DARK STORIES
Bridget Cleary
Irish people took fairies very seriously, which is why the Clonmel Chronicle was able to report in 1895 that a young woman had been carried away by them. Her name was Bridget Cleary. She was a young married woman, twenty-six years old, stylishly dressed, and apparently quite good-looking. There are no photographs, not even in the police records, although the police did keep a photo of the cutting in the bog where her body was found. For Bridget had not been taken by the fairies at all. She had been dragged by her husband and relatives from the bed where she was lying ill and accused of being a false imitation, some kind of substitute for the real woman who had been carried off. In their efforts to bring back the true Bridget, Michael Cleary and the rest held her above the fire and threw a jug of piss over her; they forced her to take herbs that had been given to them by a man called Denis Ganey, who was rumored to know about these things. The next day, her husband held a burning stick to her mouth, and when her clothes caught fire he threw paraffin on them. And after Bridget was dead, he hid the body (Bourke 1999: 55–113).
The night was cold in the month of March she was lying in her bed,
They marked her on the forehead with a poker burning red,
Are you Bridget Cleary they asked her many a time She answered yes but they would not stop from doing
the awful crime. (Ó Giolláin 1991: 210)
The Changling and the Stolen Child
There are dozens of stories about how the fairies stole a baby and left a changeling in its place; but few can compare with Jenny Blackadder's version, as she told it to a circle of wide-eyed children from Dumfries-shire in the 1780s. Here is the mother, coming back after she has been too long at the well. ‘She hears a skirl in her house like the sticking of a gryse, or the singing of a sow; fast she runs, and flees to the cradle, and there, I wat, she saw a sight that made her heart scunner. In place of her ain bonny bairn, she found a withered wolron, naething but skin and bane, with hands like a moudiewort, and a face like a paddock, a mouth frae lug to lug, and twa great glowerin een’ (Chambers 1870: 70–2).
