The Ballad of Bridget Cleary

For this poem, I was inspired by the true, bizarre, and very sad story of a young Irish woman named Bridget Cleary. In 1895, Bridget, an unusually independent girl for her time, was out delivering eggs to neighbors. When she returned shortly after, she was very ill and was thought to have some kind of bronchitis. Her husband Michael later discovered that she had traveled by a supposed fairy ringfort that was near their home while making her deliveries. This along with the fact that Bridget would not recover from her illness no matter what led for him and others in his family to suspect that the real Bridget had been stolen away by the fairies and replaced with a changeling double. He confronted the supposed "changeling" and demanded that it return his real wife to him. In Irish folklore, it is said that holding a fairy changeling close to fire will cause it to reveal itself, so that's what Michael did. Unfortunately, this resulted in Bridget being burned alive in her home. Her body was later discovered by authorities and Michael Cleary was arrested for her murder. He confessed to burning Bridget, but insisted that he was only doing what he had to do in order to get the fairies to return his real wife to him. In spite of the overwhelming evidence, Michael was sentenced to only fifteen years in prison for manslaughter when the courts decided that he truly and whole-heartedly believed that his wife had been taken away and replaced by a changeling and that it was the changeling he killed and not the real Bridget. However, there were others who felt that Michael's actions were more motivated by the fact that his wife was so independent and didn't conform to the standards of what a modest, subservient, and "traditional" Irish wife should be like for the time, especially because she had her own sewing business and brought in more money than her husband did.