The Fairy Witch of Carrick-on-Suir: A Nineteenth-Century Fairy Resurrectionist December 1, 2022
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
James Hayes in court 2 Sept 1864 : ‘It is not so extraordinary… for persons to be raised from the dead’.
Introduction
Mary Doheny (1820s-1870s?), the subject of our latest podcast, was a nineteenth-century Irish ‘fairy woman’. She began her career as a herbalist. But Mary had too much talent and too much personality to limit herself to mere leaves and roots. She quickly branched out, then, into healing cattle and children and into the practice of rudimentary love magic. She also – I know of no other example of this from nineteenth-century Ireland – advised the police on where to find criminals: our first law-and-order psychic? Like many traditional healers in Ireland in the 1800s, she relied upon the authority and power of the ‘good people’. She certainly identified one sick child as being a changeling and her most famous act of magic was rich in fairies. In 1864 she claimed to be about to bring the dead of a Tipperary policeman’s family back to life. These relatives, it was believed by the family – the Reeves – resided with the fey.
The Dead and the Fairies
The idea that the dead (or at least some of them) lived with the fairies can be found in a number of nineteenth-century Irish sources. There is the notion, first, that many stolen humans only appeared to be dead. However, when buried their ‘bodies’ turned into stocks (brooms, spades and the like): sometimes coffins were opened and nothing but a branch was found within! These individuals had ‘really’ been stolen away by the fairies and were still alive in the fairies’ realm, serving their fairy masters. In other cases, there is the claim that a dead human goes to reside with the fairies post mortem. Yeats – who is a particularly good (and reliable?) source for these kinds of beliefs – records in Irish Fairy and Folk Tales: ‘When the soul has left the body, it is drawn away, sometimes, by the fairies. I have a story of a peasant who once saw, sitting in a fairy rath, all who had died for years in his village.’
These were the convictions that Mary unwisely chose to play with in the summer of 1864 in Carrick-on-Suir in Tipperary. She would come to regret her choice. But Mary was not unique in partaking in such games. Irish fairy doctors were extraordinarily versatile in their trickery, something I have documented over the last decade, and there were several other attempts to bring the dead back from the fairy raths. Take this account from Lady Wilde (Oscar’s mother):
A young man died suddenly on May Eve [a fairy feast] while he was lying asleep under a hay-rick, and the parents and friends knew immediately that he had been carried off to the fairy palace in the great moat of Granard. So a renowned fairy man was sent for, who promised to have him back in nine days. Meanwhile [the fairy man] desired that food and drink of the best should be left daily for the young man at a certain place on the moat. This was done, and the food always disappeared, by which they knew the young man was living, and came out of the moat nightly for the provisions left for him by his people. Now on the ninth day a great crowd assembled to see the young man brought back from Fairyland. And in time stood the fairy doctor performing his incantations by means of fire and a powder which he threw into the flames that caused a dense grey smoke to arise. Then, taking off his hat, and holding a key in his hand, he called out three times in a loud voice, ‘Come forth, come forth, come forth!’ On which a shrouded figure slowly rose up in the midst of the smoke, and a voice was heard answering, ‘Leave me in peace; I am happy with my fairy bride, and my parents need not weep for me, for I shall bring them good luck, and guard them from evil evermore.’ Then the figure vanished and the smoke cleared, and the parents were content, for they believed the vision, and having loaded the fairy-man with presents, they sent him away home.
This particular ‘fairy-man’ was luckier than Mary. He did not come under the notice of the courts, at least on this occasion.
The Con
Almost all the information we have about Mary comes from three connected 1864 legal cases and accompanying media coverage involving her (largely successful) attempt to defraud Mary and William Reeves. She convinced the Reeves that their dead loved ones could be resurrected and with breath-taking chutzpah brought living family members face-to-face with deceased family members: in one case with just a pane of glass separating the living and the dead. (She presumably used actors rather than hypnosis.) Mary had two hooks. First, she claimed that the Reeves’ dead relatives would return to life if the Reeves took on the responsibility for feeding them on a proper human diet (compare the example from Wilde above). An important sum was spent by the Reeves on potatoes, tea, eggs and even tobacco and some clothing for their dead relatives. Second, Mary claimed that the dead would return with land rights so that the Reeves would become wealthy.
The wealth was connected to Captain James Power, a local landowner who had died 12 June 1854: ‘He was a magistrate of the counties of Waterford, Tipperary and Kilkenny.’ Power had been based at the house at Ballydine just to the west of Carrick and had been friendly with Mary Reeves’ father, one William Mullins, a Wexford man who had died c. 1861: they may even have been distantly related by marriage. Both the Captain and the Mullins were now – Mary Doheny explained – among the fairies and it was Power who took to writing letters on behalf of the captive dead including William Mullins, but also four others: Mary Reeves’ three dead sisters and a dead son. Though this is never stated outright it seems that the Captain – a powerbroker in death as in life – was negotiating with the fairies on behalf of the Reeves. But the Captain’s letters – at least those read out in court – had terrible spelling mistakes: not something one would expect from a magistrate…
The con was spun out across the Tipperary landscape. Mary first took William Reeves to ‘Knockroe’: presumably the famous passage tomb about seven miles to the north of Carrick. Reeves went away convinced that he had seen his dead father-in-law in a field just twenty yards in front of him. A series of letters to the dead and Captain Powers were ‘posted’ at a ‘moat’ (earth ramparts) at Ballydine about four miles to the west of Carrick. The replies were also picked up there by William Reeves’ son, Terence. There was a tunnel at this ‘moat’ and this seems to have been connected to a fairy rath. The land promised by the Captain was in Waterford on the other side of the Suir. Then William Reeves was taken to see his dead son William (there are many Williams in this tale) at William Duggan’s herding house at Carrick, probably on the south bank. The dead child was presented to him through a window and stood there with his dead aunt Margaret Powers. Later the dead son came to talk to his mother at night, for almost an hour, through a closed door.
Not the least incredible thing about Mary’s con was how effective it was. The Reeves believed passionately that five of their loved ones really were about to come back from the fairies: the five were in a kind of intermediate state in Duggan’s shed being weaned back onto an earthly diet. In September William Reeves made a point of publicly shaking Mary’s hand in court in the preliminary investigation and the Reeves continued to send food to Duggan’s shed, after Mary had been detained. But by the Quarter Sessions in October the couple were no longer on Mary’s side. Mary Reeves had become bitter in the intervening period. It was the lack of intercourse with her dead relatives – Mary Doheny was in prison and could not arrange matters – that had convinced her that she had been duped. William Reeves had been forced, meanwhile, to change the town he worked in and had made a fool of himself in court and in the press. But William, an amiable man, insisted that he did not want to see the fairy woman punished.
Mary Doheny
The con and its background in Irish lore should now be clear, but what about the perpetrator, Mary Doheny? As with many such cases she gets lost in legal and press accounts: the static of outrage is deafening. However, in the thousands of words written about these cases in British and Irish newspapers certain facts leak out. She was ‘about 40 years of age’ – birth date in the 1820s? – ‘with a good-looking face, though somewhat passe, and a mouth particularly expressive of cunning and intelligence’. She could be fearsome at times: ‘We learned that some time ago the female prisoner gave a neighbouring woman an awful beating, and yet nobody could be got to prosecute her, fearing that she might bewitch themselves or their children…’ She was also – a prerequisite in this line of work – good at theatrics. She fainted in the trial in what seems to have been a gamble for sympathy and her verbal interventions in court suggest verve.
Her back story is difficult to piece together. She arrived in Carrick-on-Suir in 1863: like many ‘fairy doctors’ or ‘fairy witches’ she was semi-itinerant. Mary had a family. She appeared, indeed, at the Petty Sessions with a baby in her arms. When she was being sentenced, she pled that she had two children and a blind husband. This husband, it was alleged by the Quarter Sessions judge, dressed up as dead members of the Reeves family for Mary. He was a beggar. ‘He travels through the country led along by a ‘dark’ guide, and on being questioned he acknowledged that his worst day’s receipts for some time past was 2s. 9½d., while occasionally they realized six or seven shillings in a day’. Her own income and that of her husband allowed her to enjoy a good life in Carrick. A journalist at the Tipperary Free Press wrote that ‘she has lived in affluent circumstances’. Court and prison put an end to that. We have only glimpses of her after she was released thanks to four surviving news reports from the later 1860s and 1870s (they are printed in this volume). Her existence in nearby Clonmel picking water-cress seems, though, to have been a miserable one.
The book accompanying the podcast – The Fairy Witch of Carrick-on-Suir: A Source Book for a Nineteenth-Century Resurrectionist – can be found here (UK, US). The Doheny trials have been almost entirely forgotten by Irish historians and folklorists.
