Of the many shady undertakings committed by Helen Duncan, witchcraft was not one of them. But nonetheless, during the Second World War the Scottish Spiritualist and show-woman was convicted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act. Duncan spent nine months in jail, and was the last person prosecuted in Britain under this legislation.
An irony is that Duncan wanted people to believe that she had paranormal powers. She touted herself as a clairvoyant and gave seances where she told customers about their dead relatives and claimed to produce a substance materialized out of the spiritual plane called “ectoplasm” from her mouth. The second image shows some of this. Even at the time, witnesses found her work stagey and hacked.
However, at a seance in November 1941, Helen Duncan claimed that a deceased sailor on board the British ship HMS _Barham_ had told her his ship had been sunk. This news had been kept from the general public, but was true – it was torpedoed off the coast of Egypt and only the relatives of the 861 dead men had been told at that point. Worried that Duncan had obtained classified information and would compromise further military secrets, government officials had her arrested.
The trial was bungled: the use of the Witchcraft Act was drawn in because the prosecution had no better evidence to convict her. The police that raided Helen Duncan’s seance found no material evidence that might convict her, and the majority of witness testimony was favorable to Duncan.
As a result of the brouhaha accompanying her trial, the Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951. After her prison sentence, Duncan promised to stop holding seances, but she was caught in the act and busted again in 1956 by police.
Source(s): _History UK_, “Helen Duncan, Scotland’s Last Witch,” by Ben Johnson. Wikipedia.
