Officially, we Britons have been Christian for more than 1,500 years.
But scratch the surface and you'll find our ancestors
believed in far more than Christ and the cross.
Pagan gods, witches, demons, evil spirits,
were all proclaimed as terrifying fact.
Now I want to uncover what beliefs and fears really built Britain.
No!
This week,
along with a team of top historians,
I'm finding out why our ancestors
believed they were surrounded by a whole host of evil spirits,
out to harm them.
They're trying to pull me down! Get away!
'Demons that could enter your body and control you from within.'
By the sight of all mighty God.
Credo, Sanctum...
'Angels, who weren't always the good guys.'
All of their beauty became ugliness.
All of their goodness became evil.
And malicious spirits, who'd take your exact form to replace you.
What was buried in the graveyard was not the body of Bridget Cleary,
but something left in her place by the fairies.
I'll be finding out why we believed these nightmare creatures,
were horrifyingly real.
Imagine a world full of demons that could enter your body
and control you from within.
A place where malicious sprites could steal you away,
and where evil spirits could send your soul to hell.
This is the world that our ancestors believed that they lived in,
and it was utterly terrifying.
Today we tend to imagine things like demons and fairies
as physical creatures,
but this isn't how our ancestors saw them.
For our forefathers, they were spirits.
Shapeless entities, made of an ethereal vapour,
rather than flesh and blood.
But these spirits had an amazing ability.
They could swirl and morph into completely different forms.
In this way they could appear to us as anything they wanted.
From small creatures to monsters.
They could even disguise themselves as humans.
Slowly, really slowly.
To find out what this really meant for our ancestors,
and exactly what they thought spirits could do to us,
I'm meeting up with historian Dr Juliet Wood.
She's using theatrical magic
to take me back to medieval times,
when evil spirits were at their most feared.
Is that?... Well I think that it is... It's Astroturf, isn't it?
No, it isn't. It's a nice medieval lawn.
Every medieval garden had a beautiful lawn,
because a medieval garden was tamed nature.
And I've got a deck chair.
- You have a deck chair? - And a hat!
And a hat?
That's what makes you a medieval lord.
I feel really in the period, I must admit.
I've even got a little picket fence.
'But beyond my well-tended medieval garden
'would have lurked a whole host of ethereal nasties
'out to do me harm.
'And the most terrifying of these were demons.'
They were violent, malicious and extremely dangerous.
Their huge power came from a very surprising source.
Because demons were originally angels.
Lucifer, one of the ark angels,
and he thought of himself as better than God.
So Lucifer and his followers started a war in heaven.
Presumably, the bad angels didn't win?
The bad angels did not win and as a result, they fell.
All their beauty became ugliness,
and all their goodness became evil.
But they didn't lose their power. This is why demons are so dangerous,
because they're fallen angels.
According to one version, the demons fell with such force,
they broke a hole in the earth and that created the pit of hell.
But the demons are always trying to get back out of hell,
and back onto the earth, where they can hassle us.
He's coming out. He looks remarkably like an animal, doesn't he?
Well, they do. All of the qualities of the animals.
All of their brutishness and ugliness were projected onto the demons.
Ah! He's got my leg!
Well, that's cos he's after your soul.
They're trying to pull me down! Get away!
That's them tempting you to be a bad man.
They're trying to pull me down! Get away!
'So, my medieval garden would have been more of a spiritual battlefield
'than a retreat.
'In the sky above were angels making sure you were virtuous.'
Beneath the turf were demons after your soul.
But what did our ancestors think these demons
would physically do to them?
Because they were spirits, it was believed
they could enter your body as a vapour, through any open orifice.
This was known as possession.
(GIRL SCREAMS)
You were the host, and the demon was a spiritual parasite.
Historians, Professor Marion Gibson and Dr Thomas Freeman,
are going to explain how this was thought to happen.
They've used contemporary accounts to rehearse an actress
in one of the many reported cases of possession in the 16th century.
Chester girl, Anne Mylner.
She was tending her father's cows
outside of the city and she says that she was surrounded by a white cloud.
She was suddenly taken with great fear.
She thought that white cloud that surrounded her
was the beginning of an illness.
And then a minister from Cambridge
came to the conclusion that she was possessed.
You talk about a white cloud? Was it like they...
..they breathed in gas?
It's something like that.
It's certainly the idea of a physical creature,
or a physical substance entering into the human body from outside.
Actually, if you think of devils as being equated to germs...
..that's not very far off.
But like in illness, this is an element of bad luck.
There's no idea that the demoniac, the person possessed,
was necessarily sinful, or wicked.
This could just happen.
But inhaling a demon wasn't the only way to become possessed.
Terrifyingly, these evil spirits could morph into everyday objects.
Objects that you'd voluntarily put into your body...
like food!
There are accounts of people eating bread and butter,
or lettuce, and then subsequently becoming possessed.
Because they think that the demon is in the lettuce,
or is part of the lettuce, or has transformed itself into a lettuce.
All of these kind of things.
There's a
tension between devils as this spiritual being,
and a devil which might be an apple.
But once a demon was inside,
what would happen to you?
Actress Emma Connell has been rehearsed in the classic symptoms
described in contemporary accounts.
In the beginning, it was convulsions,
perhaps accompanied by fever.
Often they were credited with displaying superhuman strength
and sometimes they had to be restrained.
(GIRL MOANS AND SCREAMS)
It's a dreadful noise.
It is really upsetting, isn't it?
I mean, it's interesting how it affects us,
even though we know this is somebody acting.
What if this was a person who thought
they were really demonically possessed?
And your only explanation for it
was that the devil was inside them.
You can see why you might be prepared to brutalise that person
because they're so scary.
(GIRL SHOUTS)
What she doing now?
She's speaking in tongues.
Displaying knowledge of languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
that a demon would have, but an ordinary person would not.
Neuroscientist, Dr Jack Lewis
believes some accounts of possession may actually have been
medical conditions our ancestors didn't fully understand.
Such as psychiatric disorders and epilepsy.
Epilepsy tends to go through several stages.
Right now, this would be the tonic phase.
That's where all the muscles in the body contract
and hold for a little while.
The next phase would be a colonic phase.
Where the muscles rhythmically contract, then release,
producing really grotesque movements.
Epilepsy can also affect cognition,
blurring the difference between fantasy and reality for the sufferer.
She could well be hallucinating.
This could be visual, auditory,
anything stored in memory, she could be replaying in her mind.
We know we're just observing an actress here,
but just being in this close proximity, it's really scary.
Imagine if this was just someone out of your village how you would feel!
Once a demon was believed to be inside you,
there was only one cure.
(GIRL SCREAMS)
Physically forcing it out.
For our ancestors, the process was supposed to be the ultimate battle
between good and evil.
I'm about to discover the truth behind exorcism.
(GIRL SCREAMS)
Ah! He's got my leg. They're trying to pull me down.
'I'm entering the dark world of evil spirits,
'to find out why our ancestors were so convinced they were real,
'and what people thought they could do to us.
'I've learnt that demons were thought to be fallen angels
'that could physically enter your body to control you from within.
'These possessed people were known as demoniacs.'
It was thought that they got a demon inside them,
that it was manipulating their bodies, hurling them about.
Nowadays, with the luxury of hindsight we can say,
"Oh yeah, well probably a lot of them were mentally ill,"
but before the age of science,
when people didn't have that kind of vocabulary,
is it any wonder that everybody
thought they were possessed by the devil?
One of the most horrific but best recorded exorcisms was in 1585,
when 15-year-old Sarah Williams
was thought to have been possessed by a demon
that was after her soul.
'We've picked Sarah Williams,
'because she has a particularly interesting exorcism.
'She found herself thinking that she was possessed
'or was told that she was possessed by other people,
'and needed to have the devil cast out of her.'
Sarah was unable to cross herself, to say Catholic prayers.
And in an already fevered atmosphere,
people in the household began to worry about her.
Cases of demonic possession like Sarah's
were treated particularly aggressively in the 16th century.
England, under Protestant Queen Elizabeth,
was in the grip of religious fervour.
Catholics and Protestants were virtually at war,
each side desperate to prove theirs was the true faith.
And what better proof than the successful casting out of a demon?
What are all these things?
These are the instruments
that you will need to complete the job.
The demon is a physical presence within her,
these instruments will drive the demon out of her body.
What kind of things have we got?
First of all, we have holy water, which will cause the demon pain.
No! Aah!
The purity of the holy water
was believed to physically aggravate the demon,
encouraging him to leave.
Why don't you put your head out the window, you bastard?
- Did they really say stuff like that? - Yes, they did... Yes, they did!
This is all about resisting God.
If the holy water wasn't enough,
the exorcist had lots of other tools in his arsenal.
This is a mixture of rue, which is a herb, vinegar and wine.
The holy water causes spiritual discomfort,
this causes physical discomfort and drives the demon out of her body.
Drink this!
No, no!
Drink this!
NO, NO!
Nooo, no!
'The more entrenched the demon appeared to be,
'the more extreme the treatments would become.'
These are all kinds of things to burn.
We've got feathers to burn which smell horrible,
and helps drive the devil out.
We've got asafoetida, here,
powdered root, and that again creates a horrible smell.
It causes the devil discomfort
and makes him come out of the possessed person.
All these things are sanctioned in the Bible
as ways of driving out the devil.
What did you do with this?
This cauldron, you would have held under her nose.
No! Please, no, no!
During the course of the possession,
the accounts tell us that her face was burnt black by this smoke,
so she was repeatedly exposed to this horrible smell.
Oh, it is actually... it is horrible, isn't it?
- It really smacks you. - It really smells, doesn't it?
'The holier the substance was,
'and the further you could get it into the body, the better.'
These are relics of Edmund Campion,
a priest who'd been martyred in England a few years earlier.
You need to put this in her mouth. It will cause the demon discomfort.
The sight of the relic, it burns. It burns.
Nooo! Aaaargh!
No! Nooo!
OK, what you have to do now is to take the crucifix.
You must touch this to different parts of the body.
It will pain the demon and you must drive it out of her body.
No!
'Demons were sometimes thought to hide in the extremities of the body.'
I touch you here, I touch you here, I touch you here.
'A cross was used to move them into the chest cavity.'
I touch you here.
'From here, the exorcist had to command them to leave
'via the mouth or nose.'
What kind of things do I say?
You can say some of the words of the Catholic baptism rite,
which actually contains an exorcism rite in it.
No!
By the sight of Almighty God I command you to show yourself.
Credo, sanctum, ecclesiam...
Noooo!
Oh!
Feels as though something very huge has just completely dissipated,
which I suppose is how you're supposed to feel, isn't it?
Did it work?
It did work.
It took eight months to work, that's the only problem with it,
so Sarah was tortured by all of these priests
in order to drive the devil out of her body.
'Of course, not all exorcisms were considered successful,
'but those that appeared to work, were seen as proof,
'both of the existence of demons
'and of the ability of the Church to conquer the forces of evil.'
And the belief in exorcism lives on,
even today it's still a recognized Catholic ritual
and many hundreds of exorcists are openly practising around the world.
Nooo! No!
But what happens if you take a different view of demons?
If you think of their demonic powers, not as a threat,
but as an opportunity?
Not something to be cast out, but exploited.
While most people lived in terror of demons
and did everything they could to avoid them,
some people actively went out looking for them.
They tried to conjure up these evil spirits,
in order to harness their power for their own ends.
Witchcraft is the obvious example.
Women who were accused of being in league with the devil
and using his power to cast diabolic spells.
But a lot of people were accused
of harnessing the forces of lesser demons.
If you could do that, then untold power and wealth could be yours.
Well, that was the idea, but the stakes were high.
It was a crime that was punishable by death.
I'm meeting up with Professor Peter Marshall,
to find out about necromancy,
the dark art of conjuring up the forces of hell
in pursuit of earthly power.
I've got a copy of something called the Munich Handbook,
a collection of spells of the kind that were common in Europe
in the late Middle Ages.
What makes it dangerous
is that all of these involve the conjuring of demons to do your will.
And that's necromancy?
That's what necromancy is, absolutely.
The Munich Handbook is just one of several necromancy textbooks
that were hugely popular in Europe in the Middle Ages.
It contains detailed instructions on how to summon demons
and harness their powers to perform evil deeds.
Like stealing treasure or harming other people.
One of its spells is particularly disturbing.
It describes how I can force a beautiful young maiden
to become my love slave.
We need various ingredients for this.
First of all, a white dove.
I've got, um, a pigeon here.
Um, a pigeon, I suppose, will have to do.
You're supposed to bite into it, near its heart,
cos we need the blood.
We do actually have some blood here already.
You're going to draw with the blood,
using a quill from the feather of an eagle,
on parchment made out of the skin of a female dog in heat.
That is weird. Why a female dog in heat?
This is the logic of magic, it works on similarities.
Everything in magic is meaningful.
Everything in magic counts.
The dove is the symbol of Venus, the dog, of course, representing lust
and the principle here is what is called "sympathetic magic"
of likeness working on likeness.
And people really believed in this?
Absolutely, virtually everybody in this period believes in demons.
In England in 1604, the very act of conjuring demons
is made a capital offence.
The most famous prosecution for supposed necromancy in Britain
was of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, in 1441.
Along with Roger Bolingbroke,
she was accused of using the dark art to obtain the information
that Henry VI would suffer a life-threatening illness.
Eleanor was imprisoned for life
and Bolingbroke was hung, drawn and quartered.
With the blood, you draw on the parchment
a naked image of the object of your desire.
Yes, I've got one in my mind.
And, crucially, you write on her various limbs,
the names of the six demons that we're going to conjure
to bring this spell about.
Chaubal, Satan, Roikers, Cupido, Afallion and Doliatus.
Cupido? Like cupid?
Cupid, absolutely.
And it specifies that the name of Cupid
is to be written across the genitals of the woman.
Do you know I did that automatically, isn't that strange?!
Who is it who would have been officiating,
do you think, at these magic ceremonies?
Well it's not the sort of thing that anybody could do,
these spells are complicated,
they involve quite a lot of ingredients,
they're in Latin, so you need some education.
Almost certainly it's priests who are likely to be doing this,
which makes it even more transgressive.
In the sight of Almighty God, I command you...
'When performing exorcisms,
'priests were thought to become hugely skilful
'in manipulating and controlling demons.
'Ironically, the perfect qualities for necromancy.'
No!
Now it's time for Peter and me to show our abilities,
with an incantation to summon demons
that will finally bring my spell to life.
Conjuro vos omnes demones in hac ymagine scriptos,
per dominos vestro quibus obedire tenemini,
Sobedon, Badalam, et Berith.
And now demons, in the form of handsome young men, should appear.
'The demons then bring me the woman I desire and make her fall in love.'
One more step, in case anyone notices she's gone,
another of the demons will take her form and go to her house.
'So, while I'm enjoying my new lover,
'a demon in disguise will make sure she's not missed at home.'
Very good magic, Peter.
This spell has revealed what our ancestors feared
more than anything else about demons.
That they could take human form.
This meant you couldn't be sure who was real,
and who was actually an evil spirit in disguise.
All people could do
was hope God and their faith would keep them safe
both from demons
and from the people who wanted to exploit their evil power.
But unfortunately, these evil spirits of Christianity
weren't the only entities our ancestors needed protection from.
I'm about to find out why the spirits of folklore,
that are depicted in legends and sagas, could be just as terrifying.
People said that a stroke was a fairy blast.
You're children would get ill, or you'd get ill,
you might become paralysed.
Fairies will never seem the same again.
I'm finding out why our ancestors were so afraid of evil spirits,
and what they thought they could do to us.
Credo, sanctum, ecclesiam...
As medieval man, I've met the demons of religion,
fallen angels that were out to steal our souls.
But these weren't the only ethereal entities
our forefathers lived in terror of.
The spirits of folklore, from elves to fairies,
were also the stuff of nightmares.
Yes,
even fairies could be very nasty.
In Peter Pan,
the very first baby laughs for the very first time
and it breaks up into smithereens,
and they all go skipping about and become the first fairies.
Which is a little sick-making, isn't it?
But basically, it paints a picture of fairies as bundles of joy.
And Disney picked up on that, and so did lots of other filmmakers,
until now I think it's fair to say,
we all think of fairies as happy and cute
and a little bit naughty sometimes,
but basically very nice.
But that's not what our ancestors thought.
For them, fairies...
could be objects of terror.
I'm meeting up with literary expert Dr Diane Purkiss,
to find out exactly what our forefathers thought fairies were,
and why they were so different from Tinkerbell.
This is what I've always thought fairies are like,
pretty little gossamery things.
Well, that's really pretty much an inheritance from the Victorians.
Shakespeare made fairies small,
and he made them flying,
and the Victorians really picked up on that.
Victorian artists drew on entomology to produce wings,
cos they really wanted to tie fairies into nature,
as part of Romanticism.
But this really cements your pretty fairies. I love these photos.
These are the infamous Cottingley fairy photos.
These photos were taken in 1917
by two young cousins in Cottingley, near Bradford.
The five images, which show them playing with dainty winged fairies
at the bottom of their garden, became a media sensation,
making everyone think of fairies as both gentle and very real.
But not only are these pictures fake,
this whole image of tiny gossamer-like beings
is bogus as well,
and a long way from their original manifestations.
If this was a modern 19th and 20th century vision of what fairies were,
what were they like before that?
Well, I think in the ancient world,
the origin of fairy beliefs is nymphs.
An adult fairy is life-size,
real human-size, the same size as you or me,
and if we look at this Victorian picture of nymphs,
this is Waterhouse's Water Nymphs.
This gives us a very good idea
of one of the mythic ancestors of fairy belief.
Now, you can see that these very attractive young ladies
are luring this young man into a pond
and it probably won't turn out particularly well for him.
I'd go in in five seconds, I think.
Well, you might, but they might drown you after they'd exhausted you.
And that was what nymphs did.
And she is luring the young man
to be her sexual partner.
and after she's exhausted him, she'll throw him away.
Way to go.
The idea of nymphs came from the Romans
who invaded us some 2,000 years ago.
Like the Celts, the indigenous people of Britain they conquered,
they believed there were supernatural spirits, in all aspects of nature,
from trees to rivers.
These spirits became part of mainstream folklore,
and gradually evolved into fairies,
mystical, often dangerous creatures that inhabited the natural world,
and who were only visible when they chose to be.
To help me understand what this actually meant for our ancestors,
Dr Juliet Wood is again performing some theatrical magic.
Come into the wings and I'll explain it to you.
All right, excuse me.
Right, what's going on here?
Well, you want to think of this as a parallel world.
A parallel world?
Well, a world that's like ours, but it's inhabited by spirits.
I see what you mean, like the same way the stage management
are normally hidden from the world of the stage,
except when they come on and fix something, like earlier,
and then disappear again,
that's how this parallel world of pixies and people is?
Exactly. Except with this lot,
you have to be very careful not to offend them,
as they can be very, very nasty.
METAL SHEET CLASHES
Getting on the wrong side of a folklore spirit like a fairy
was considered a risky business.
They were thought to be able to ruin your crops with bad weather,
or kill you by causing a nasty accident.
But the thing people most feared about fairies
was the belief that they could abduct your child
and replace it with a changeling,
a fairy that had taken the exact form of your baby.
In medieval Britain,
the fear of having your children stolen away by fairies was so strong
that many parents took extreme measures to prevent it.
If you'd just given birth and
all the women in the village are hovering over you,
what advice would they give you
to prevent your baby being stolen by the fairies?
The main thing is to try and get some cold iron involved.
Cold iron around the cradle.
Oh, look at these.
Oh, shears.
That's the best of all, because shears themselves are magical.
You can use them for divination,
to find stolen goods, all kinds of things.
They're really powerful, so I'd put them at the head.
What is it about iron, do you think?
The manufacture and shaping of iron was itself a bit of a mystery.
Most villagers wouldn't have known how to shape iron,
so an iron thing is probably the most magical possession
most ordinary people would have had.
If that didn't work, is there anything else we could do?
Draw a chalk circle right around the cradle.
There we go, there's a bit of chalk.
Make sure you draw it clockwise,
and you could recite some key prayers and incantations.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
The circle was supposed to become a protected area for the child,
made holier by the chant.
One to watch, one to pray...
But these preventative measures
weren't thought to completely guarantee a child's safety.
And if your offspring developed physical or mental abnormalities,
this could lead to the suspicion
that a fairy had taken its place.
WHISPERING VOICES
Psychologist Chireal Shallow has been looking into the reasons
why parents might have come to this horrifying conclusion.
What kind of symptoms that you know today,
do you think in medieval times might have caused parents to
look at their child and think, "It's not mine, it's a fairy."
A child not speaking, a child not being able to hear,
a child not being able to move.
Lots of physical disabilities,
which today we can understand within a medical context.
Today you can see, you know, a child that may be throwing a tantrum,
a child that may be not developing their language
as we would expect them to,
might be suffering from autism
or be on the autism spectrum.
Yeah.
Back then, they didn't have that knowledge, or that understanding,
so they had to rely on their belief system,
which was in the changeling.
So in medieval times, parents of an abnormal child
might suspect fairies had swapped it for an imposter.
But how could they know for sure?
There were lots of tests you could do to find out if this was a changeling.
And one really key one was to do something strange,
something that no normal person would ever do.
What kind of thing?
Well, like making bread in an eggshell.
What's the significance of that?
Well, I think the idea is that a fairy could be very old and wise,
and they would therefore find mortal follies immensely funny,
and that's the idea,
provoking them into laughter through surprise.
I see, so it forgets it is a baby.
Yes. That's it, yeah.
Show us what you do.
You break an egg.
You mix some flour.
You mix some water,
and you knead it.
This is rather ridiculous, isn't it?
Oh, look! Yes, she's protesting.
See, she's stirring. Look at that!
Might be a sign.
How do we know that's the kind of thing they did?
It does seem rather bizarre.
It does seem bizarre and bizarre is the whole point.
But we know about it
because of 16th-century antiquarians like Reginald Scott.
He recorded the folk beliefs of villagers right across the nation.
If the baby laughed at these activities, it was taken as proof
that it really was a fairy changeling.
But how did parents then think they could get their real child back?
Well, the belief was that if they threatened the imposter with death,
its fairy parents would come and rescue it
and return the human child at the same time.
Diane's looked at the ways parents could do this.
There are two options.
You can take the baby
and leave it in the woods,
ideally on a dung heap,
and what you're hoping then
is that the fairies are terrified something will happen to it
and they come and take it back,
and they bring your baby back to you.
You said there were two options?
Well, the second option's pretty drastic.
You show the baby the fire,
and what you're hoping is that the baby will be so terrified of the fire
that he'll reveal himself as a changeling, fly up in the air.
So, you're putting your baby right next to the flames,
and if he reacts, then that means he's a changeling?
Yeah. On the grounds that it's not your baby.
If you thought it was your baby, you wouldn't do this.
You're thinking it's a fairy baby,
and you're thinking that you're rescuing your baby
by doing this terrible, terrifying thing.
As a result of these beliefs,
it's thought many babies were burnt to death
or died in the woods.
How many we'll never know,
because such events weren't routinely recorded as infanticide.
After all, it was the fairy that had died.
The human was merely missing.
When you look at the deaths of these changeling babies,
supposedly changeling babies,
it is hard for you to put yourself in that position,
but I think what we've got to understand
is that they had this strongly held belief
that the act they were committing would bring their babies back.
So it actually justified them doing something
that we consider quite heinous and cruel,
but they believed they were doing something good, and endorsed,
and thought they were going to get their babies back.
It does seem strange, doesn't it,
That parents could believe their own flesh and blood wasn't theirs,
but in some way had been taken over by a fairy.
And not just strange,
the consequences if a child had physical or mental disabilities
could be horrendous.
The whole community could condone that child being abandoned
in order to get rid of the fairy.
The belief in fairy changelings
is thought to have peaked in the Middle Ages, but incredibly,
this disturbing and fantastical superstition endured for centuries,
surviving deep into the modern era.
The last recorded case
took place as recently as 1895,
a time when my own grandfather was alive.
And this is the house where it took place?
This is the house.
And it ended with a brutal killing.
The world of our ancestors was full of dangerous malevolent spirits
they thought could do real harm.
While demons were after your soul,
fairies were more interested in your children.
I've learnt that parents would take horrific measures
with any child they thought was really a fairy in disguise.
It's not your baby, it's a fairy baby.
Now I want to investigate the last-known case
of this dark superstition.
So, I've come to Ballyvadlea in Ireland
to find out more about a woman who was killed here by her husband
because he believed her to be a fairy changeling.
Incredibly, it was just over a hundred years ago, in 1895.
Historian, Professor Angela Bourke,
has studied the court case and testimonies
that reveal what really happened.
She was a young woman called Bridget Cleary,
she was 26, maybe as old as 28.
The story told at the time was
that he believed, or had come to believe,
that she was a fairy changeling,
that meant the woman that he was living with was not his wife,
was not Bridget Cleary, was not even human,
that she had been taken away by fairies
and something else put in her place.
And this is the house where it took place?
This is the house.
It doesn't look like the kind of place
where something terrible happened.
No, it looks like a clean, tidy, modern house
and that's how it looked in 1895.
The only thing that was peculiar about this house
is that it was built very close to a fairy fort.
There's a fairy fort in the land behind the house.
What locals called "fairy forts"
were actually the remains of medieval hill settlements,
but our ancestors believed fairies lived beneath them.
Having one near your house or disturbing one
was thought to bring bad luck,
and this fairy fort has been left untouched by the local farmer.
What punishments would you get if you upset the fairies,
if you transgressed? If you came here.
Well, if you came here,
it'd be feared that things would happen to cattle,
your children would get ill, or you'd get ill.
You might become paralysed,
people said that a stroke was a fairy blast.
A lot of those kinds of things were said to be fairy malevolence.
At the time, newspapers reported
that Bridget was thought to have visited the fairy fort
shortly before she died.
Anybody who came into a place like this was under suspicion.
So, if you willingly consorted with the fairies,
it was a suggestion that you were turning your back on human society,
you're dicing with something very dangerous and you were distrusted.
So, people really didn't like it.
One day, Bridget left her house saying she was going to sell eggs,
but some people suspected she had gone to the fairy fort instead.
When she came back, she was ill with a fever.
Her husband Michael claimed she was two inches taller.
Something just wasn't the same.
Gosh, it's very small, isn't it?
It's a very small house.
Big for the time, but yeah, very confined space.
The house has been modernised,
but we've got copies of police photos
taken after Bridget's death.
- And this, here, is that fire there, presumably. - That's right.
You can see the grate underneath.
Oh yes, that's the old grate. Yeah, yeah.
What happened on the day in question?
'Bridget Cleary had been sick in bed for days,
'she was perhaps delirious and running a fever.
'Then various relatives came and visited, including several men.
'Michael Cleary, by this time, has got a horrible potion...'
I have to give you this.
'..which they are now going to try to feed to Bridget Cleary.
'They sense that if they can get her to swallow this horrible potion,
'then the creature that replaced her will disappear,
'and she will perhaps walk in the front door.
'Michael is trying to feed her this potion with a spoon,
'two others are holding her by the shoulders.'
And it was right here that it happened?
It was right here, right on this spot.
'All on the pretext that she's not herself.
'That she's a fairy changeling.'
Come on!
And then what happened?
They took her bodily from her bed and carried her in there,
- ..back into the kitchen. - Back into here, yeah.
Into the fire, they held her in, over the bars of the grate.
It's going to be OK, Bridget.
'Fairies were believed to be scared of fire.
'So the idea was that the flames would force the fairy to leave,
'or to reveal its true identity.'
Her father says, "Are you Bridget Cleary in the name of God?"
And she says, "I am, Dada."
I am Bridget Cleary!
The men are then satisfied that this is the real Bridget Cleary.
Bridget, it seemed, was safe.
But the next night, Michael and her relatives
became suspicious once again,
when Bridget refused to eat the food they had prepared.
Will you have some bread, Bridget?
I don't want to eat anything.
You've got to eat something.
'When she didn't want to eat anything,
'I think her husband got very, very anxious again.'
- That's when he kicked off? - 'That's when he kicks off.
'He thinks a real woman, who is not a fairy changeling, would eat.'
What have you done with me wife?
'He knocked her to the ground'
and picked a burning stick from the fire and brandished it in her face.
What have you done with me wife?
What have you done with her?!
Michael! Michael!
'He picked up the lamp and spills the oil from it on her,'
and then her clothing catches fire.
Whoosh, she goes up?
Yeah, she goes whoosh.
Bridget Cleary was dead!
Burnt alive
because her husband and family thought she was a fairy changeling.
Michael and the others in the house were arrested for murder.
So this is the grave where Bridget Cleary is said to be buried.
This is where her story ends.
So, everyone was convinced that
this was the real Bridget and not a fairy?
Well, a lot of people said that the real Bridget Cleary
had gone into the fairy fort,
that she was still up there with her fairy lover
or with the fairies,
and that what was left after the burning
and what was buried in the graveyard
was in fact not the body of Bridget Cleary
but of something left in her place, by the fairies.
Michael Cleary was convicted of manslaughter but not murder.
When reaching the verdict,
his belief that the woman he'd killed was a fairy changeling
was taken into consideration,
as was his behaviour after the murder,
when he went to the fairy fort.
And he came up here,
and he just waited for the moment when his real wife,
not the body that he'd just buried in a shallow grave,
which was just a fairy,
but when his real wife rode out of here
with the other fairies
and he would hold the other fairies off
and he would bring down his wife from the saddle
and take her in his arms and...
..take her back home
and he'd have his wife back again.
But I don't know for how long he was able to sustain that fantasy.
Michael, Michael!
Today, it seems incredible to us that a man could kill his wife
because he believed she was a fairy.
But Bridget's appalling death was the final manifestation
of a profound and almost universal fear of supernatural spirits
that stretched back more than two millennia,
to the forests of Celtic Britain.
Over the last couple of hundred years,
our attitude towards the world of the spirits has completely changed.
Nowadays, we tend to think of these creatures as happy,
as safe, as benign and above all, as fantasy.
But for our ancestors,
they weren't only very real, they were utterly evil.
So that when an exorcist was trying to expel a demon
from the body of a young woman who was thrashing about...
Aaagh!
..or when Michael Cleary was holding his wife
over the smoke and the flames...
..in order to drive out a fairy,
they thought they were combating the powers of darkness head on.
And maybe that's something to bear in mind
next time you read your kids a fairy story.
Next week, the terrifying creatures our ancestors thought made them ill.
From evil elves that pierced you with disease-laden arrows,
to stone age surgery that released inner demons.
I'll be experiencing the horrific realty of magic medicine.
Oh, God! I tell you what, this suit's leaking!
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd