies and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  I think what is missing from the version that we have are the details of the relationships everyone in that house that night had with one another. And that really, it's not the, oh, of course, this is our, our conclusion inevitably. But it's not the supernatural element that is of interest here or even useful, I think. Even if that was Michael's belief and the belief of other people present. Even if that was the case, even if we take it at face value, Michael really thought his wife had been taken by the fairies. If he did this, she'd come back to him. If we put, put that aside, what happened that night depends on the complicity of people, not just in terms of fairy belief,

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  but in terms of allowing Michael to do that, allowing that to happen to Bridget. So what does the relationship with all those people look, with, with Bridget look like? Presumably, she is crying out for help in this moment. She is ill, she is incapacitated anyway. She's weakened, she needs defending, that doesn't happen. And she has been, up, up until the night of the murder, she has been isolated. She has been brutalized, she's been bullied. Someone has come and given her the last rites. I mean, this is, if she, we don't know what illness she had. We don't know if it's a cold, if it's pneumonia, if it's, you know, actually,

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  you know, something much more serious that she didn't realize she had and it just reached a fever pitch, literally, you know, in, in that moment. And, and maybe her, she was about to die of natural causes, we don't know. But I think the fact that the priest is called, what seems very early on in the story, it feels like there's a decision made within that community around Bridget, that she is going to die, one way or the other. And that death has come to that house. And when it doesn't happen naturally, it is enacted by the people in it. Ah, the, I, I think the, the human element here, the human motivations,

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  the, whether it, whether it is belief in something, whether, I, I don't know. It's, there's so much missing. This is such a, I mean, it's such an angering and raging history.

• 1:08:34Anthony Delaney?

  Isn't it?

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  It's just, I mean, it's despicable, of course it is. But it's also so frustrating with this historical distance and with the archive that we do have. And I think you're right, that we, then there's a need to go back to the primary material, actually, and really study this, because that, there is not enough information.

• 1:08:56Anthony Delaney?

  No.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  About the people in this house. There is ample opportunity within this narrative we're receiving for Bridget to be saved.

• 1:09:05Anthony Delaney?

  Can I give you, can I proffer a hypothesis based on nothing at all? But this is what, I wonder if this didn't happen.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:09:18Anthony Delaney?

  I don't wonder if Michael, the husband, killed his wife and nobody was there. He shared that detail with the Bolans, with Joanna's family, who, I want to know how close they live. I want to know what the, she's a cousin, so there's a reason for her to be in and around this area. He shares the detail with, oh, my wife was wayward. I ended up, I, I did a terrible thing, I killed her. And then the family and the community self-polices and concocts something

• 1:09:57Anthony Delaney?

  that they are going to say, we're gonna have to explain why she's gone. And this is how we're going to do it for whatever purpose. Now, I know that, well, why would you go to fairy? I know that doesn't make sense. But maybe a solicitor introduces that as a potential way to save everybody. Because we also have a Boland who's now disposed of the body on, on the day of the murder.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:10:27Anthony Delaney?

  And so what, but what, also, why if the Bolans are outraged by this, as they supposedly are, do they not offer up the location of the body the next day when supposedly the RIC are looking for her? It ain't adding up. And we become too blinded by the romanticism of these fucking fairies.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Anthony Delaney?

  That we were just like, oh, fairies. And this is what these people believed, bullshit.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  And it's the, the confluence there of the quaint Irishness.

• 1:10:59Anthony Delaney?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  As we've been sold, certainly from an English point of view. And then the dark horror of this, and we're like, oh, interesting collision, that's fascinating. I, yes, all the way through this, I was thinking, she is already dead.

• 1:11:11Anthony Delaney?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  Before she's burnt. I know the coroner says it's death by burning.

• 1:11:16Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, I see what you mean, right? Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  But I think there's a world in which she's dead before she's set on fire. Has she died of natural causes? I mean, unlikely, because then why would they need to dispose her in that way? But, you know, she has been brutalized in the days before. She's been threatened with a red hot poker and all, all sorts of things. She's been forced to drink things, she's being held down. Have they, have, she's been thrown to the floor? Have, has she been killed accidentally? And then this has been agreed upon, that they will do this?

• 1:11:47Anthony Delaney?

  I think there's some kind of agreement going on here.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  I.

• 1:11:51Anthony Delaney?

  In the community, like.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Something I would like to know, were, were we to set a modern police force to investigate this? Is, where does the burning actually take place? Is it in that house? Is it at the place of burial, in fact? Would, would the 19th century, late 19th century police actually be able to tell that?

• 1:12:11Anthony Delaney?

  Did they even ask, or did they just take it?

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:12:14Anthony Delaney?

  Because do remember that the RIC were taken from the community. But at this time, this is after Land League. They are the Royal Irish Constabulary, they are not a trusted unit within.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  Giving the clue there.

• 1:12:27Anthony Delaney?

  Exactly. So there, there's a world in which this community doesn't feel in any way obliged to tell the RIC and therefore the legal system, what has happened in their community in that cottage.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  Just, this, this might be obvious to you, but a question. So, thinking about when this goes to court and the justice who presides over this, the jury, the, the authorities that are dealing with this and the legal system, are they predominantly British? Are they Irish?

• 1:13:00Anthony Delaney?

  And where does the, in, in terms of it happening on the island of Ireland, which it does?

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:05Anthony Delaney?

  Where does that line lie at this particular moment in time?

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Yes, and, and I suppose what, what I'm, what my question is, is in terms of the fairy element of this, is this put forward as a defense strategy? Because the, those in authority will buy it and go, of course, these rural bumpkins believed this. And of course they did, like, we, the, the English, or, you know, the civilized. We don't believe, yeah, exactly, the, the urban, all of that. We, we wouldn't believe this, but of course they do, so it's entirely plausible. And has this, is this narrative a way of covering up something real that has happened? Something far more insidious?

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  And that actually, it is offered as a defence strategy and clearly it works because Michael is not convicted of murder.

• 1:13:59Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. And I can't answer that question for you definitively, but I certainly have my suspicions about it. And maybe there's one thing to just finish on in terms of how, you know, Ireland, it's only what, the Easter Rising is 1916. So, you know, we're talking 20 years later and then independence comes 22. So, you know, this is within the same generation that these events are unfolding.

• 1:14:26Speaker 00

  How important is this case then in terms of the debate around Irish home rule, around getting the Brits out?

• 1:14:33Anthony Delaney?

  Uh, not, not, not directly, but passively, as in what you're saying, like, well, they can't be trusted to rule themselves. Look what they do if they're left to their own devices. But I want to highlight something that happened on TikTok recently, which I think feeds into this.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  That's not what I thought you were saying.

• 1:14:46Anthony Delaney?

  No, I know, I know. And it's, it's not related in one sense. But there was this, uh, this woman who was on Irish TV, a folklorist, and she went on Irish TV and she said, the, the position of women in pre-colonial Irish society was so lauded and so free and so liberated that, uh, you know, that's one of the things that we lost when the British came over and they, whatever else. And there was a huge outcry of this going, of course, that's the case and whatever else. And then there was a brilliant historian on TikTok and I was watching this going, I can't say a thing about this. There was a brilliant historian on TikTok, Irish historian based in Ireland called Amy, and she, point by point dismantled

• 1:15:29Anthony Delaney?

  the seven ways in which women could be oppressed in marriage alone in the ancient Irish, in the Celtic Irish traditions. And I think the idea of ancient belief systems are so often used in opposition to the idea of colonial oppression, of which of course it was oppressive, it wasn't a good thing for Ireland, it didn't go well with us.

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're not taking away from that. No.

• 1:15:54Anthony Delaney?

  But at the same time, those two narratives feed into each other in really oppositional ways. And, and it's not beyond Irish people to just default into using it when it's convenient to say that colonialism is bad, or to say that actually within your legal system that you've set up for me, I might find a way out of this. I might have something to say because I'm, I'm altered in my belief system. And actually, the whole community is somehow altered in this. But at the same time, we have everyone else apart from Michael saying, she's not a fairy egot, apparently. So, so are they more guilty than Michael is? Also, if we were to, sorry, and we're gonna have to finish because we're going on forever.

• 1:16:38Anthony Delaney?

  But also, the only words we reportedly have of Bridget are, you think that I'm away with the fairies because your mother was reportedly away with the fairies. Does that hint at potential mental health or psychosis problems or something in Michael's family?

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  Oh, I tell you what it does tell you is it's generational misogyny, the treatment of women, seeing them as being away with the fairies, rather than, rather than viewing them as potentially having some kind of, like, dealing with any kind of mental illness, but instead thinking these women are, they're magical and uncanny and we can't understand them and they're a pain in the arse.

• 1:17:13Anthony Delaney?

  But equally, maybe Michael had, if his mother did have some kind of mental illness, maybe Michael does too. And he's a mad fucking egot and this is just what we're left with. So I don't, I, it actually angers me that we smokescreened this in this, and I think Irish people have done that, by the way, uh, you know, I really do. And I just wonder how deliberate, and that's why that smokescreening has been. And I really do want and feel really compelled to go back into those original sources because we rely too much on this 1999 book, I think. And I don't know enough about it to really pick it apart. And I'm not saying it deserves to be picked apart, but it needs to be questioned because this doesn't add up.

• 1:17:51Speaker 00

  That will be your next book. You've got to write this.

• 1:17:54Anthony Delaney?

  But I, I think I should look in. If somebody, if I don't, somebody should, because surely to God, that woman deserves some bit of clarity around what's gone on here. It's absolutely, this is batshit.

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  It's, it's a really unsatisfying history. There, there are just too many questions left unanswered. And there's a woman at the centre of it who's been utterly destroyed, physically and in, in historical terms. She's been erased from the world in every meaningful way. And a version of events has been put in her place that isn't satisfactory, that doesn't hold up to scrutiny, that leaves a lot of questions. Um, thank you for sharing this with me, though. It's a, I think, you know, you mentioned at the top of this episode, it's a history that's very familiar to people in Ireland. And I think it's, it's certainly

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  famous outside of Ireland, but it's not a story that I knew the details of. Um, I feel angry.

• 1:19:00Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah. And, and I will say, every retelling of this now is very much like, oh my God, poor Bridget, like, this is, everything does, nobody's saying anything beyond that when they're retelling. I'm not the first person to be like, I'm outraged by this. Everyone's outraged by this. But I just think we've relied too much on the smokescreen and we've, we've settled into the smokescreen way too much and accepted it as, because it's uncannily appealing, but I don't find it appealing. And I think the reaction you're having is that you don't find it appealing.

• 1:19:30Speaker 00

  It's a good story, but it's not the whole truth.

• 1:19:34Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, I just, we're either sophisticated thinkers in a modern world, or we're fiddly eye. Okay, I know things aren't that easily black and white, but like, come on, it's, I'm not buying it. I'm going to finish this episode before I get myself in trouble with everyone in Ireland.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Well, if you want to hear more Irish history, if you want to hear more about actually Irish stories around, the folklore around fairies, and you don't want to do it, but the extent of it, how it might pervade into historical moments, what impact it might have had, I would be interested to explore, this is a question, a little bit more. And you can get in touch with us at afterdarkerhistory.com. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment below. Leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts and we will see you next time.