‘To the Catholics their fairies and the Protestants their witches’ ran an old saying in the north of Ireland at one time. This would, on the face of it, suggest that Ireland was fairly rife with instances of witchcraft and that it occurred in largely Protestant areas of the country. This is not wholly true. In fact, according to the records, there appear to have been very few formal cases of witchcraft in Ireland. Compared with areas such as Essex in England, the recorded material regarding witchcraft trials is very scarce indeed.
This, of course, does not mean that there was no witchcraft in Ireland. It could mean one of two things – first, that evidence concerning instances of witchcraft and trials of alleged witches has been lost or (more likely) that few formal instances of witchcraft were ever brought to trial in Ireland. Witchcraft certainly existed throughout the country but, one suspects, it was regarded quite differently than it was in England or Scotland.
Under the laws of both Church and State, witchcraft was viewed in different ways, depending upon the country concerned. In England, for example, it was viewed as maleficium (evil doing), a crime against society, and was therefore treated as a felony under the civil law. Historians such as Keith Thomas in his seminal book on English witchcraft, Religion and the Decline of Magic, and Alan MacFarlane in his Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England have shown how English witchcraft was firmly rooted in social disputes, individual envy, communal injustices and interpersonal dislike, coupled with a changing social ethos. The idea of witchcraft seemed to spring from spite and hatred of one’s neighbours – an ill-wishing, as it were, against those who were socially better or socially different – and English law reflected such thinking: few alleged English witches were burned, all were hanged, the traditional punishment for a felony.
On the Continent and in Scotland, however, the position was very different. Here, the notion of witchcraft was fundamentally religious and involved the complicity of Satan, the Evil One, the Enemy of All Mankind. In return for earthly powers, witches were considered to have thrown in their lot with diabolical forces – usually at the expense of their immortal souls – and had turned upon the servants and followers of Christ. In doing so, they had completely renounced Christ’s salvation and had rejected His love. They were beyond help and would ultimately burn in the fires of Hell. Under Continental law, then, witchcraft was heresy – an offence against both the laws of Man and the laws of God – and those who practised it were to be burned. The Continental view made its way to Scotland with Protestant clerics and Reformers such as George Wishart and John Knox around the end of the 1500s. Scotland became one of the very few parts of the British Isles where old women were placed on blazing tar barrels or burnt at the stake in town and village squares. Ireland, it would appear, was curiously oblivious to all this and stood apart from the witch persecutions which sporadically afflicted its neighbours. Or did it?
What particular form of behaviour constituted witchcraft? What set the alleged witch apart from his or her community? And did this sort of behaviour appear in Ireland? As with England and Scotland, the answer lay in the context of local community relations.
There is some evidence to suggest that both versions of the witch-belief – English and Continental – prevailed in Ireland as well. In many parts of the countryside there were people (mainly women) who displayed both skills and knowledge which were considered to be beyond the capabilities of ordinary mortals. Such people may have had a knowledge of herblore, a way with livestock or a highly intuitive ability to foretell the future. However, although these ‘powers’ were usually acknowledged as being supernatural, such people were not necessarily deemed to be witches – rather they were referred to as ‘wise women’ or ‘fairy doctors’ by their community. Indeed, they were regarded as integral members of society – often acting as doctors and midwives in areas where no formal medicine existed or as ‘advisors’ in the years before a communal counselling service came into being. Nevertheless, it was generally agreed that because of their alleged powers, it was unwise to cross them and that some misfortune would ensue if the wise woman or fairy doctor ‘took against’ a person. Farmers knew that if they spoke rudely to some old woman living alone on the edge of their property or if they refused her charity, their crops could fail, their cattle might fall ill, or worse – a member of their family might die. Such people were to be treated with respect.
In many cases, a reputation like this was sometimes the only way in which the old or the particularly vulnerable could obtain any sort of status in their communities. In a chauvinistic rural society, a widow woman, perhaps with no man to provide for her or to look after her, was especially susceptible to hardship. However, if the other members of the community feared her, they would treat her with caution and provide for her when she asked. Thus, as elsewhere, vulnerable people encouraged such beliefs about themselves by deliberately adopting and developing eccentric and independent ways. For women this was especially easy. Many male-dominated communities demanded certain behaviour patterns from the women in their midst. These were enforced by another male-dominated organisation – the Church. Therefore, it was not hard for independent women to outrage the forces of social morality by behaving in non-acceptable ways. And the way in which some women did this was to behave like a man – thus some women smoked, drank to excess and played cards, just like their male counterparts. Such behaviour drew attention to them and through it they acquired a reputation. If this behaviour was linked to alleged supernatural powers, then the person in question was deemed to be a ‘wise woman’ or in some other cases ‘touched by the fairies’. From their pulpits, the clergy denounced such people – women especially – as being outside the Church and ‘in dire need of salvation’.
It was a small step in certain localities from such denunciations of outlandish behaviour towards what might be described as a more ‘Continental’ viewpoint. Such women were not only flouting the Church and its teachings, they were deliberately courting the Devil and his minions. The north of Ireland, in particular, had been strongly influenced by Calvinistic Protestant doctrines introduced by Scottish settlers during the Ulster Plantation. In areas steeped in such a strict religious view, the Devil was everywhere, seeking through his agents to lead God’s people astray or to do them harm. What better way to do so than to enlist the help of such eccentric women and mould them for his own purposes by offering them earthly power and status? Thus the fiercely independent man or woman with his or her ‘arcane’ knowledge and odd ways became an instrument of the Evil One and those who consulted them were placing their immortal souls in terrible danger. At least, so ran Church teaching. Nevertheless, in many instances, the so called witches continued to enjoy both status and reputation in their specific communities. Those who were forbidden by the authorities to consult them often did so secretly, adding to the air of sinister mystery which surrounded these local practitioners. And the Church continued to fume and fulminate against them.
Occasionally such accusations did spill over into formal trials. These occurred particularly in areas of Ireland that had become heavily Anglicised – places like Youghal in County Cork or Carrickfergus in County Antrim – and may have reflected a more ‘English’ view of the matter. The case of Florence Newton, for example, with its curses and witchfinders, reflects many of the characteristics of English witchcraft cases recorded in places such as Essex. But there were Continental influences in some of the trials too, especially in areas that had been settled by those espousing religious doctrines derived from Continental Calvinism, most notably the Presbyterians of Ulster. It is interesting to note that at least one witchcraft trial in the north of Ireland – the Islandmagee case in the early eighteenth century – bears all the hallmarks of the Salem experience in 1692, which occurred in a New England community heavily influenced by Calvinist beliefs.
In the rural Irish countryside, however, the wise women and fairy doctors continued to ply their trade undeterred. Local figures such as Biddy Early in Clare and Moll Anthony in Kildare continued to give out cures, love potions and` curses, just as they’d always done and although a number of Witchcraft Acts were passed in England, supposedly to limit the influence of such practitioners, in rural Ireland they seem to have had little effect. Moreover, many of these alleged ‘witches’ were steadily acquiring a reputation far beyond their own localities. Biddy Early, the famous ‘wise woman of Clare’, for example, was well-known even as far away as the Isle of Man and people were prepared to travel from places like Douglas to her cottage at Kilbarron to consult her. And of course, as the reputation of these people grew, so did the legends and stories about them, sometimes to wild and improbable heights – Biddy Early was said to have a magic bottle in which she could foresee the future, spy on her neighbours or pin-point the location of lost objects, whilst Maurice Griffin, a legendary ‘fairy doctor’ of Kerry, was supposed to have received his powers by drinking milk from a cow which had been overwhelmed by a supernatural cloud. In many cases, the individuals concerned supported these fables as it added to their status as practitioners of the dark and magical arts.
A formal belief in witchcraft by the authorities seems to have declined around the beginning of the eighteenth century, mirroring developments in England where witchcraft trials began to die out at around this time. Informally, however, ‘wise women and fairy men’ continued to practise in rural areas right up until the twentieth century and some may still practise in the remoter regions of the countryside even today. Indeed, the last instance of alleged witchcraft in which the law was involved occurred in Ballyvadlea, County Tipperary, as recently as 1895. This case is discussed in the fourth chapter of the book.
The figure of the Irish witch, then, is a complicated one, comprising a number of functions (midwife, healer, mischief worker) and a number of strands of belief (Celtic, English, Continental). In many instances it is extremely difficult to untangle these in order to get a clear picture of what was really going on. The overlap between traditional notions of witchcraft as found in Britain and on the Continent and the widespread Irish vernacular belief in fairies, in particular, resulted in a distinctively Irish ‘take’ on witchcraft and associated supernatural matters.
‘THE CLONMEL WITCH BURNING’ (1895)
Although nowadays we tend to think of witchcraft as being something that belongs to some distant and more barbarous time – usually the medieval or dark ages – the last ‘witch burning’ in the British Isles was much more recent than that. And it happened in Ireland. The burning of Bridget Cleary in Ballyvadlea, near Clonmel in County Tipperary, occurred as recently as 1895 and was widely reported in the newspapers of the day.
The case, which provoked widespread interest at the time (the noted writer, E.F. Benson, author of the celebrated Mapp and Lucinda books, wrote an article on the incident in the highly influential journal The Nineteenth Century) is a curious amalgam of folk-belief, local fears and fairy lore. A belief in witchcraft, fairy abductions and malign powers was still deeply rooted in the local mind, and this was to have terrifying and fatal results.
The notion of fairies being involved with alleged witches was not unique to southern Tipperary. Indeed, in many parts of rural Ireland, the two were inextricably linked. Wise women and ‘fairy doctors’ (rural healers), it was believed, had received their knowledge and skills from the Little People (fairies) and maintained close links with them. It was also believed that fairies intervened more frequently in human affairs than was commonly supposed. From time to time, it was said, they might even spirit individuals away to live with them for a time and ‘teach them things’. In some cases a representation of the person – a ‘stock’ – might be left in their place in order to trick the community into believing that the person concerned was actually still amongst them. Small children and newborn babies were particularly at risk of such abductions until they were baptised, but even adults who had perhaps committed some sin might be ‘taken away’ as well.
The physical appearance of those who had been ‘taken’ often changed. This change was very apparent in babies and the very young – children who had been healthy-looking the evening before were often found thin, wrinkled and wasted in the morning. In many cases, the notion of being changed for a ‘stock’ often helped to explain the sudden onset and effects of infant tuberculosis. At one time, during an epidemic of the disease in the Burren region of County Clare, the physical appearance of the victims was put down to the fact that they’d been stolen by fairies or evil entities. Adults too could be stolen and a formerly healthy individual could be replaced with a withered, moaning thing. This was a central aspect of the Ballyvadlea witchcraft burning, where the victim was believed to have become possessed by a malevolent fairy or demonic presence.
The incident itself needs to be seen in the context of a spate of Irish ‘changeling’ incidents that had spanned the nineteenth century. In County Kerry, The Morning Post reported the following account from Tralee Assizes in July 1826.
‘Ann Roche, an old woman of very advanced age, was indicted for the murder of Michael Leahy, a young child, by drowning in the [River] Flesk. This case turned out to be a homicide committed under the delusion of the grossest superstition. The child though four years old could neither stand, walk (n)or speak – it was thought to be fairy struck – and the grandmother ordered the prisoner and one of the witnesses, Mary Clifford, to bathe the child every morning in that pool of the River Flesk where boundaries of three farms met; and on the last morning, the prisoner kept the child under the water longer than usual, when her companion (the witness Mary Clifford) said to the prisoner “How can you ever hope to see God after this?”, to which the prisoner replied that “the sin was on the grandmother and not on her”. Upon cross-examination, the witness said that it was not done with intent to kill the child but to cure it – to put the fairy out of it. The policeman who apprehended her stated that, on charging her with drowning the child, she said that it was no matter if it had died four years ago.
Baron Pennefeather said that although it was a case of suspicion, and required to be thoroughly examined into, yet the jury would not be safe in convicting the prisoner of murder, however strong their suspicion might be. Verdict – Not guilty.’
The court’s ‘not guilty’ verdict (at the direction of the judge) is suggestive of the depth of belief in changelings and ‘fairy-struck’ people within the community, yet the countryside around Glenflesk was not the only region in which such superstitions manifested themselves.
On 30 January 1888, a woman named Johanna Doyle appeared at Assizes near Killarney, again on a charge of child murder. At the time she was roughly forty-five years of age, could neither read nor write and was barely able to speak any English whatsoever. She was charged with butchering her own mentally retarded son, Patsy, with a hatchet. In this terrible act, she had been aided by her husband and three of her other children. During her trial she insisted, in Irish, that thirteen-year-old Patsy had been both ‘a fairy and a devil’, having been ‘changed’ by the fairies for some malign purpose. The family had been dogged by strange events in recent years and this had been put down to Patsy’s sorcerous influence. Another son, twelve-year-old Denis, described as ‘an imbecile’, was also considered to be under threat for a similar reason. Johanna Doyle was placed in the Killarney asylum, where she had to be restrained from hurting herself and tearing her clothes. Her eighteen-year-old daughter Mary went on record as saying that she was not surprised to hear that her mother had killed Patsy: ‘I heard people say that he was a fairy and I believed them.'
Such incidents were not confined to County Kerry. A series of changeling-related incidents appears to have occurred in County Tipperary around the mid-to-late 1800s. There are, for example, several alleged instances around Roscrea in the north of the county which seemingly took place around the 1860s but no definite information on them has been recorded.
But it was in the south of the county that the most serious instances concerning changelings seem to have occurred. The Daily Telegraph dated 19 May 1884 notes an arrest of two women in Clonmel, on the suspicion of having harmed a three year- old child named Philip Dillon. When taken before a local magistrate, Anastasia Bourke and Ellen Cushion stated that they believed the child, who didn’t have the use of his limbs, to be one of the fairy kind left in exchange for the original infant. Whilst the mother was absent, they entered the house and, seizing the unfortunate child, placed him naked on an iron shovel, holding him over a hot fire (a common way in rural areas to drive out malign creatures and spirits). In this way they hoped to ‘break the charm’ and destroy the changeling’s powers. The boy was badly burnt and at the time of the newspaper report was in a very serious condition. The prisoners were remanded in custody to stand trial (no further account exists) and during the hearing they were hooted and sneered at by locals.
The most notorious case, however, also comes from the Clonmel area and concerns Bridget Cleary, who has been ignominiously dubbed ‘Ireland’s last witch’. The horrific events that surround her death have been recorded as the ‘last witch burning in the British Isles’ and have often been cited by English writers as evidence of profound ancient superstition still existing in the Irish countryside during the late nineteenth century.
Bridget Cleary was born and died in the then relatively remote Ballyvadlea area near Clonmel, south Tipperary. She was only twenty-six years old at the time of her death in 1896 and, according to The Cork Examiner, she had been a pretty woman of medium height and of a strong and independent cast of mind. Her parents, Patrick and Bridget Boland, belonged to the poor Catholic rural labouring classes. They were devoutly religious and extremely superstitious. This was not surprising, considering the area in which they lived.
Ballyvadlea was steeped in folklore and tradition. All through the area, the remnants of ancient earthen forts and tumuli hinted at the lore and secrets of former peoples while, from the road which ran through the district, the traveller could see the distant slopes of Slievenamon, the fairy-haunted mountain, once said to be the stronghold of the legendary Fenian knights, where all manner of supernatural creatures were said to dwell. Between its lower slopes and Fethard town, many ‘slieveens’ lived. They were the ‘fairy doctors’ or ‘cunning men’ (in its modern usage the term ‘slieveen’ is now taken to mean ‘rascal’ or ‘trickster’ and is a term of abuse) who were intimately familiar with the ways of the Little People and who displayed skills that verged on the supernatural. These were men like Denis Ganey, who resided in a reputedly well-appointed thatched cabin at Kyleatlea on the mountainside, or John (Jack) Dunne, a limping, toothless man who tramped the streets of both Clonmel and Fethard, telling tales of both fairies and ghosts.
There were fairy-haunted sites everywhere in the locality. At certain times of the year, Slievenamon itself was reputedly frequented by witches and enchanters from all over Ireland. Close to where the Bolands lived rose the brooding bulk of Kylenagranagh Hill, which was topped with a fairy fort or rath – reputedly a ‘sheehoguey’ place (a site of supernatural dread) where the Sidhe or the fairy host held court and plotted mischief against the humans who lived around them. Local people simply avoided the place – beliefs connecting such sites with supernatural dangers ran very deep amongst them.
Although a strong-willed and opinionated young woman, Bridget Boland does not appear to have felt the need to move away from her narrow rural environment. Always good at sewing and stitching, she became a self-employed dressmaker, working from home. Indeed, as her father was to state later, she became one of the first women in Ballyvadlea to own a new Singer sewing machine, which she kept in her bedroom. Her new business venture seems to have been popular throughout the local community and soon Bridget Boland was relatively prosperous, which added to her desirability amongst the young men in the surrounding townlands of Ballyvadlea, Cloneen and Mullinahone. She could have had her pick of any of them. A stylish young woman by all accounts, it appears that she was noticed by one of the local landowners who, on his way to hunt with the Tipperary Hounds, had been so struck by her attractiveness as she passed him on the road that he had asked who she was and later claimed that the memory of her had stayed with him into old age. Her prettiness had also turned the heads of many of the young labourers in the area. However, the man she chose as her husband came as a surprise to the entire community. He was Michael Cleary, a dark, brooding character, almost ten years older than herself.
It is thought that Bridget and Michael met in Clonmel town. She was doing some apprentice work in a milliner’s there whilst he was working as a cooper (barrel-maker). He was a dark and sullen man who reputedly had never bothered much with women and was highly superstitious. He was, for example, wary of his wife’s mother, Bridget Keating, who had been considered to be a ‘fairy woman’ who had been ‘taken’ several times and who had as a result been somewhat distrusted. He was an unlikely partner for the independent Bridget Boland. Even so, they were married in August 1887 when Bridget was eighteen and Michael was twenty-seven. It was an unusually young age for Bridget, as most Irish women of the time delayed getting wed until they were around twenty-six. In fact, there was a surplus of unmarried women all across Ireland. The marriage was even more strange, because for some time after the wedding Michael continued to live and work in Clonmel while Bridget returned home every evening to her parents’ house near Ballyvadlea Bridge. The reason for this may have been that Bridget was needed at home to look after her mother who was ill (the older woman died around 1893) but there were other rumours too. Some people in the area suggested that Bridget might be seeing someone else and the general consensus was that it was one of her neighbours, William Simpson. If such an affair existed (and there is absolutely no evidence that it did), there were good reasons for keeping it quiet. Simpson was married and lived with his wife Mary (known as Minnie) and two children in a farmhouse a few hundred yards from the Clearys. He is described as an ‘emergencyman’ (a form of land steward) and as such was ‘not the sort of man you could easily make friends with’. He and his family occupied a farm from which the landlord, his employer, had evicted the previous tenants some years before. But there was something else – the Simpsons were Protestants and, in a conservatively Catholic area, the idea of a young Catholic girl consorting with a married Protestant was scandalous if not unthinkable. There was probably no truth at all in the rumours but it fitted in well with what some local people considered to be Bridget’s ‘high and mighty’ attitude. If the stories about his wife ever reached Michael Cleary in Clonmel, he appeared to take no heed of them. A little while after Bridget’s marriage, the Cashel Poor Law Guardians erected a new cottage in the district under the 1883 Labourer’s (Ireland) Act. This was designed to be suitable for a labouring family and was built about half a mile up the hill from Ballyvadlea Bridge in the townland of Tullowcossaun. From the door and front window it had a direct view across the countryside to distant Slievenamon. It was a fine, modern structure with a high sloping, slated roof and a chimney at each gable and, as such, was considered much grander than the cabins roundabout. There was one drawback, however. It had been built on the site of an old fairy rath and the immediate area was widely regarded as a supernatural site. Such a reputation deterred many locals from applying for its tenancy.
Nevertheless, in the late 1880s, Bridget and Michael Cleary, supported by Bridget’s parents, applied to the Guardians for tenancy of the new cottage. They were unsuccessful and the place was given to another labourer. Shortly after he moved in, the place fell vacant again, allegedly due to ‘certain problems’. It is unclear what these ‘problems’ might have been but it was said that the fairies had taken exception to the occupancy and has disturbed the man with unearthly cries and shrieks. He quickly moved out. Once again, the Clearys applied for tenancy of the cottage and this time they were successful. It is unknown when they took up occupancy but it is suspected that their move created some local resentment – after all, compared to many of their neighbours the couple were regarded as reasonably well-off, and furthermore Bridget was thought to have ‘airs’ about her. The new cottage reflected their supposedly ‘grand’ status in relation to their neighbours. Despite Bridget’s airs, the family soon fell into arrears of rent – not an uncommon thing in the district, but puzzling given the Clearys’ relatively prosperous status. In fact, they were so badly in arrears that the Poor Law Guardians forbade any repair work to be carried out on the cottage until the debt was cleared.
At Tullowcossaun, they were surrounded by relatives. Mary Kennedy, Patrick Boland’s widowed sister and Bridget’s aunt, lived a short distance away at Ballyvadlea Bridge. Her sons Patrick, James and William, all labouring men, lived with her, as did her eleven-year-old granddaughter, Katie Burke, who was her daughter Johanna’s eldest child. Johanna herself lived nearby with her husband Michael Burke, also a labourer, and several other children. Bridget had been Johanna’s bridesmaid and the two women were reasonably close, despite Johanna being some years older than her cousin (at the time of Bridget’s death she was about thirty four years old). Johanna Burke was known as ‘Han’ or ‘Hannie’ to her family and friends.
From the time she came to live at Tullowcossaun, Bridget continued to show a strong and independent spirit. Michael was still working in Clonmel and it was up to her to run the house and provide for her widowed father after her mother’s death. She still did some dressmaking, although not as much as before, but she now had another source of income – she kept hens. Hens and their eggs were an important source of income to any household and it enabled Bridget to be more or less financially independent from her husband and set a tidy sum of money by for herself. She sold ‘on tick’, collecting the money for her produce around the start of each month. There were some problems with this arrangement, however, as not everybody was willing or able to pay her when she called and some of her neighbours had soon run up large bills.
The winter of 1894/95 was bitterly cold and severe, all through South Tipperary. Snow and ice, coupled with hard frosts, delayed farm work long after Christmas, and many labourers found themselves without wages and facing the prospect of serious debt and destitution. It was not until late March that the weather picked up again and working conditions improved. For the Clearys, the situation was not so desperate – not being a labourer, Michael was not dependent on seasonal work like his neighbours, but for Bridget the impact was slightly more serious. If money was scarce throughout the countryside, payment from eggs already sold would be hard to come by.
On Monday, 4 March 1895, Bridget Cleary walked from her home in Tullowcossaun, across Ballyvadlea Bridge, towards a squalid cabin near Kylenagranagh Hill. It was here that the ‘fairy man’ Jack Dunne (a first cousin of her father’s) lived with his wife Kate, and Bridget was calling on them to collect outstanding money for eggs. Winter still had a firm grip on the land and although the day was dry it was very cold. The weather had settled into an awkward pattern – bitter days filled with snow and sleet, followed by three or four milder ones with wind and rain. The country people said that it wasn’t a healthy time. It had been snowing the night before and, as she walked, Bridget could see that the peak of distant Slievenamon was white in the morning sun. Dunne’s dwelling was a rough, narrow roadside hut and as she drew nearer, it appeared to be empty. Jack and Kate Dunne had no children and spent much of their time in the pubs of Clonmel or Fethard, leaving their cabin empty for long periods. Bridget knocked at the door but there was no reply. She waited for a while, feeling the cold penetrating her clothes, then walked home again and entered her own house shivering. She tried to warm herself in front of the open fire but, according to her cousin Johanna Burke, it was no use. She had caught what the country people called a ‘founder’, a severe and penetrating chill.
The shivering fit hadn’t passed, even by the next day, and Bridget now complained of a severe headache. Great attention was paid to the place where she had received the ‘founder’ and her reasons for being there. Living near the sinister Kylenagranagh Hill, Jack Dunne was said to be ‘well in’ with the fairies, and was widely regarded as a shanachie, a teller of stories (mainly ghost stories) and a custodian of ancient lore. He claimed to have seen the fairies on numerous occasions playing hurling near his back door in the last light of the evening. In the pubs, he frequently complained of an awful pain in his back, which he said had occurred one night when the fairies had lifted him bodily out of his bed and had thrown him out into the yard. A couple of times he had been chased into his house by a man in black and a woman in white who were undoubtedly of the fairy kind. He claimed to know the fairies intimately and had even been up Kylenagranagh Hill with them. Such talk often secured drinks for him and his wife and he was treated with a great deal of awe and respect. To demand money from a man who was so friendly with the fairies might be to invite disaster. Maybe that was what Bridget Cleary’s ‘founder’ was all about.
Bridget went to bed to see if she could recover from the chill that she’d caught at Jack Dunne’s door. There was no sign of improvement and if anything her condition grew slowly worse. It is possible that she may have caught pneumonia but she remained untreated. Doctors in the country areas around Clonmel were few and far between and were very expensive. Far better to fetch the ‘fairy doctor’ and see if he could cure the chill. And so it was that Jack Dunne himself made his way to Tullowcossaun. Ostensibly, he came as a relative and neighbour to see how she was but, as a man connected to the fairies, he was probably also called upon to make an unofficial ‘diagnosis’ to see what might be wrong with her and how best she might be cured. Although able to sit at the fire, take some food and walk around a little bit, Bridget was still feverish and was certainly not her former confident, attractive, well turned-out self. Dunne sat with her for a little while but the room was probably dark and his eyesight was not what it had been. Squinting in the smoky light, the old man looked at the young woman. His words were to have a dramatic effect on subsequent events.
‘That is not Bridget Boland,’ he whispered, using her maiden name. In other circumstances such a remark might have been taken differently. Jack Dunne could easily have meant ‘she’s not looking like herself today’ or ‘she’s badly failed’, but coming from the lips of a ‘fairy man’, these words had a particular resonance. Jack Dunne was actually articulating what a number of people were thinking anyway – that the real Bridget had been somehow spirited away and had been replaced by a ‘stock’ or ‘pattern’ of herself. This was no longer a human woman but a ‘sheehoguey’ thing that had come down from Kylenagranagh Hill to take her place. Bridget, of course, had a number of enemies amongst her neighbours – those who were envious of her, suitors that she’d snubbed and those who thought that she was too ‘high and mighty’ – and some of them had been remarking on how a proud and independent woman had suddenly turned into a weak and insipid invalid who could not even go out of the house. The reason for such sudden and rapid deterioration had to be a supernatural one. There was one other indication that this might be the case – although they had been married for over seven years, Michael and Bridget Cleary were still childless, a sure hint of fairy involvement.
Following Dunne’s assertions, he was asked to look at the invalid more closely and he immediately suggested that she was indeed a fairy. One leg, he stated, was longer than the other (a condition which was not dissimilar to Dunne’s own) which was a sure sign that she was ‘fairy-struck’. Whilst he was measuring Bridget, Michael Cleary arrived at the house to find him there. He paid close attention to everything Jack Dunne had to say, taking the old man’s opinions (strange though they were) to heart.
‘This is not my wife at all. This is not Bridget,’ Michael muttered to himself. ‘It’s a fairy-creature from Kylenagranagh Hill.’ But although he was suspicious, he did nothing about it
Source
http://oldmooresalmanac.com/news-topics/paranormal-ireland/the-last-irish-witch.html
