A changeling in Irish folklore was a fairy left in place of someone the fairies had taken, usually a baby but sometimes a young wife. The Irish words are iarlais and síofra. Families watched for wasting and constant crying, and tried “cures” with fire and foxglove. In 1895 that belief framed the killing of Bridget Cleary by her husband in Tipperary. It was a crime, not a fairy story.
Of all the stories in Irish folklore, the changeling is the hardest to tell. On the surface it’s a fairy tale. The good people steal a baby and leave one of their own behind.
But people acted on it. Sick children were put through tests by the fire. In March 1895 a young dressmaker in Tipperary, Bridget Cleary, died at her husband’s hands.
What is a changeling in Irish folklore?
A changeling was a fairy, or something the fairies had bewitched, left in place of a human they had carried off. The family was meant to take it for their own.
W. B. Yeats, in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), says the fairies left a sickly fairy child or a log bewitched to look like one. The real child was thought to be living with the fairies, often inside a fairy fort. That’s the local name for a ringfort, or lios (say it liss), a round earthwork left from early farmsteads.
The Irish words for changeling
Irish has two words, iarlais (say it EER-lish) and síofra (SHEE-fra). In the Ó Dónaill dictionary on teanglann.ie, both mean elf-child or changeling. But iarlais can also mean a chronically ailing person, and síofra a weakling. The language itself ties the changeling to sickness.
The fairies were rarely named out loud. People called them na daoine maithe, “the good people”, out of caution rather than affection. Their mound was the sí, the same word you’ll find in bean sí, the banshee.
Who did the fairies take?
“Most commonly they steal children,” Yeats wrote. Lady Wilde, in Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), says the fairies went after handsome children.
Babies weren’t the only ones. According to tradition, the fairies also carried off brides and young women. The Schools’ Collection, the lore Irish schoolchildren wrote down in the late 1930s, has a story from Knocktopher, Co. Kilkenny of a young mother taken to nurse a fairy baby.
The signs of a changeling
A changeling wasted away and failed to grow, however much it was fed. Lady Wilde notes its huge appetite. It cried or fretted constantly, and its face looked wizened and old.
In a Co. Mayo story in the Schools’ Collection, a mother leaves her baby in a harvest field and finds a tiny crying thing in its place.
The “cures”: fire, the shovel and foxglove
The recorded “cures” were meant to frighten or hurt the fairy into giving itself away, so the real child would be sent back.
Fire and the red-hot shovel
Yeats quotes the charm Lady Wilde gives for the fire test. “Burn, burn, burn, if of the devil, burn; but if of God and the saints, be safe from harm.” In story after story, the changeling escapes up the chimney.
A Schools’ Collection story from Kinsale, Co. Cork, has a fire shovel heated red-hot and the changeling set on it. It flies up the chimney and the mother’s own baby comes back.
Lus mór, the foxglove
Foxglove is the tall purple bell flower of Irish hedgerows. In Irish it’s lus mór (say it luss MORE), “the great herb”, and it was believed to belong to the fairies.
Lady Wilde records the juice of twelve foxglove leaves being given to children who were “pining away”. Foxglove contains digitalis, which acts on the heart. Given to a sick child, it could kill.
The eggshell trick
The gentlest test is in T. Crofton Croker’s “The Brewery of Egg-shells” (1825). A mother boils water in eggshells and the startled changeling admits it’s 1,500 years old, though the red-hot poker was her next step.
What really lay behind the changeling belief?
Scholars have long linked changeling stories to illness and disability that nobody could treat. Susan Schoon Eberly’s article “Fairies and the Folklore of Disability”, in the journal Folklore (1988), is the standard starting point.
Read those signs now and they describe a sick child. Eberly argues many “changelings” match children with conditions doctors recognise today, from congenital disorders to children who simply failed to grow. The signs also fit wasting diseases like tuberculosis, then called consumption.
Some readers now see post-natal illness in the stories of taken wives. That’s a modern guess, though, not something the storytellers said.
When the stories had real victims
None of this was harmless. Lady Wilde tells, as a true case, of a wasted child left outside on a shovel for three nights and given foxglove to chew. The child died on the third night.
The historians Ciara Breathnach and Andrew Sneddon, writing for RTÉ Brainstorm, say such attacks on sick or disabled children were common in 19th-century Ireland. There were so many that they rarely made the news.
In 1895 the same logic was turned on a grown woman.
The burning of Bridget Cleary, 1895
Who was Bridget Cleary?
Bridget Boland grew up in Ballyvadlea, near Cloneen, in south Co. Tipperary, the daughter of a farm labourer. She went to the Sisters of Mercy school in Drangan and was apprenticed to a dressmaker.
In August 1887 she married Michael Cleary from Killenaule, a cooper, or barrel maker. By the early 1890s they lived with her father in a new labourers’ cottage. Bridget earned her own money from dressmaking and selling eggs. They had no children.
Her illness and the changeling rumour
In early March 1895 Bridget fell ill. On 13 March Dr William Crean, the dispensary doctor from Fethard, called and noted “nervous excitement” and a mild chest infection. A dispensary was the free public clinic for the poor.
The curate, Fr Cornelius Ryan, called twice and said Mass in the house. The family also got herbs from a “fairy doctor”, Denis Ganey, near Slievenamon.
Several accounts trace the idea that Bridget had been “taken” to Jack Dunne, a cousin of her father’s who knew the old stories well. Michael Cleary came to believe, or said he believed, that the woman in the bed was a fairy in his wife’s place.
How Bridget Cleary died
On 14 March male relatives and neighbours forced Ganey’s herbs on Bridget and held her over the kitchen fire until she answered to her name. According to evidence given in court, the question was: “Are you Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God?”
The fire and the fairy herbs come directly from the changeling tests above. Even the demand to answer in God’s name echoes the fire charm Lady Wilde recorded. After that night she was pronounced recovered.
The next night, with relatives in the house, Michael Cleary knocked Bridget down in front of the fire. He set her clothes alight with a stick from the fire and threw lamp oil over her. She burned to death.
This wasn’t folklore. It was a man killing his wife in front of witnesses, and the law treated it as a crime.
Michael and her cousin Patrick Kennedy buried her in a shallow grave some distance from the house. Michael then kept watch at Kylenagranagh, a nearby ringfort, saying she would ride out of it on a white horse.
The inquest and the trial
The Royal Irish Constabulary, the police of the day, found her body on 22 March. An inquest jury found the next day that her death “was caused by extensive burning”. With most of her family in Clonmel prison, police buried her in Cloneen after dark on 27 March.
Michael Cleary and eight others were tried at the Clonmel assizes, the travelling court for serious cases, in July 1895. Michael was found guilty of manslaughter, not murder. He was sentenced to 20 years’ penal servitude, which meant prison with hard labour.
Seven of the others were found guilty of wounding. Six went to prison, for terms from six months to five years’ penal servitude. The seventh, Bridget’s aunt Mary Kennedy, was released, and a charge against one other man was dropped.
What became of Michael Cleary
He served about 15 years and was released from Maryborough prison, now Portlaoise, on 28 April 1910. He went to Liverpool, and a Home Office letter of October 1910 records that he had emigrated to Montreal.
Was Bridget Cleary the last witch burned in Ireland?
You’ll see that line a lot, and it’s wrong. Bridget was never accused of witchcraft. The belief in that house was about fairies.
Breathnach and Sneddon show why the label stuck. Over 60 reports ran in British, American and Irish papers between July and December 1895. One in South Carolina ran under the headline “Darkest Ireland”. “Witch burning” simply made a catchier headline than “fairy burning”.
“Are you a witch or are you a fairy?”
Angela Bourke records a children’s rhyme about the case: “Are you a witch or are you a fairy, / Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?”
It’s often called an old nursery rhyme, but it can’t be older than 1895. It’s a chant about a real killing.
A killing dragged into politics
The case landed in the middle of the Home Rule debate, over a plan for an Irish parliament in Dublin. Unionist newspapers, which opposed it, used the killing to paint the Irish as unfit to govern themselves. The New York Times ran a report on 31 March 1895 drawing on unionist accounts.
Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary
The standard book on the case is The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story by Angela Bourke (Pimlico, 1999; Viking in the US, 2000).
Her central idea is that fairy legend worked like a coded language, a way to talk about things people couldn’t say openly. Here that meant a childless marriage, a wife with her own money, and local gossip.
Read that way, the case has two sides. In the language of legend, Michael was “curing” a changeling. Seen plainly, Bourke suggests, a husband killed a wife who was independent and earned her own money. She also shows oral tradition colliding with doctors, police, courts and newspapers.
Changelings in poetry: Yeats and Allingham
Yeats’s The Stolen Child first appeared in the Irish Monthly in December 1886. It has the fairies calling a child away: “Come away, O human child!”
Its refrain is the line people remember: “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
William Allingham got there first with The Fairies in 1850. In it the fairies steal a little girl away for seven years.
Changelings and Halloween
Lady Wilde records that the fairies were abroad on November Eve, the old Samhain, and that people should keep indoors. There’s more in how the Irish invented Halloween.
If you tell changeling stories this Halloween, remember that Bridget Cleary was a real woman, killed by her husband. Her death is not a ghost story.
Changeling and Bridget Cleary FAQ
What happened to Bridget Cleary?
She fell ill in March 1895 and her husband Michael came to claim she was a fairy changeling. On 15 March he set her clothes alight and she died of her burns. He was convicted of manslaughter.
What is the Irish word for changeling?
Iarlais (EER-lish) or síofra (SHEE-fra). Iarlais can also mean a chronically ailing person, which says a lot about where the belief came from.
Where is Bridget Cleary buried?
In Cloneen cemetery, Co. Tipperary. Police buried her there after dark on 27 March 1895, while most of her family were in Clonmel prison (Dictionary of Irish Biography).
How old was Bridget Cleary when she died?
Reports at the time gave her age as 26. The Dictionary of Irish Biography says she was probably born in February 1867, which would make her 28.
What happened to Michael Cleary?
He got 20 years’ penal servitude and was released in April 1910 after about 15. He emigrated to Montreal, and the record goes quiet after that.
More Irish folklore for Halloween
- How the Irish Invented Halloween
- Banshee: The Wailing Women of Irish Folklore
- The Púca
- The Dullahan
- Irish Mythological Creatures
- Cat Sìth, the Fairy Cat
- 10 Haunted Places Around Ireland
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