This principle may perhaps be
unknown to science, falsely so called, but it is well understood in
Ireland and has been acted on within recent years. In March 1895 a
peasant named Michael Cleary, residing at Ballyvadlea, a remote and
lonely district in the county of Tipperary, burned his wife Bridget
Cleary alive over a slow fire on the kitchen hearth in the presence of
and with the active assistance of some neighbours, including the woman's
own father and several of her cousins. They thought that she was not
Bridget Cleary at all, but a witch, and that when they held her down on
the fire she would vanish up the chimney; so they cried, while she was
burning, "Away she goes! Away she goes!" Even when she lay quite dead on
the kitchen floor (for contrary to the general expectation she did not
disappear up the chimney), her husband still believed that the woman
lying there was a witch, and that his own dear wife had gone with the
fairies to the old _rath_ or fort on the hill of Kylenagranagh, where he
would see her at night riding a grey horse and roped to the saddle, and
that he would cut the ropes, and that she would stay with him ever
afterwards. So he went with some friends to the fort night after night,
taking a big table-knife with him to cut the ropes. But he never saw his
wife again. He and the men who had held the woman on the fire were
arrested and tried at Clonmel for wilful murder in July 1895; they were
all found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to various terms of penal
servitude and imprisonment; the sentence passed on Michael Cleary was
twenty years' penal servitude.
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