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Anne Williamson

Anne Williamson

Audiobook narrator who reads public-domain works by G. K. Chesterton on the Napoleon of Notting Hill podcast.

Sep 7, 2026

6:41
So for anybody who doesn't know the story, who was Bridget Cleary?
6:48
Yeah, Bridget Cleary was a young woman who lived in Ballybitlay, Clunane in County Tipperary.
6:56
And she was about 18 and she met Michael Cleary.
7:03
She was working in Clonmel, a local town, where she was a seamstress.
7:08
And she met Michael Cleary and within six months or so of meeting him, she married him.
7:16
She married him in the local... parish church in Drangon and things were rolling along fine for a while and they were married about seven years or thereabouts and suddenly he decided that she was different one day that she came home he thought she was different that it wasn't his wife was in it and that he believed because she used to walk every night she used to take a walk up the hill past the ferry forth he believed that she had been captured by the fairies and that they had put a changeling in her place because she seemed different you know when she came back one night so about a couple of days after that she got sick and she took to the bed and um he uh Well, they called the doctor, and the doctor came to see her, and he said she only had a cold or something like that, and he left medicine for her.
8:17
But her husband still maintained that it was the fairies had taken her, and he kind of convinced her relations and people around the parish that she had been taken by the fairies and that it wasn't Bridget who was in the bed at all.

39 MINS LATER

47:04
I think my last question with Bridget Cleary is, if Bridget Cleary could somehow see your film today, what would you hope she would take from it?

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