Part One: The Woman the Fairies Took

There is a phrase I have been careful with when talking about my forthcoming novel, Why the Curlew Cries.

Inspired by true events.
Not based on a true story. There is a difference.

Jack Dawson is fictional. So are Gerry, Angela and the people Jack encounters as he follows the case his dead partner left behind. But fiction does not grow in a vacuum, and there are real pieces of Irish history sitting underneath this book.
Some of them are surprisingly recent. Others are older, one of the oldest is the story of Bridget Cleary.

I had known the name before I really knew the story. I suspect a lot of Irish people are the same. Bridget Cleary, the woman burned as a witch. Ireland's last witch burning. It is usually reduced to something like that.

Except Bridget Cleary was not really accused of being a witch.

What happened to her was, somehow, stranger and much more Irish.

Bridget
Bridget Boland was born in Ballyvadlea, near Cloneen in County Tipperary. There is some disagreement over her exact year of birth, although contemporary accounts generally described her as twenty-six when she died.
She was educated, worked as a dressmaker and earned additional money selling eggs. She had been apprenticed to a dressmaker and owned a sewing machine, something worth noting in rural Ireland in the 1890s. She was making her own money. Her husband, Michael Cleary, was a cooper.
They had no children. The Dictionary of Irish Biography, in an entry written by folklorist Angela Bourke, describes the couple as being more prosperous than many of their neighbours. Bridget was not some mysterious old woman living alone at the edge of a bog. She was a young working woman living in a relatively new labourer's cottage, earning money from her own skills and going about an ordinary life. I think that matters.

It makes what happened next harder to comfortably push back into some ancient Ireland where people supposedly knew no better. This was 1895. There were doctors. There were newspapers. There were police. Trains crossed the country. Oscar Wilde's name would be all over the newspapers within weeks. And people still believed that the fairies could take you.

The illness
In early March, Bridget became ill with what the Dictionary of Irish Biography records as bronchitis. Her husband and father tried to get the local dispensary doctor, William Crean, to attend her. A priest, Father Cornelius Ryan, also came to the house.
That is another part of the story that tends to disappear in the retelling.
The family did not simply reject modern medicine and decide to call the fairies instead. A doctor was sought, a priest came. And folk belief entered the room alongside them.

When the doctor was slow in attending, the family also sought help from Denis Ganey, described as a "fairy doctor", and the idea began to take hold that the sick woman lying in Bridget Cleary's bed might not actually be Bridget Cleary at all.  She might be a changeling. For anyone unfamiliar with the belief, a changeling was something left behind when the fairies took a human being. The stories most often concern babies and children, but adults could be taken too.
The thing left behind might look like the person. But it wasn't them and if you believed that completely, a horrifying bit of logic followed.

Hurting the thing in front of you was not necessarily hurting the person you loved.
You might even convince yourself that you were saving them.

Are you Bridget Cleary?
By 14 March the situation inside the Cleary house had become frightening. Bridget's cousin Johanna Burke later gave evidence about what she witnessed. Her testimony was reported by The Irish Times during the court proceedings and survives in the newspaper's archive.

Johanna arrived to find Bridget being held down by men including relatives, neighbour John Dunne and Michael Cleary. A mixture of herbs and milk was being forced into her.
Michael repeatedly demanded that his wife identify herself.

Was she Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary?
She answered, he asked again, she answered again. When she did not answer as required the third time, the sick woman was taken from the bed and held above the embers of the kitchen fire. Eventually she gave them the answer they wanted.
The ritual appeared, for the moment, to have worked. The Dictionary of Irish Biography records that Bridget was pronounced recovered that night, whether from the illness or from whatever they believed the fairies had done to her.  It should have ended there, it didn't.

The following night
On Friday, 15 March, relatives were again gathered in the house.
Bridget was dressed and brought into the kitchen. Michael gave her bread and again demanded that she identify herself three times. According to Johanna Burke's evidence, Bridget answered twice and ate two pieces. Michael forced the third piece into her mouth. Then he knocked her to the floor. He put his knee on her chest and a hand at her throat. He took a burning stick from the fire.

Eventually Bridget's clothes were set alight and lamp oil was thrown over her.
She burned to death in her own kitchen.
Johanna's evidence gives us something even more disturbing than the violence itself. Michael appears to have believed, or at least claimed to believe, that the woman burning in front of him was not his wife.
His real wife had been taken.
This was the thing the fairies had left behind. 

That distinction is why calling Bridget Cleary "the last witch burned in Ireland" has always bothered me. A witch is a human being believed to possess supernatural powers.
That was not really the accusation here.
The horror of Bridget's case is that the people around her had begun denying that she was human at all.

The white horse
After Bridget was dead, Michael Cleary and her cousin Patrick Kennedy buried her body in a shallow grave.
Then Michael waited for his wife to come back.
This may be the part of the story that stayed with me most.
He went with others to the nearby ringfort at Kylenagranagh. He believed Bridget would emerge from it among the fairies, riding a white horse. Think about that for a moment.
His wife's burned body was lying in the earth. And somewhere nearby, men were watching an ancient fort for a woman on a white horse.

This was not a detail invented later to make the story more Gothic. Angela Bourke notes that the idea corresponds closely with existing Irish fairy stories and ballads. The belief had a structure. There were rules to it. There were stories already there telling people how someone taken by the fairies might return. 

That frightens me far more than the idea of somebody simply losing his mind. Because stories shared by a community can become very powerful things. Usually they are harmless. Sometimes they are beautiful.
And occasionally somebody believes them enough to act.

The body
Rumours about Bridget's disappearance eventually reached the Royal Irish Constabulary. A search began. On 22 March, a week after her death, Bridget Cleary's burned body was found. Michael Cleary and eight others were arrested. Bridget was buried in Cloneen cemetery on 27 March. Most of her family could not attend because they were in prison. Michael Cleary eventually faced trial in Clonmel. The murder charge was reduced to manslaughter and he was sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. Seven others were convicted in connection with the violence inflicted upon Bridget. 

But the story did not end in the courtroom.
In some ways, that is where the next version of Bridget Cleary began.

Ireland on trial
The murder became international news.
And because this was Ireland in 1895, even the death of a woman in a small Tipperary cottage managed to become political.
Home Rule was still a live and bitter question. Opponents of Irish self-government seized upon the case as evidence of a backward, superstitious population incapable of governing itself. Newspapers sympathetic to Home Rule pushed back against the idea that the beliefs involved in Bridget's death represented rural Ireland as a whole.
Bridget became useful to everyone.
Her death became evidence of Irish barbarism to some and an embarrassing aberration to others. Angela Bourke's research has explored this collision between the oral culture surrounding Bridget and the written world of newspapers, courts and colonial politics. 

And somewhere underneath all of that was Bridget.
A dressmaker.
An egg seller.
A wife.
A young woman who got sick. I think we owe it to her not to lose sight of that. Then the murder became folklore There is one final twist that I find fascinating. Decades later, the story turned up in the National Folklore Collection.

During the Schools' Collection of the 1930s, a local account was recorded under the title The Burning of the Woman. In it, the house where Bridget died is remembered as the "Fairy Cottage."

The details have already started to change. The account does not perfectly match the evidence presented at the trial. There is speculation that Bridget may have already been dead when she was burned, and the events have been reshaped by decades of telling and retelling. 

That is almost the perfect ending to the story. Bridget Cleary was killed partly because people believed folklore. Then Bridget Cleary herself became folklore.
The murder entered the same oral world that had helped make the murder possible in the first place.

Black Stockings
I was also drawn back to Bridget's story through Aaron Mahnke's Lore podcast. Episode 11, Black Stockings, first released in 2015 and later remastered, places Bridget's murder within the wider tradition of changeling stories.
Mahnke opens from a simple idea: human beings create stories to explain things they cannot explain, and occasionally those stories stop being stories.
That episode is well worth listening to alongside Angela Bourke's much deeper historical work because it captures something difficult to get from dates and court records alone. It captures the unease of the belief itself. 

And that brings me back to Why the Curlew Cries.
My novel does not retell Bridget Cleary's murder. There is no fictional Bridget Cleary hiding inside it.

What stayed with me was something else.
The idea of an Ireland where the rational and irrational can occupy the same room.

A doctor can be called.

A priest can arrive.

The police can investigate.

And, somewhere beyond the house, there can still be a fairy fort where someone is waiting for a woman to return on a white horse.

We like to imagine there is a clean line between folklore and reality. There isn't always. Sometimes one bleeds into the other. And sometimes there is blood.
Why the Curlew Cries grew, in part, out of that uncomfortable space.

In Part Two

I will move forward into modern Ireland and look at another shadow behind the novel: the women who disappeared, the cases that remain unresolved, and the terrible power of not knowing what happened.

Sources and further reading

Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999), and “Reading a Woman's Death: Colonial Text and Oral Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland”, Feminist Studies (1995). 

Dictionary of Irish Biography, “Cleary, Bridget,” contributed by Angela Bourke, Royal Irish Academy. 

The Irish Times, “The story of the last ‘witch’ burned alive in Ireland,” drawing on the paper's contemporary 1895 court reports. 

National Folklore Collection, UCD / Dúchas.ie, The Burning of the Woman, Schools' Collection, Volume 0557. 

Aaron Mahnke, Lore, Episode 11, Black Stockings, first released 27 July 2015 and remastered in 2021.