Burning Bridget Cleary - Are you a witch or are you a fairy?

Here’s a gruesome story from Ireland.   Poor Bridget.  Stupid Irish people!

Bridget's Story

The Story of Bridget Cleary

The Last Witch Burned in Ireland: Fairy Folklore and the Law

by Alison Gillespie

(reprinted from the Celtic Cultural Alliance Newsletter - March 2009)
 

“Are you a witch or are you a fairy? Are you the wife of Michael Cleary”? 

Such innocent words, often chanted by Irish children in nursery rhyme, only hint at the grisly but true story of the young Irish woman whose life was snuffed out on a bitterly cold day in March only a little over a century ago in Ireland. Here in America, the Salem Witch Trials brought an end to witch burning and the use of the supernatural or “spectral evidence” as permissible in court in the 1690s, but such practices continued in Ireland until as recently as the turn of the last century with the infamous ritual killing of Bridget Cleary and the precedent-setting trial of her accused murderers.

Continue reading @ http://www.burningbridgetcleary.com/bridgets_story/

Who was Bridget Cleary?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Cleary