‘She was wronged’: new film lifts the lid on an infamous Irish ‘witch burning’

The killing of Bridget Cleary by her husband in 1895 was long a taboo subject in Tipperary

Sun Nov 01 2026 - 06:43 • 4 MIN READ

Mark Fitzgerald recalls the response of one customer in his pub in Cloneen, Co Tipperary, when told a drama group in the area was making a film about the burning to death of local woman Bridget Cleary in 1895. “Isn’t it a bit soon?”

Fitzgerald himself has a part in the film. Fellow cast member Eugene O’Meara says the burning alive by Michael Cleary of his 26-year-old wife remained a taboo subject for well over a century in south Tipperary. Cleary claimed she was possessed by a fairy.

“I remember I came home from primary school one day in Mullinahone – this would have been in the 1960s – and I recited this rhyme I had learned: ‘Are you a witch or are you a fairy or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?’ I asked my father what did it mean.

“He had been born in 1917 in Drangan, just half a mile from where Bridget was killed and just 22 years after it happened, and he said to me: ‘Don’t let me ever hear you mention that name in this house again’. It was like an omerta; it was never mentioned.”

More than 130 years later, it still resonates as a shocking tale of barbarity – how a young woman of independent means was burned to death by her husband before other relatives, including her father, after a local maven on piseogs convinced them she was a changeling possessed by a fairy.

Bridget Boland, a seamstress, had met Cleary, a cooper, in Clonmel. They married in 1887 and he moved into her small cottage with her father, Patrick. They seemed happy, and Bridget had her own income from selling eggs.

According to Cliona Purcell, curator at Waterford Treasures, Bridget caught a cold after stopping off at a fairy fort at Kylenagranagh Hill on her way to deliver eggs to a neighbour. She took to bed for 10 days, and a local doctor diagnosed her with bronchitis and left her medicine.

But Michael Cleary had no faith in prescriptions and instead called a friend, Jack Dunne, who believed that when Bridget walked into the fairy fort, she had become a changeling, possessed by a fairy. Cleary consulted a local herbalist and “fairy doctor”, Denis Ganey, who confirmed Dunne’s suspicion.

What followed was horrific. There was a belief that fairies were afraid of fire. After burning Bridget’s face with a red-hot poker, Cleary held her before the fire where, after brandishing a burning stick in her face, he poured lamp oil over her and set her alight with the stick.

“It’s not my wife I am burning,” Cleary is reported to have said in front of the eight others, including Bridget’s father. Cleary locked those present in the house with her body while he dug a shallow grave before waiting in vain for three nights outside the fairy fort for his wife to appear.

The film Bridget has been made by the local community, with the director and co-scriptwriter Anne Williamson the driving force. .

“I’d say I grew up maybe a mile from where it happened, so it fascinated me since I was a child when my grandfather used to tell me about it. He never believed any of the fairy stuff – he just thought Michael Cleary was jealous and crazy but the story was always a talking point in our house,” Williamson says.

“Of course, some people didn’t want to talk about it at all, but it was always a tale that tore at my heart strings, the fact that Bridget was burned and buried in the middle of the night with no mourners. It always got to me that she was wronged.”

The burning scene, filmed in one of the rooms in Fitzgerald’s authentically antique pub, The Thatch, is handled with a deftness of touch and editing that is almost Hitchcockian. Today’s viewer is spared the trauma, but Bridget Cleary was not the only casualty of the crime.

Michael Cleary escaped the hangman’s noose, convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to 15 years. Others received lesser sentences. But the people of Tipperary and indeed of Ireland were condemned for the barbarism.

Murphy says the reason the story went global was that a New York Times reporter described it as “a witch burning, which wasn’t accurate and was inflammatory”. “But coming just 200 years after the Salem witch trials in New England, it gave it a huge currency across the United States and beyond.”

Williamson believes “misogyny played a huge part” in what was done to Bridget. “To be burned alive and then for her story to be shunned for over a hundred years is appalling, but I think we have gone some way towards righting that wrong and she has finally been vindicated, which was our aim making the film.”

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