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The same curiosity drove others to try to check Bridey's story in Ireland. To get the Denver Post back on top of the story it had launched, Post Publisher Palmer Hoyt sent Reporter Barker on a three-week prowl through Irish graveyards and libraries. This week, in its Sunday edition, the Post printed Barker's 20,000-word report. He listed many a point that checked out in Bridey's favor—mostly knowledge of expressions, customs and legends, all of which (though Barker die not say so) could have lodged in Mrs. Tighe's subconscious mind in tales told by her parents, both of whom were partly Irish in extraction.
Bridey & Blarney. But otherwise, Barker's search turned up more blarney than Bridey, even though folklorists, genealogists, historians and language specialists turned themselves inside out to help. Barker found numerous directories and records in which Bridey and several of the characters in her story—lawyers, teachers, a priest—should have been recorded if they had existed. But there was not a trace. Bridey—whose name Barker now spells "Bridie" on the advice of the Irish —had given names of Belfast streets and obscure towns through which she passed on her honeymoon trip and on a journey to the sea as a child. He could find only some of the places, and even they made no sensible pattern of travel.
Despite her brogue, Barker learned, Bridey had shamefully mispronounced Irish words (like the name Sean, which she insisted on pronouncing See-an instead of Shawn), and larded her story with American idioms unheard-of in Ireland, e.g., her hair was "real red," she got an "awful spanking."
There were other discrepancies. Bridey described her metal bed in 1804, but Irish authorities said that metal beds did not arrive in Ireland until 1850. Bridey's father's first name was Duncan, a Scottish name that the Irish found utterly incongruous with Murphy. Bridey had spoken of living in Cork in a wooden house, but the houses in that boggy part of the country were almost invariably made of stone. She had spoken of Cork as a "town" and "village," but it was a big city in the 1800s.
Though nobody could find a scrap of evidence that she ever lived, Bridey died hard—even with Reporter Barker, who was frankly hoping to prove her real. Barker consoled himself and his readers with the thought that the search was really not over.
"What do I think about the whole Bridie business?" he wound up. "Well, it's no fraud, whatever it is ... Has this research disproved reincarnation? I'll leave that to you. All I think we've proved definitely is that memory (any kind of memory) is unreliable. And that we know less than nothing about our brains and our souls. I do think Morey and Ruth owe the world one more hypnotic session with somebody present who's accustomed to interviewing people. That somebody ought also to know Ireland. I volunteer."