1672 – The first declaration of indulgence suspending penal laws against Catholics and dissenters is issued by Charles II.
1764 – Charles O’Conor, antiquary and historian, is born in Belanagare, Co Roscommon.
1773 – Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ is performed at Covent Garden Theatre, London.
1774 – Birth of author, Isaac Weld, in Dublin.
1813 – In the British House of Commons, Sir…
Are you a witch, or are you a faerie?
Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?
Policemen had been combing the fields of Ballyvadlea, Ireland, for a week when they finally discovered the body of 26-year-old Bridget Cleary. The young woman’s body had been wedged beneath several inches of clay and a jumble of thorn bushes, but her corpse showed wounds caused by something much worse than branches: Her spine and lower limbs were so badly burned that parts of her skeleton were exposed. She was naked, except for a stocking and one gold earring, and her head was encased in a sack.
19th century Ireland was a society steeped in legends of the supernatural, especially when it came to fae. Bridget herself was known to be fascinated by the beings, and to take trips to the most fairy-ridden spots around town. On March 4, 1895, when she went to deliver eggs to her father’s cousin, Jack Dunne, near Kylenagranagh Hill. The area was home to a ringfort, an early medieval circular fortified settlement believed, in Irish folklore, to be a “fairy fort,” and thus to be avoided at all costs. Yet Bridget often visited the fort, and she likely spent time there that Monday after delivering the eggs.
It was after this visit that Michael Cleary, Bridget’s husband, became convinced that the now bed-ridden woman in their cottage was “too fine,” in his own words, to be his wife, and that she was “two inches taller” than the woman he had known. At some point, Michael had developed the belief that Bridget had been replaced by a fairy changeling as she passed near the fairy fort on Kylenagranagh Hill.
It was this belief that would drive Michael murder his wife merely 11 days later when he set Bridget on fire in their family home.
Lore Episode 11: Black Stockings (Transcript) - 25th July 2015
tw: violence, death by fire, medical details, ableism, child abuse, torture, unsanitary procedures
Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!
Before we begin, I want to share something exciting with you. My newest novel, Grave Suspicion, is finally here. In fact, today is release day, and like every other type of release, the first day is always the most important. The novel is a supernatural thriller. If you like the unexplainable, the odd, and the mysterious then you’ll love this book. It’s available in paperback as well as a number of digital formats from eBook stores, and it would mean the world to me if you’d consider buying a copy today. You can go to amazon.com and search “Grave Suspicion Aaron Mahnke”, or visit aaronmahnke.com and find links to your other favourite formats. And thanks in advance for an incredible release day for this book, and know I couldn’t have done it without you. And now, on with the show.
Most of us have had the joy of being sick once or twice in our lives. It’s a part of the human experience, I suppose – we get sick, and then we get better. At least, that’s how its supposed to work. One thing I’m constantly thankful for is the fact that we live in such a modern, enlightened age of medicine. We no longer use urine as an antiseptic and we don’t diagnose illness based on our astrological signs, but that wasn’t always the case. Gone are the days of bleeding ourselves with leeches or trying to balance our humours to make sure our sanguine fluids aren’t overpowering our melancholic fluids, and I’m probably not the only one who’s happy that we no longer treat sick people with enemas administered with metal syringes filled with boar bile. Yes, bile from a boar. I could not make this stuff up. Our ancestors didn’t know why certain things happened, but they sure did their best their best to try. Stories were created, myths were told, and superstitions took root. All of them were designed to explain why things happened, and these reasons, even if they were pure fabrications, somehow helped people deal with the realities of life. Why was my child born deformed? Why did my husband’s personality change overnight? Why did my entire family die from a plague last year? These questions haunted people in ways we can’t understand today, and they grasped for anything that would help them cope. They found answers in their common folklore. Among the countless tales and stories told, there’s one superstition from Ireland that saw more usage than most. You see, when something didn’t seem right, when things went wrong, and people suffered, there was only one explanation in the minds of the Irish that covered it all: they blamed it on changelings. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.
A changeling, according to the folklore of Europe, is a kind of fairy. Stories of them can be found in Germany, Ireland, England, Scandinavia, Spain, and many other European countries. In all those cultures, changelings have the same methodology: they are a substitute for a kidnapped human being. Either out of jealousy or great need, fairies were said to enter our world and make a trade without our knowledge. They would leave one of their own behind and return to the fairy realm, where the kidnapped human would live a happy, joyful life in paradise. We have a great summary of changelings thanks to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. “They steal children”, he wrote, “and leave a withered fairy, 1000, or maybe 2000, years old instead. At times, full-grown men and women have been taken. Near the village of Colonie lives an old woman who was taken in her youth. When she came back, at the end of seven years, she had no toes, for she had danced them all off”. Changelings, according to the legends, can actually take one of three forms. The first is the kind Yeats wrote about: the senile and ancient fairy, who is disguised as a child. Another kind of changeling was an actual fairy child, and the third type was simply an inanimate object, such as a block of wood or a carved log. This third type is sometimes known as a “stock”. The logic, at least to someone in medieval Europe, was simple. If a child was born with birth defects, was sickly or ill-tempered, they were often thought to be the fairy substitute, left behind when their real child was taken from their home. If an adult went missing, or was later found mysteriously dead, people would often assume that the body was really a bundle of sticks that had merely been enchanted to resemble their loved one. Folklore blossomed on the subject. Wives’ tales and legend taught new generations how to spot a changeling, instantly providing them with both one more reason to fear every little change in a person’s life, but also some safety and hope that they could cling to.
Even the overall wellbeing of a family could hinge on these creatures. Changelings, you see, were said to drain all the luck away from a home, and by doing so, they would leave a family cursed to struggle with poverty and misfortune, all while trying to care for a child they saw as a curse more and more, every day. When the stories focused on men and women who had been swapped out for a fairy, the symptoms were more psychological in nature. Signs of an adult changeling included mood swings, becoming argumentative, and losing interest in friends and family. Changelings were said to have enormous appetites, eating everything they were given and then asking for more. It was said that if your infant preferred food from the larder rather than being nursed, there was a chance they weren’t really your child at all. While most changeling infants died in early childhood, those that survived were said to become dim-witted adults. Men and women who survived this long were sometimes called “uffa”, which is where we get the word “oaf”. Thankfully, though, there were ways to test people to see if they were, in fact, a changeling. One method involved putting a shoe in a bowl of soup. If the baby saw this and laughed, it was seen as proof that the child was a changeling. Another method involved making a tiny loaf of bread inside half an eggshell, again meant to make the fairy laugh. And once discovered, a fairy changeling could be driven from the house in a variety of ways, in which case the kidnapped human child or adult would be returned unharmed. One trick involved holding the suspected child over a fire, while another recommended forcing the suspect to drink tea brewed with foxglove, a poisonous flower. It was thought that as the person’s body expelled the toxin through vomiting and diarrhoea, the changeling would be forced to return to the fairy realm. It sounds crazy to think that people would believe such stories, even centuries ago. Surely no one actually performed these tests, or administered these treatments, especially to their own family, right? Unfortunately, history teaches us that desperate people are capable of just about anything.
In July of 1826, a woman named Anne Roche from Tralee, Country Kerry in South-West Ireland, was caring for a four-year-old boy named Michael Leahy. According to her own testimony, the boy was unable to walk, stand or speak. Convinced that he was, in fact, a fairy changeling, she bathed him in icy waters three times to force the fairy out. The boy drowned. She was tried by court, and they found her not guilty. In 1845, a woman suspected of being a changeling was placed in a large basket filled with wood shavings, and then hung over the kitchen fire until the contents of the basket ignited. In 1851, a man in Ireland literally roasted his child to death, because he believed the boy to be a fairy. Three children were suspected of being fairies in 1857 – they were bathed on a solution of foxglove, and then forced to drink it. Sometimes babies were left in or near bodies of water as a way of forcing the changelings to leave. In 1869, an exorcism was attempted by dipping a child three times in a lake in Ireland. Another woman actually left her infant on the shore of a lake, and walked away, expecting the fairies to come and make the swap. Thankfully, she returned later to reclaim her child. Sometimes neighbours stepped in when the parents of an obvious changeling would did nothing. In 1884, while the mother of three-year-old Philip Dillon was out of the house, Ellen Cushion and Anastasia Rourke snuck inside. Philip, you see, could not use his arms and legs, and these neighbours saw that as proof enough of his condition. One of the neighbours stripped the boy naked while the other stoked a fire. Then, when everything was ready, they placed him on a large shovel and held it over the flames. Little Philip survived, but he was severely burnt by the incident. We hate what we fear, you see, but rather than fade away as the 19th century moved on, the fears and superstitions around changelings only seemed to grow in Ireland, and as hard as it might be to believe, things were about to get worse.
In the late 19th century, one of the governing bodies in Ireland was the Board of Guardians in each district. They were tasked with dispensing public aid, and one of the ways they did that was by building labourer cottages, homes built to provide housing for rural agricultural workers. Many workers had lost their land in the recent famine, and this was one way of helping alleviate some of the homelessness and poverty that had become so common in the country. One cottage was constructed in Ballyvadlea, a small community of just nine homes and 31 people, in County Tipperary. The family who was awarded the cottage moved in, but there was a problem. It seems that the house had been built on a rath, a low, earthen ring, and while archaeologists know them to simply be remnants of an Iron Age fort, some of the Irish still thought of them as “fairy rings”, portals into another realm. After the family moved in, odd things began to happen. Cries in the night, noises that couldn’t be identified, and a feeling of dread. Almost as soon as the tenants had moved in, they were leaving. In their stead, the cottage was given to an old, retired labourer named Patrick Boland, who moved in with his adult daughter and her husband. His daughter, Bridget, was unusual. In 1895, it was the men who controlled the family, they were the breadwinner and sole provider. But even though her husband, Michael, did well as a cooper, someone who makes and repairs barrels, a business that has always done well in Ireland, Bridget wasn’t dependent on him. She had her own business making dresses and keeping hens, and the income from those jobs was more than enough to meet her needs. She was also said to be clever, flirtatious, and highly independent. You can imagine how she must have annoyed her husband and caught the ire of the neighbours, and then there were the rumours of the affair she was having with another man. Bridget Cleary was a self-made, self-possessed woman, and everyone else was bothered by that. I tell you all that because stories have layers. There’s the meaning you glean from the initial telling, and then there’s the rest of the story. The deeper you dive, the more things begin to make sense, and believe me when I tell you there’s a lot about this story that fails to make sense. On March 4th, 1895, Bridget left home on an errand. She had eggs to deliver to the house of her father’s cousin, Jack Donne. It was a short enough distance that she decided to walk, but the weather turned sour while she was out. She spent the next day in bed, complaining of a raging pain in her head. She had chills and shivered constantly. Donne came by the little college to visit a few days later and found Bridget still in bed. He took one look at her, and declared, “That’s not Bridget”. According to him, she was a changeling. Thankfully, no one believed him. Yet.
On March 9th, five days after Bridget’s walk in the cold, her father walked four miles to the nearest doctor and asked him to come help. Two days later, there was still no sign of the doctor, and so her husband, Michael, made the journey. After yet two more days of waiting, the doctor had still not come, and so Michael went again, this time making sure that he brought along the summons from the local health authority. While her husband was out looking for the doctor, the doctor arrived unexpectedly. He did his typical house call check-up, prescribed some medicine, and then left. Still frustrated, the family called upon a priest to come by and give her last rights, just in case. Things weren’t looking up for Bridget Cleary. This was March 13th, a full nine days since taking ill, and so later that evening neighbours and relatives gathered at the cottage to help administer fairy medicine in the form of herbs. Bridget refused the treatment, and they held a red-hot poker in her face until she complied. Things got worse the following day. Cousin Jack Donne had begun to spread word that Bridget had been taken by the fairies and replaced by a changeling. At his urging, a man named Denis Ganey was called to the house. Ganey was known in the community as a fairy doctor and was well-versed in treating cases such as these. His treatments wouldn’t necessarily fit into modern medical textbooks, mind you. They included the use of the hot poker, forcing the changeling to drink first milk from a cow that had just given birth, dousing the person in urine and exposing them to flames. Bridget was slapped and held in front of the fireplace, while her husband demanded that she state, before God and family, that she was indeed Bridget Cleary. Even though she answered yes, the gathered crowd didn’t believe her.
Now, before I continue, there’s something you need to understand about Michael Cleary’s state of mind. While his mother had died when he was young, his father had just passed away hours before. He and Bridget were childless, and they lived with her father in a spare room in the 19th century equivalent of public housing. His own wife was rumoured to be cheating on him, and she didn’t even need him to support her. Michael Cleary was adrift, he had come undone, and maybe that’s what drove him to the edge of sanity. The treatments continued late into the night. Friends and family began to ask to leave, but Michael was said to have yelled that no one was leaving until Bridget came home. He locked the door and placed the key in his pocket. If they could just get this right, he told them, if they could just drive the fairy out and be done with it, his Bridget would come home. Again, she was asked to declare her identity, and Bridget refused. Now, historians don’t know why. Maybe she was just afraid, maybe her independent, stubborn nature prevented her from handing over authority to her husband. Whatever the reason, her silence infuriated Michael. He stripped her to her undergarments and pushed her to the floor. “Come home Bridget, in the name of God”, someone was said to have cried as she lay near the fire. “She’s not my wife”, Michael replied, “you’ll soon see her go up the chimney”. And with that, he doused her with lamp oil, and grabbed a log from the burning fireplace, which he used to ignite the oil. Bridget Cleary burnt to death on the hearth of her own kitchen fireplace, in front of her husband and father, cousins and friends. She was 26 years old.
We haven’t always known as much about the world as we do now. Compared to the centuries before our own, we live in a veritable golden age of knowledge and understanding. Science has eradicated much of the ignorance that once plagued us, and while I’m a fan of mystery and unanswered questions, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Ignorance has been used as a justification for the barbaric, inhumane treatment of other people, to fuel our hatred of those who aren’t like us. That kind of fear often becomes the agent of a dark transformation. Under the influence of fear, humans have a history of mutation, of changing into something grotesque and dangerous. We become monsters. Fear drove Michael Cleary and the others to kill his wife - fear of illness and disease, of mental and medical mysteries, the fear of the loss that seems to be creeping ever closer to his household, and blinded by that fear, Michael Cleary lashed out with the only tool he had: superstition. In many ways, it’s beyond ironic that his fear turned him into someone else. In the end, perhaps, he was the changeling. After forcing one of Bridget’s cousins by knifepoint to help wrap her body in a sheet, he carried her to a nearby field, and buried her in a shallow grave. A short time later, some of the neighbours told the local priest that Bridget Cleary had gone missing. They said, in whispered tones, that it had been a fairy exorcism. When the priest found Michael Cleary praying in the church the next day, he brought up the man’s wife. “Is your wife alright?” the priest asked. “I heard she’d been sick”. “I had a very bad night, father”, Michael told him, a wild look in his eye. “When I woke up, my wife was gone. I think the fairies have taken her”. He was convinced she would return. He had plans to visit a nearby fairy ring and wait for her. She would arrive, he said, in a white gown on a pale horse, and he would cut her bindings with a blackened knife. His Bridget would come home. The priest, to his credit, didn’t believe a single word. He called the police, and a massive search was undertaken. On March 22nd, two constables found her body in the shallow grave her husband had dug just days before. She had been badly burnt, and lay in the foetal position, her knees against her chest, arms wrapped tightly around them. Because her face had escaped the fire, a cloth sack had been placed over her head. All that remained of the little clothing she had been wearing was a pair of black stockings. Bridget Cleary would never come home.
This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can learn more about me and this show over at lorepodcast.com, and be sure to follow along on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, @lorepodcast. This episode of Lore was made possible by you, the most thoughtful and knowledgeable listeners around. [Insert sponsor break]. Let me take a moment to say thank you. Because of you, Lore has been a runaway success, and truth be told, I couldn’t have done any of that without you, and I’m thankful to each and every one of you. Now, many of you have asked me to step it up and produce this show weekly, and I’ll be honest – I would love to do that. But to get there, I need your help. So, do this for me: visit my sponsor websites and sign up for their free trials, that helps so much in the long-term success of this show. Pitch in over at Patreon, leave an iTunes review, buy some of my novels, every little bit helps me get closer to being able to take Lore to a full-time, weekly schedule. You can find links and info on how to do all of that over at lorepodcast.com/support. As always, thanks for listening.
Notes
Literally no Celticist with any level of proficiency would use Yeats as a source for “Celtic mythology”.
I can’t find any source for this word “uffa”, but the etymology of “oaf” apparently does trace back to the Old Norse alfr, meaning elf.
