Moll Anthony, aka Mary Lesson (–1878), was an Irish bean feasa (wise-woman) who lived at Hill of the Grange, but apparently originally from the Red Hills, County Kildare. She was called after her father, Anthony Dunne. She was buried in Milltown, County Kildare, in 1878.
Moll was able to cure both people and animals with potions she created from particular herbs. Each potion was given in three porter bottles, two of which she gave at her first visit, the third bottle been given at the second visit. The charge was half a crown a bottle. According to a website,
Lord Walter Fitzgerald wrote of her
He furthermore stated that "Some believed that Moll Anthony of the Red Hills was a sort of reincarnation of a young dead girl. And that Moll's spirit had been left by the fairies in replace of the young girls dead body in the coffin." His account was as follows:
Fitzgerald claimed that Moll Anthony's name was Mary Leeson, that she died in 1878 and that her cure passed on to a James Leeson her son. This man lived in a comfortable slated house on the Hill of the Grange on the site of Moll's former mud-walled house. Local people accept that James had the cure and the house which still clings to the side of Grange Hill was his.[1]
Two side-by-side tombstones in the graveyard of Milltown, County Kildare, read.