Written by David Caldwell · 15 August 2025

Changelings: Fairy Doubles, Old Fears, and the Tragedy of Bridget Cleary

What people meant by a “changeling”

In the island folklore recorded across the 19th and early 20th centuries, a changeling was a substitute: a fairy double left in place of a stolen human being. The fear touched children most often, but it could reach adults too. Sources describe the same signatures: a sudden, uncanny change of face or voice; relentless crying; wasting; strangeness that neighbours called “not herself” or “not himself.” In Andrew Lang’s 1895 discussion, the old explanation ran like this: when a healthy, good-tempered child becomes peevish and “a bag of skin and bones,” the primitive conclusion is that the real child has been taken and “a substituted fairy brat” left behind (Illustrated London News, 23 May 1895).

Welsh testimony kept the same outline but gave it local names. The Tylwyth Teg (the fairies) were said to carry off the beautiful and healthy, leaving a plentyn-nyd (changeling). At first the impostor might look just like the stolen child, but would soon “become ugly and sickly and always crying.” Families laid rowan or a piece of iron near the cradle as protection, and even christening customs took on a protective edge: the north door of the church left open “so the devil could go out,” and the christening water thrown “on to something green,” preferably the leek bed (Country Life, 11 July 1963).

Where the fairies were thought to dwell

Accounts from Mourne in County Down placed the “wee people” close to home - in shady greenwoods and in the circular forts scattered over the countryside. People warned against interfering with these places, telling of misfortune if a rath or “fort” was disturbed (Newry Telegraph, 1 Dec 1927). One old “Ballykeel” story had a man threaten to put a fairy fort “in the middle of your house,” after which the walls were said to crumble of their own accord (ibid.). In the harvest-field tale from the same article, the danger came in with a stranger: a travelling worker who played the flute at midday and later danced a farmer’s infant in the kitchen. The mother returned to find her baby’s face “strange and pinched.” The household took him for a fairy in disguise, attempting a theft (ibid.).

This sense of being watched or rivalled by another folk appears again and again. In Wales, a later writer even repeated the speculation that the Tylwyth Teg might once have been a defeated people, driven into wild places - an idea used to explain why their raids on cradles felt like revenge (Country Life, 1963).

Recognising (and resisting) the changeling

The newspaper tales keep returning to the same tests and counters:

• Speech gives it away. In Bristol’s Horfield and Bishopston Record (7 Oct 1911), a mother followed a wise woman’s odd advice: set a pot to boil and “brew with egg-shells,” and leave the door open. When the watching “baby” asked, “What are you brewing, mammie?” she knew a true infant could not speak plainly and pressed on. The creature declared, “I’ve lived a hundred years and have never seen egg-shell beer brewed before,” and fled out the open door - whereupon her own “big, rosy baby” lay again in the cradle.
• The eggshell ruse - again, but darker. A Herefordshire version (recounted in the Wicklow News-Letter, 29 Mar 1913, from Ella Mary Leather) tells of a “baby that never grew,” ever hungry, ever ailing. When the husband brewed in an eggshell, the creature laughed: “I am an old, old man, and I never saw a soldier brewing in an eggshell before.” It shrieked, recognised the trick, and vanished through the window. The husband followed and found not an infant but a man of twenty-four, “fine and healthy,” and carried him home to his weeping mother.
• The dung-heap ordeal. A much-reprinted Irish anecdote (e.g., Kilburn Times, 7 Aug 1885; Sevenoaks Chronicle, same date) - collected by the Rev. John O’Hanlon - has neighbours convinced a respectable farmer’s child had been swapped. A “fairy-woman” was called; with her charms she put the supposed changeling on a shovel and left him on the dung-heap by the yard. Amid shrieking resistance, the household looked again and found, to the mother’s delight, her own child “ruddy, plump, and smiling sweetly as of yore,” the “old man” having disappeared.
• Ignore the screaming. A Sutherland field tale (via Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 12 Nov 1888, from Miss Dempster’s “Folklore of Sutherland”) has a woman lay her baby under a hedge while haying. The child suddenly screamed so horribly she rushed to it - but a reaper warned: “Lay it down and leave it, if you value your child.” When the “folk” saw their “screaming imp” would be given no notice “nor get anything,” they brought back the “good gift” - the woman’s boy.
• Iron, rowan, ritual water. In Wales, as noted, parents set iron or rowan near the cradle, and handled christenings with care (Country Life, 1963). The fear did not end with baptism: one local tale told of a child stolen “many years ago” and a mother who pursued “through the dark trees” and rescued her baby from the fairies (ibid.).
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Not all of this folklore remained safely in the hearth-corner. In more than one source, the fire that tested the changeling also threatened the person beneath. Lang summarised the cruelty plainly: once the substitute was suspected, “the brat had better be roasted on a shovel” (ILN, 23 May 1895).

The belief endured - long after it was “supposed” to fade

Newspapers kept insisting the lore was fading, yet their own pages show how long it lingered. The Bristol piece from 1911 presents the eggshell “test” as living memory. The 1927 Mourne sketches treat fairy forts, warnings, and attempted thefts as part of local knowledge. As late as 1963, Country Life wrote that the fear of changelings “has not yet been entirely forgotten” in parts of Wales; families still told of a healthy baby stolen and a “deformed little plentyn-nyd” left in its place, and of mothers who believed they had tracked and taken back their children (11 July 1963).

Poetry took up the theme, too. Dora Sigerson’s “The Fairy Changeling” (Northern Star, 14 May 1898) hears the banshee keening, imagines the loved one “beneath a foreign sky,” and binds the changeling grief to sorrow for the lost - a reminder that these beliefs were not only village prescriptions but part of a wider imaginative world.

All of this sets the stage for the case that made “changeling” a courtroom word in the late 19th century.

Bridget Cleary: a dark meeting of lore and law

In March 1895, near Clonmel, the suspicion that a wife was “not herself” slid into violence. The Dublin Evening Telegraph (27 Mar 1895) preserved long blocks of sworn testimony:

• Johanna Burke, a neighbour, described a Thursday night in the Clearys’ house. Michael Cleary asked the sick woman if she was “Bridget Boland” (her maiden name). When she did not answer, he took up a lighted stick, held it near her face and said, “Away with you; come home.” He shook her and pressed, “Will you go home to your father’s?” She said she could not. Then, Burke said, “Michael Cleary stripped the clothes off her except her chemise, and threw paraffin oil over her… held the lighted stick under her chemise… She screamed out, ‘You are killing me!’ He threw her on the ground and poured more paraffin oil on her… I heard Michael Cleary say, ‘She’s gone now; I have got rid of her. She is not my wife; she’s an old deceiver sent in her place.’”
• Mary Kennedy testified that Michael asked the woman, “Will you tell me the truth? Are you my wife Bridget Cleary?” When she said she was, he replied that she was “not his wife, but Bridget Boland.” He said, “If you are my wife, take off your clothes, for I am going to burn you.” She refused; he seized her, pulled her to the fire, poured paraffin over her, and lit it with the stick. “The flames went up, and she screamed.” He pushed her to the floor and poured more oil. Later, she said, she saw him turn the body with the long fire-iron and heard him cry out, “She is burned now, but, God knows, I did not mean to do it.”
• Patrick Kennedy and Patrick Boland gave accounts in the same dreadful key: paraffin poured; a stick from the fire; screaming; “she fell back.” The steady refrain from Michael - “She is not my wife; she is a deceiver sent in her place.” A constable later reported finding the remains of a burnt body in the kitchen.
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Crowds packed the courthouse; the magistrates repeatedly called for order. The prisoners were remanded under heavy escort. It was not only the brutality that shocked readers; it was the reason given in open court: the husband said he burned a changeling so that his real wife might be returned.

“Clemency for a man who knew not what he did?”

What followed was a public dispute over guilt, superstition, and mercy - and your transcriptions catch its turns.

• In the Southern Echo and Bournemouth Telegraph (11 July 1895), an editorial protested the twenty-year sentence for manslaughter. It argued that Cleary’s “gross superstition” made him “no more responsible for his actions than a criminal lunatic,” that he “never for a moment imagined that he was doing harm,” and that to punish “sheer ignorance” so heavily was “bad law and bad morals.”
• Andrew Lang wrote to the Evening Mail (19 July 1895) that “most students of superstition will agree… the sentence of Cleary may be mitigated,” comparing the mindset to forms of “possession” described in other cultures. He did not excuse the killing, but he took seriously the power of belief.
• Edward Clodd, President of the Folk-Lore Society, initially protested the severity of the sentence. But after he and Andrew Lang received the jury foreman’s communication and read the evidence in detail, Clodd publicly changed his mind. In a statement reported in the Dundee Evening Telegraph (2 Aug 1895), he wrote that although the changeling belief “prevails… and has often led to murderous acts,” the Cleary evidence showed “other and baser motives” behind the deed; therefore the Society would not pursue mitigation. The Globe (1 Aug 1895) applauded the reversal and added a tart moral: “in common with the criminal in this case, a little folk-lore is a dangerous thing.”
• Meanwhile, the Weekly Dispatch (23 June 1895) cast the whole affair in a stark anthropological light, likening it to “benighted superstitions” reported by missionaries, and noting the belief that doors might be left open “for the evil spirit to depart by” - echoing the ritual logic you see in gentler form in that Bristol eggshell story of 1911.
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What the sources, together, teach

Read as a set, these clippings do more than repeat a grisly crime. They show how changeling belief persisted into living memory, across regions and languages, in hearth-tales and in household practice; how it could be playful (eggshell “beer”), coercive (tests, threats), or catastrophic (paraffin and fire). They show how communities located fairies in woods and forts, treated babies’ words and cries as evidence, and reached for rowan, iron, and ritual open doors to keep danger out or drive it away. They show the press wrestling, in real time, with the collision of such lore and the law: calls for mercy because a man “knew not what he did,” followed by a sober withdrawal of that plea when the trial record suggested “other and baser motives.”

Above all, they keep the definition steady: a changeling is the other - a double, a withering stand-in - standing where a loved one ought to be. In most houses, that meant whispered remedies and the watch kept through the night. In one Tipperary kitchen in 1895, it meant a woman’s death and a country’s shame. The newspapers remembered both: the old beliefs that shaped the act, and the voices - editorialists, folklorists, jurors - who, after the shock, tried to reckon with what belief can do.

Footnotes & Sources

1. Horfield and Bishopston Record and Montepelier & District Free Press — Saturday 07 Oct 1911, “The Changeling.”
2. Supports: definition-by-example and eggshell exposure ruse; leaving the door open; the “infant” speaking plainly; line about “a hundred years” and eggshell beer; return of the “big, rosy baby.”
3. Wicklow News-Letter and County Advertiser — Saturday 29 Mar 1913, “The Tale of a Changeling” (from Ella Mary Leather’s The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire).
4. Supports: the eggshell brewing test in Herefordshire; the changeling’s boast (“I am an old, old man…”); the vanishing through the window; recovery of the child as a grown adult (24) and reunion with his mother.
5. Kilburn Times — Friday 07 Aug 1885, “Fairy Changelings” (Rev. John O’Hanlon; via The Gentleman’s Magazine Library: English Tradition Lore).
6. Supports: the dung-heap ordeal (changeling placed on shovel and set on the dung-heap); the child’s shrivelled, “old” appearance; the return of the plump, smiling child; secrecy and use of a fairy-woman.
7. Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser — Friday 07 Aug 1885, “Fairy Changelings.”
8. Note: substantially the same O’Hanlon account as #3; corroborates the dung-heap story and framing.
9. Sheffield Evening Telegraph — Monday 12 Nov 1888, “The Changeling” (from Miss Dempster’s Folklore of Sutherland).
10. Supports: the harvest/haying scene; “Lay it down and leave it, if you value your child”; the idea that ignoring the screaming imp forces the return of the child by the “good people.”
11. Newry Telegraph — Thursday 01 Dec 1927, “More About the Fairies” (W. J. Fitzpatrick; “Kinly’ Mourne” sketches).
12. Supports: where fairies dwell (woods/forts/raths), warnings about interfering with forts; the harvest-field stranger who plays music and is suspected of an attempted child theft; the Ballykeel story; general Mourne lore context.
13. Country Life — Thursday 11 Jul 1963, “Strange Beliefs in Rural Wales” (Mary Corbett Harris).
14. Supports: Welsh terms Tylwyth Teg and plentyn-nyd; changeling signs (“ugly and sickly and always crying”); protective practices (rowan, iron, christening customs: north door open, christening water thrown on something green, e.g., the leek bed); statement that the fear of changelings had not entirely vanished; anecdote of a mother recovering her child.
15. Northern Star (Belfast) — Saturday 14 May 1898, “The Fairy Changeling” (poem by Dora Sigerson).
16. Supports: the poetic frame of changeling sorrow and banshee keening; contextualises the belief’s emotional register within contemporary literature.
17. Illustrated London News — Thursday 23 May 1895, “Changelings” (Andrew Lang).
18. Supports: clear definition of a changeling; the primitive logic of substitution when a child wastes away; the brutal proverb about a suspected changeling being “roasted on a shovel”; framing of Irish cases within a wider discussion of superstition.
19. Dublin Evening Telegraph — Wednesday 27 Mar 1895, Court report on Bridget Cleary (“THE STRANGE DEATH NEAR CLONMEL… CHARGED WITH THE MURDER OF THE WOMAN CLEARY”).
20. Supports: verbatim witness testimony (Johanna Burke, Mary Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy, Patrick Boland); Michael Cleary’s repeated assertions “She is not my wife; she’s a deceiver sent in her place”; use of paraffin, lighted stick, burning near the hearth; “She is burned now, but, God knows, I did not mean to do it.”; discovery of the burnt remains; crowds, courtroom excitement, remand.
21. Weekly Dispatch (London) — Sunday 23 Jun 1895, “Bridget Cleary.”
22. Supports: editorial reaction equating the affair with “primitive” superstition; description of leaving a door open for an evil presence to depart; the moral tone that it occurred “within the Queen’s realm” late in the century.
23. Southern Echo and Bournemouth Telegraph — Thursday 11 Jul 1895, Editorial on the sentence (“Gross Ignorance Amongst the Irish Peasantry”).
24. Supports: protest at the twenty-year manslaughter sentence; argument that Cleary’s “gross superstition” impaired responsibility; claim that punishing “sheer ignorance” so heavily is “bad law and bad morals.”
25. Evening Mail — Friday 19 Jul 1895, Letter: “The Irish Changeling Burners” (Andrew Lang).
26. Supports: call for mitigation/clemency on the view that Cleary “knew not what he did”; comparison with accounts of possession in other cultures; emphasis on the power of belief (without excusing the killing).
27. Dundee Evening Telegraph — Friday 02 Aug 1895, “The Irish Witch Burning Case.”
28. Supports: Edward Clodd’s public reversal after reading the jury foreman’s account and trial evidence; Society’s conclusion that “other and baser motives” were at work; decision not to seek mitigation.
29. The Globe — Thursday 01 Aug 1895, brief editorial note.
30. Supports: applause for Clodd’s change of position; the line that “a little folk-lore is a dangerous thing.”