The 'Changeling Murder' of Bridget Cleary

Anthony Delaney (0:00)

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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?

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.

Maddy Pelling (1:34)

Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddy. And I'm Anthony. 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?

Anthony Delaney (2:05)

It doesn't quite work in an English accent.

Maddy Pelling (2:07)

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

Anthony Delaney (2:09)

No, I'm not going to. But actually, I was listening to her like that.

Maddy Pelling (2:12)

Yeah. I was like, yes.

Yeah. But I'm not going to do an Irish accent for you, Anthony.

Anthony Delaney (2:17)

So 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 cracker.

Maddy Pelling (2:23)

That is never ever happening. That's pure cancellation territory.

This is a difficult history. This is one that we've wanted to do for a really long time, isn't it?

Anthony Delaney (2:34)

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

Maddy Pelling (2:38)

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

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 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?

Anthony Delaney (3:30)

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 Two of the Dan and in Irish folklore. And they are this people who have gone underground.

Maddy Pelling (3:57)

And so they're sort of off the land in every sense.

Anthony Delaney (4:00)

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 look like a kind of French medieval nobility, which is kind of ridiculous in itself.

Maddy Pelling (4:31)

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