Beaver Island History - Helen Collar Papers

Women Who Stayed in Bed

P. 45
Some old ladies (in their fifties) went to bed & never got up. They were cared for by their families, dressed every day, etc... They "shrank up," got to be only about 4 feet long. They "thought they went back to the fairies." Roland remembers seeing one. She was very small, all dressed in black with a white apron on, lying on the bed. On of them had been in bed for 18 years when the pig fell into the well and she got out of bed and got him out. ( -Roland)
Mr. Nackerman confirms this. He told particularly of Mrs. "Lably" O'Donnell (see her card). He also told the story about the woman who got the pig out of the well, & tells another one about a woman getting up & putting out the fire when the house caught afire when she was there alone.
Stanley Floyd confirms this, & says Mrs. Don Father was one of them. He said (with no prompting on my part), "they did it to get out of the way."

Mike Cull's grandmother - Mrs. Lably O'Donnell. ( -Nackerman)
Mrs. Big Phil Gallagher
Johnny Mahane O'Donnell (Maria)
Mary Greene, wife of Big Dominic - she is the one that got up & rescued the pig
( -Roland)

Note:
"We also knew of a handful of women who took to their beds in their fifties and in obedience to some strange custom whose origin we could not find, never left their houses again until they died. What a rich field it would have offered to a sociologist! It must have gone back to an incredibly early England."
Bryher, The Heart to Artemis, p. 1751
(She is talking of the Scilly Islands, 1911-17. She stayed on St. Mary's.)

Bryher, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962.