Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 11: Black Stockings

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

In this remastered edition of a classic episode, we’ll revisit the folklore of changelings, and the tragic story of Bridget Cleary, with a brand new story at the end, plus refreshed narration and production, and music from Chad Lawson. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most of us have had the joy of being sick once or twice in our lives. It's part of the human experience, I suppose. We get sick and then we get better. At least that's how it's supposed to work. One thing I am constantly thankful for is the fact that we live in such a modern, enlightened age of medicine. We no longer use urine as an antiseptic, nor do we diagnose illness based on our astrological signs.

But that wasn't always the case. Gone are the days of bleeding ourselves with leeches, or trying to balance our humors to make sure our sanguine fluids aren't overpowering our melancholic fluids. And I'm probably not the only one who's happy that we no longer treat sick people with enemas administered with metal syringes filled with boar bile. Yeah, bile. From a boar. I could not make this stuff up.

Our ancestors didn't know why certain things happened, but they sure did their best to try. Stories were created, myths were told, and superstitions took root. All of them were designed to explain why things happened, and these reasons, even if they were pure fabrications, somehow helped people deal with the realities of life. Why was my child born deformed? Why did my husband's personality change overnight? Why did my entire family die from a plague last winter?

These questions haunted people in ways we can't understand today, and they grasped for anything that would help them cope. They found answers in their common folklore. The right there among the countless tales and stories told, there's one superstition from Ireland that saw more usage than most. You see, when something didn't seem right, when things went wrong and people suffered, there was only one explanation that covered it all in the minds of the Irish. They blamed it on changelings.

I'm Erin Mankey, and this is Lore. A changeline, according to the folklore of Europe, is a kind of fairy. Stories of them can be found in Germany, Ireland, England, Scandinavia, Spain, and many other countries. And, in all of those cultures, changelings have the same methodology. They are a substitute for a kidnapped human being. Either out of jealousy or great need, fairies were said to enter our world and to make a trade without our knowledge.

They would leave one of their own behind and return to the fairy realm, where the kidnapped human would live happy, joyful lives in paradise. We have a great summary of changelings thanks to the Irish poet William Butler Yates. They steal children, he wrote, and leave a withered fairy, 1,000 or maybe 2,000 years old instead. At times, full-grown men and women have been taken. Near the village of Colony lives an old woman who was taken in her youth. When she came back at the end of seven years, she had no toes, or she had danced them all

off. Changelings, according to the legend, can actually take one of three forms. The first is the kind Yates wrote about, the senile and ancient fairy who was disguised as a child. Another type of changeling is an actual fairy child, and the third type was an inanimate object such as a block of wood or a carved log. This third type is sometimes known as a stock. The logic, at least to someone in medieval Europe, was simple.

If a child was born with birth defects, was sickly or ill-tempered, they were often thought to be the fairy substitute left behind when their real child was taken from their home. If an adult went missing and was later found mysteriously dead, people would often assume that the body was really a bundle of sticks that have merely been enchanted to resemble their loved one. Folklore blossomed on the subject. Wives, tales, and legend taught new generations how to spot a changeling, instantly proving both one more reason to fear every little change in a person's life, but also a clear

sign of safety and hope they could cling to. Even the overall well-being of a family could hinge on these creatures. Changelings, you see, were said to drain all luck away from a house, and by doing so they would leave a family cursed to struggle with poverty and misfortune, all while trying to care for a child they saw as a curse more and more every day. When the stories focused on men and women who had been swapped out for a fairy, the symptoms were more psychological in nature. Signs of an adult changeling included mood swings, becoming argumentative, and losing

interest in friends and family. Changelings were said to have enormous appetites, too, eating everything they were given and then still asking for more. It was said that if your infant preferred food from the larder rather than being nursed, then there was a chance that they really weren't your child at all. While most changeling infants died in early childhood, those that survived were said to become dim-witted adults. Men and women who survived this long were sometimes called ufa, which is where we get

the word oaf. Thankfully though, there were ways to test people to see if they were, in fact, a changeling. One method involved putting a shoe in a bowl of soup. If the baby saw this and laughed, then it was seen as proof that the child was a changeling. Another method involved making a tiny loaf of bread inside half an eggshell, again meant to make the fairy laugh. And once discovered, a fairy changeling could be driven from the house in a variety of ways, in which case the kidnapped human child or adult would be returned unharmed.

One trick involved holding the suspected child over a fire, while another recommended forcing the suspect to drink a tea brewed with foxglove, a poisonous flower. It was thought that as the person's body expelled the toxin through vomiting and diarrhea, the changeling would be forced to return to the fairy realm. It sounds crazy to think that people would believe such stories, even centuries ago. Surely no one actually performed these tests or administered these treatments, especially to their own family, right? Unfortunately, history teaches us that desperate people are capable of just about anything.

In July of 1826, a woman named Ann Roche from County Kerry in southwest Ireland was caring for a four-year-old boy named Michael Leahy. According to her own testimony, the boy was unable to walk, stand, or speak. Just that he was, in fact, a fairy changeling, she bathed him in icy waters three times to force the fairy out. The boy drowned. She was tried by court, and they found her not guilty. In 1845, a woman suspected of being a changeling was placed in a large basket filled with wood

shavings and then hung over the kitchen fire until the contents of the basket ignited. In 1851, a man in Ireland literally roasted his child to death because he believed the boy to be a fairy. Three children were suspected of being fairies in 1857. They were bathed in a solution of foxglove and then forced to drink it. Sometimes babies were left in or near bodies of water as a way of forcing the changelings to leave. In 1869, an exorcism was attempted by dipping a child three times in a lake in Ireland.

Another woman actually left her infant on the shore of a lake and walked away, expecting the fairies to come and make the swap. Thankfully, she returned later to reclaim her child. Sometimes neighbors stepped in when the parents of an obvious changeling would do nothing. In 1884, while the mother of three-year-old Philip Dillon was out of the house, Ellen Cushion and Anastasia Rourke snuck inside. Philip, you see, could not use his arms and legs, and these neighbors saw that as proof enough of his condition.

One of the neighbors stripped the boy naked while the other stoked the fire. Then when everything was ready, they placed him on a large shovel and held it over the flames. Little Philip survived, but he was severely burned by the incident. We hate what we fear, you see, but rather than fade away as the 19th century moved on, the fears and superstitions around changelings only seemed to grow in Ireland. And as hard as it might be to believe. Things were about to get worse.

In the late 19th century, one of the governing bodies in Ireland was the Board of Guardians in each district. They were tasked with dispensing public aid, and one of the ways they did that was by building laborer cottages, homes built to provide housing for rural agricultural workers. Many farmers had lost their land in the recent famine, and this was one way of helping alleviate some of the homelessness and poverty that had become so common in the country. One cottage was constructed in Balevaadley, a small community of just nine homes and 31 people in County Tipperary.

The family who was awarded the cottage moved in, but there was a problem. It seems that the house had been built on a wrath, a low earthen ring, and while archaeologists know them to simply be remnants of an Iron Age fort, some of the Irish still thought of them as fairy rings, portals into another realm. After the family moved in, odd things began to happen, cries in the night, noises that couldn't be identified, and a feeling of dread. Almost as soon as the tenants had moved in, they were leaving. In their stead, the cottage was given to an old retired laborer named Patrick Boland,

who moved in with his adult daughter and her husband. His daughter, Bridget, was unusual. In 1895, it was the men who controlled the family. They were the breadwinner and the sole provider, but even though her husband, Michael, did well as a cooper, someone who makes and repairs barrels, a business that has always done well in Ireland, Bridget wasn't dependent on him. She had her own business, making dresses and keeping hens, and the income from those jobs was more than enough to meet her needs.

She was also said to be clever, flirtatious, and highly independent, so you can imagine how she must have annoyed her husband and caught the ire of the neighbors. And then there were the rumors of the affair she was having with another man. Bridget Cleary was a self-made, self-possessed woman, and everyone else was bothered by that. I tell you all of that because stories have layers. There's the meaning that you glean from the initial telling, and then there's the rest of the story.

The deeper you dive, the more things begin to make sense. And believe me when I tell you, there is a lot about this story that fails to make sense. On March 4th of 1895, Bridget left home on an errand. She had eggs to deliver to the house of her father's cousin, Jack Dunne. It was a short enough distance that she decided to walk, but the weather turned sour while she was out. She spent the next day in bed complaining of raging pain in her head. She had chills and shivered constantly.

Dunne came by the little cottage to visit a few days later and found Bridget still in bed. He took one look at her and declared, That's not Bridget. According to him, she was a changeline. Thankfully, no one yet believed him. On March 9th, five days after Bridget's walk in the cold, her father walked four miles to the nearest doctor and asked for him to come help. Two days later, there was still no sign of the doctor.

And so her husband, Michael, made the journey. After yet two more days of waiting, the doctor still had not come. And so Michael went again, this time making sure that he brought along a summons from the local health authority. While her husband was out looking for the doctor, the doctor arrived unexpectedly. He did his typical house call checkup, prescribed some medicine, and then left. Still frustrated, the family called upon a priest to come by and give her last rites. In case things weren't looking up for Bridget Cleary.

This was March 13th, a full nine days since taking ill. And so later that evening, neighbors and relatives gathered at the cottage to help administer fairy medicine in the form of herbs. Bridget refused the treatment and they held a red hot poker in her face until she complied. Things got worse the following day. Cousin Jack Dunn had begun to spread word that Bridget had been taken by the fairies and replaced with a changeling. At his urging, a man named Dennis Ganey was called into the house.

He was known in the community as a fairy doctor and well-versed in treating cases such as these. His treatments wouldn't necessarily fit into modern medical textbooks, mind you. They included the use of the hot poker, forcing the changeling to drink first milk from a cow that had just given birth, dousing the person in urine, and exposing them to flames. Bridget was slapped and held in front of the fireplace while her husband demanded that she state before God and family that she was indeed Bridget Cleary. Even though she answered yes, the gathered crowd didn't believe her.

Now before I continue, there's something you need to understand about Michael Cleary's state of mind. While his mother had died when he was young, his father had passed away just hours before. He and Bridget were childless and they lived in her father's house in a spare room in the 19th century equivalent of public housing. His own wife was rumored to be cheating on him and she didn't even need him to support her. Michael Cleary was adrift.

He had come undone. Maybe that's what drove him to the edge of sanity. The treatments continued late into the night. Friends and family began to ask to leave, but Michael was said to have yelled that no one was leaving until Bridget came home. He locked the door and placed the key in his pocket. If they could just get this right, he told them. If they could just drive the ferry out and be done with it, his Bridget would come home.

Again she was asked to declare her identity and Bridget refused. Historians don't know why. Maybe she was afraid. Perhaps her independent, stubborn nature prevented her from handing over authority. Whatever the reason, her silence infuriated Michael. He stripped her to her undergarments and pushed her to the floor. Come home, Bridget, in the name of God, somebody was said to have cried as she lay near the fire.

She's not my wife, Michael replied. You'll soon see her go up the chimney. And with that, he doused her with lamp oil and grabbed a log from the burning fireplace, which he used to ignite the flame. Bridget Cleary burned to death on the hearth of her own kitchen floor in front of her husband and father, cousins, and friends. She was just 26 years old. We haven't always known as much about the world as we do now.

Compared to the centuries before our own, we live in a veritable golden age of knowledge and understanding. Ignorance has eradicated much of the ignorance that once plagued us. And while I'm a fan of mystery and unanswered questions, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Ignorance has been used as a justification for the barbaric, inhumane treatment of other people to fuel our hatred of those who aren't like us. That kind of fear often becomes the agent of a dark transformation. Under the influence of fear, humans have a history of mutation, of changing into something

grotesque and dangerous. We become monsters. Fear drove Michael Cleary and the others to kill his wife. Fear of illness and disease, of mental and medical mysteries, fear of the loss that seemed to be creeping ever closer to his household, and blinded by that fear, Michael Cleary lashed out with the only tool he had, superstition. In many ways, it's beyond ironic that his fear turned him into someone else. In the end, perhaps he was the changeling.

After forcing one of Bridget's cousins by knife point to help wrap her body in a sheet, they carried her to a nearby field and buried her in a shallow grave. A short time later, some of the neighbors told the local priest that Bridget Cleary had gone missing. They said, in whispered tones, that it had been a fairy exorcism. When the priest found Michael Cleary praying in the church the next day, he brought up the man's wife. Is your wife all right?

The priest asked. I heard she'd been sick. I had a very bad night, father, Michael told him with a wild look in his eye. When I woke up, my wife was gone. I think the fairies have taken her. He was still convinced that she would return. He had plans to visit a nearby fairy ring and wait for her. She would arrive in a white gown on a pale horse, and he would cut her bindings with

a blackened knife. His Bridget would come home. The priest, to his credit, didn't believe a single word. He called the police and a massive search was undertaken. On March 22, two constables found her body in the shallow grave her husband had dug just days before. She had been badly burned and lay in the fetal position, with her knees against her chest, arms wrapped tightly around them.

Because her face had escaped the fire, a cloth sack had been placed over her head. All that remained of the little clothing she had been wearing was a pair of black stockings. Bridget Cleary would never come home. The story of Bridget Cleary is one of the most tragic to take place at the intersection of documented history and ancient folklore. In many ways, her tale is one of true crime, but it's dressed in significant and essential details that seem pulled straight out of a fantasy novel. And sadly, it's not the only one.

In fact, the world of changelings, abduction, and misguided belief have left us a number of painful stories. Then if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll share another powerful example. Mrs. Kerns was a widow, but that wasn't anything new. In fact, her husband had passed away many years before. Long enough that their only child, Mary, was now a young woman. Thankfully, though, the two of them still lived in the same house.

Just like Bridget Cleary, they too lived in County Tipperary, in the small village of Tumavara. Others were kind, and folks seemed to support their efforts to provide for themselves. According to the newspaper article I tracked down about them, they were both busy in the needlework trade. It was a good, peaceful life, as good as one could ask for, at least. But in late February of 1834, darkness entered Mrs. Kern's life. And as she stood inside the police office, she explained to anyone who would listen how

it all began. It was the strangers who had visited her two weeks before. She was sure of it, and she remembered every detail about them. When Mrs. Kerns had answered the knock at the door, she said she was greeted by a middle-aged woman with pockmarks on her reddish face, black hair and a red coat. And before Mrs. Kerns could ask the stranger what she needed, this woman began to speak. She was a fairy woman, she told her. Not a woman who was a fairy, mind you, but a woman from the community who considered

herself to be an expert in all things fairy. She knew their customs, their culture, and even the places in this world that they preferred to inhabit. She even claimed that knowledge gave her the ability to raise the dead from the grave. And this woman, who called herself Mary Mack, had a message for Mrs. Kerns. Your husband is with the fairies, she told the old widow, and I know how to bring him home. Now, Mrs. Kerns knew enough to know the stranger was lying.

It was nothing more than superstition. And if her husband really was alive out there somewhere, he'd have returned a long time ago. So, she shut the door in Mary Mack's face. But even in that short encounter, a seed was planted. You see, Mrs. Kerns' daughter Mary was in the room when the encounter took place, and she overheard everything. And while she didn't speak up that day, the notion that her father was out there, somewhere,

someone could possibly come home, was just too tempting to dismiss. So, when Mary Mack returned a few days later, while young Mary Kern's mother was out of the house, young Mary was a lot more willing to listen. And according to the fairy woman, there was good news. Would you like to see your father again? The strange woman asked. And young Mary nodded, but told the older woman that she was afraid it wasn't true, which is when one of Mary Mack's accomplices, hidden away inside a nearby bush, called out

in a masculine voice, I am your father, Mary, I cannot stay today, but I will return in four days' time. But Mary Mack told the young woman, to make it happen, you're going to need to accompany me on a short journey. It's a two-day walk to the place where we need to leave a gift, and then two days back. And that gift will need to be expensive. It's your father's life we're talking about after all. And young Mary agreed.

Believing in fairies and the power of the stranger, she gathered up a large sum of money and then left the woman to escort her away. Presumably they were headed to a special location, one dripping with fairy magic or other worldly powers, and soon enough all would be right. Except I don't have to tell you that it wasn't. When Mary's mother returned home that day, she found the house had been completely stripped of everything valuable. Only the fairy woman had more than one accomplice, and they made quick work of the little house

once Mary left. Sadly, there's no record that Mary Kearns ever returned home. Her mother made that visit to the local police station to report the theft and the kidnapping, but despite offering a reward, the authorities came up empty-handed. Ask most people today, and they'll tell you what you most likely already believe. That fairies aren't real, and that they can't kidnap our loved ones and leave changelings in their place, that there's no actual magic to fear. But there is something we should be afraid of.

The power of belief. If history has taught us anything, it's that folklore will always find a victim in the gullible, the desperate, or the naive. And let's just hope that's not us. This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Menke, with music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television

show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi, and I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. Bye. Bye. Bye.