Victoria Helen McFarlane was born in Callender, Perthshire, Scotland on November 25, 1890-something. (It’s hard to know exactly what year; sources have given every year between 1895 and 1899, but official documents say 1897 so let’s go with that.)

For most of her life she used her middle name, Helen, instead of her given name so we’ll do the same here.

Her parents were Archibald and Isabella McFarlane, two very sober and serious Presbyterians. Helen, by contrast, was a wild child with an explosive temper who would pick fights, hang out with the neighborhood toughs, and do things just to piss off her parents. These rebellious ways purportedly earned her the nickname “Hellish Nell.”

When Helen was 16, she found herself in serious trouble for the first time: she got pregnant. She would later claim to have been sexually assaulted, but the particulars didn’t matter that much to her parents. This was the final straw as far as they were concerned, and kicked her out of the house.

Penniless, pregnant, and alone, Helen needed to find a way to support herself quickly. British industry was ramping up for the Great War, so she applied for a job at a local munitions factory. The factory would have hired almost any warm body, but Helen failed the mandatory physical for several reasons: because she was pregnant; because she was obese (weighing 15 stone or 210 pounds), and because she had tuberculosis.

She spent several months in the Dundee Royal Infirmary recovering, and liked it so much that after her discharge she became a nurse there. A few years later friend and co-worker Jean Duncan introduced Helen to her brother Henry, recently discharged from the army after coming down with a severe case of rheumatic fever. Henry and Helen got along like a house on fire. The two were wed on May 27, 1916 and shortly after he adopted her illegitimate child.

Their marriage was not an easy one. Chronic illness made it hard for Henry to work. Helen tried to contribute by taking factory jobs or working as a housekeeper, but she too was frequently sidelined by health problems. Often their only income was Henry’s army pension, a measly 8s a week.

That was not nearly enough money to support their growing family. They had eight children, all of them difficult births. The children were also sick and injury-prone. One of their daughters, Isabella, lost an eye after being attacked by a dog. Another, Henrietta, became ill and died as a toddler.

In the mid 1920s Helen decided to get a hysterectomy. The operation left her in constant pain, which she tried to manage by self-medicating with cigarettes, alcohol, and opiates. She put on more weight, at one point tipping the scales at nearly 25 stone (350 pounds). She needed help to stand and walk, had a weak bladder, and eventually developed Type II Diabetes.

So yeah, things were not well in the Duncan household. But that was about to change dramatically.

A Large Medium

So let’s talk about Spiritualism.

If you a regular listener of this podcast, you’re probably intimately familiar with it and you can zone out for the next minute or two.

If you’re not familiar with Spiritualism, it is a Nineteenth Century religious movement based on the idea that there is a barrier separating the living the dead and that certain people, or mediums, can act as conduits and channel messages across that barrier.

Many members of the public regarded mediums as con men and charlatans (mostly because they were). Spiritualists attempted to change that impression by describing their religion with the language and structure of science. The spiritual and numinous was presented as just another facet of an increasingly materialistic world. Mediums were certified and sorted into classifications, seances were “tests”, the spirits they channeled were “controls,” and so forth. The result was a strange fusion of religion and pseudo-science.

Spiritualism became enormously popular in America during the aftermath of the American Civil War, as vast numbers of the bereaved sought out any form of closure with their deceased loved ones. By the end of the century the movement was in decline, thanks to the efforts of committed skeptics who revealed that the “scientific rigor” of Spiritualism them was neither scientific nor rigorous, and that mediums were little more than stage magicians.

History has a tendency to repeat itself, though, and Spiritualism experienced a European revival in the aftermath of the Great War. Two of those newly-minted Spiritualists were Henry and Helen Duncan, who had been reading all they could on the paranormal and supernatural.

Supernatural experiences were nothing new to the Duncans. Helen often saw ghosts as a child, and had learned folk magic that enabled her to “draw sickness into herself.” She had visions of the future, though these precognitions seem to have been limited to to revealing schoolmates’ future husbands (if she liked them) or grisly deaths (if she didn’t). During the war she had visions of a strange man fighting in the trenches, who later turned out to be her future husband. Henry’s experiences were less extensive, but did include a vision of his future wife that came to him while he was convalescing in an army hospital.

It’s hard to say whether these experiences were genuine. There is no contemporary documentation of them… but why would there be? I think we can say the supernatural meet cute is almost certainly a retroactive invention. As for the rest, who can say?

What we can say is that as their health worsened and their employment opportunities dwindled, the Duncans turned to the supernatural to provide. With Henry’s encouragement and guidance, Helen Duncan reinvented herself as a Spiritualist medium.

Her seances followed a pretty familiar pattern.

• They would take place in darkened room illuminated only by dim red light. The dim light was supposedly for safety reasons; bright light, it was said, would be fatal to a medium in a trance. Its real purpose, unsurprisingly, was to make it hard to actually see anything clearly while allowing the medium to pretend that everything that followed was happening in plain sight.
• Helen would enter and retreat into a “cabinet” (a small corner of the room set off by a curtain). This was framed as a way of providing the seclusion a medium needed to enter a trance, but was intended to further keep the audience from seeing what was going on.
• Then she would enter a trance and call forth her “control” or spirit guide. The spirit guide spoke using Helen’s voice, amplified by a metal speaking horn, giving its voice a tinny otherworldly quality. It goes without saying that controls were just the medium talking in a silly voice and using a bit of ventriloquism to change where it seemed to be coming from.
• The control, in turn, would bring forth the spirits of the audience’s loved ones to answer questions. More silly voices, of course, and the accuracy of the answers either required foreknowledge of the question on the medium’s part or the use of cold reading (a technique developed by carnival psychics that involves giving open-ended answers and allowing the listener’s natural curiosity to fill in specifics).
• Helen’s big twist on the formula was that she was a “materialization medium,” a class of mediums who claimed to produce spirits in the flesh… Well, not quite in the flesh, but in a mysterious luminous substance called “ectoplasm.” It was a fabulous substance that could contort itself into amorphous clouds, glistening tendrils, or even faces and bodies. Visitors were often warned not to touch the stuff or it would retract and injure the medium. Ectoplasm was usually just wet cheesecloth being manipulated by the medium, who was hidden from view by their all-black dress, like a bunraku puppeteer. Touching it would have just given away the game.

The performance (and let’s not mince words, it was a performance) was often enhanced with some spectacular theatrics. Once a sewing machine vibrated itself halfway across the room during a seance. On another occasion a battle with evil spirits caused a nearby fireplace to collapse. She would frequently swoon from exertion and fall out of her chair, or urinate uncontrollably and leave a large puddle on the floor. Sometimes departing spirits would leave burns on her arms, though these burns only seemed to emerge after she had one of her usual post-seance cigarettes.

Helen’s first “control spirit” was the kindly “Dr. Williams,” who helped her develop her spiritual powers and refine her mediumistic abilities. The good doctor soon gave way to the gentlemanly “Matthew Douglas” and the domineering “Donald,” but neither one seemed to resonate with audiences. They were quickly discarded in favor of a veritable menagerie of distinctive and crowd-pleasing controls, including the avuncular “Albert Stewart” (a Scottish-Australian man who spoke like a BBC Radio 1 presenter for some reason) and the rambunctious “Peggy Hazzeldine” (a young girl who sang badly and taunted the audience).

Sounds like a fun night out to me, as long as you didn’t take it seriously.

Alas, many did.

Brazen Effrontery

With a spectacular show like that it was hardly surprising that by 1926 Helen Duncan was the most popular medium in Scotland. Word of her success soon reached the London Spiritualist Alliance. They were always looking for someone whose supernatural talents could prove the truth of Spiritualist dogma to the scientific community.

Mind you, they were also also always looking to destroy mediums who were obvious fakers and charlatans.

The Spiritualist Alliance did not have high hopes for Helen Duncan. Some of their skepticism can be boiled down to class prejudice. A morbidly obese, barely literate, lower class Scotswoman with a nasty temper was hardly their idea of the perfect medium. For the most part, though, they reacting to the quality of Helen’s seances, which were less like a somber religious ceremony and more like a carnival sideshow.

In 1929 the Spiritualist Alliance brought the Duncans to London so they could test Helen’s abilities. You might wonder why she would expose herself to the possibility of being debunked, but the answer is simple: in exchange for submitting to a few hours of prodding and poking, the Duncans received a stipend of £9 week, or about three times the income of the typical British family. The publicity generated by the tests would also create publicity, increasing the number of seances Henry was able to book and enabling him to charge more for them. The new income allowed the Duncans to pull themselves into the lower middle class. They rented a detached four bedroom home in Edinburgh, bought new clothes (including a fur coat and silk underwear), and even hired someone to keep house for them.

Initial results were not promising. Helen did fine with no controls in place. As the tests got more intense and invasive, often struggled to call up spirits in the face of restraint or restriction. When she could call them up, the spirits struggled provide accurate answers to simple questions.

(The traditional defense by apologists for mediums who fail during testing is that invasive tests and strict experimental controls interfere with spiritual abilities. The retort from skeptics is that lax experimental controls allow for all sorts of fraud.)

Investigators surreptitiously recovered pieces of ectoplasm during a seance, which turned out to be gauze soaked in pine tar. Suspecting that Helen was swallowing the cloth earlier and regurgitating it during the seance, they made her swallow a methylene blue tablet and were vindicated when she was unable to produce any ectoplasm at all that day (though she did try to pass her tongue off as ectoplasm). When physically restrained she could not produce any ectoplasm at all until the restraints were removed.

The Spiritualist Alliance quickly concluded that Helen Duncan was a fraud. The only real question was how much of a fraud she was. Some skeptical investigators were convinced she was a complete charlatan. More credulous ones argued she was only using cheap parlor tricks when her genuine spiritual powers failed her.

To allay their suspicious. Helen had herself x-rayed at the Dundee Royal Infirmary to show that she had a perfectly normal stomach. She also freely offered up the information that when she had her hysterectomy years earlier the surgeons had found “ectoplasmic movements” inside her body. Whatever that meant, and as if it explained anything.

Then the Duncans’ new housekeeper came by one day and told the investigators that she kept finding things around the house which the Duncans had no need of, but which strongly resembled the ectoplasmic manifestations produced during her seances. Things like children’s dolls. And cut-out photos of faeries. And rubber gloves. And various glow-in-the-dark knicknacks.

Suspecting that things were not going well for them, the Duncans decided to ditch the Spiritualist Alliance and see if they could find a more compliant investigator. They didn’t have to look far. Just upstairs, in fact.

You see, the London Spiritualist Alliance sublet part of its offices to another group of psychic investigators: Harry Price and his National Laboratory of Psychical Research.

Now, we’ve discussed Price on this podcast. He was a salesman, amateur magician, and compulsive liar who reinvented himself as Britain’s greatest ghost hunter. If there was a poltergeist, psychic, or paranormal event to be investigated Price would be there, attacking the problem with all the pseudo-scientific rigor he could muster. Before long he became Fleet Street’s go-to ghost guy and an infotainment celebrity.

The problem with Harry Price was that you never knew which Harry Price you would be getting, because he was devoted more to the “tainment” than the “info.” If he thought you were an obvious fake or fraud he would debunk you without a second thought. If he thought he could use you to keep his name in the papers or make a quick buck, he would play along until your act hit the point of diminishing returns.

In our earlier encounter with Price, the story of Borley Rectory, he thought there was money to be made and so he became an active participant in the hoax, fudging data, manufacturing poltergeist phenomena, and stretching the story out for years past its natural expiration date.

So it’s probably telling he was singularly unimpressed with Helen Duncan.

Helen held her first seance at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research on May 4, 1931. There were no controls in place; Price just wanted to see her regular act. The lights were dimmed, Helen retreated to the cabinet, and emerged a few minutes later covered head-to-toe in ectoplasm which seemed to be coming out of her nostrils.

This first séance was over just before ten o’clock, and I must say that I was deeply impressed: I was impressed with the brazen effrontery that prompted the Duncans to come to my Laboratory in an attempt to “put over” their stuff on our experts; I was impressed with the amazing credulity of the spiritualists who had sat with the Duncans for six solid months, and with the fact that they had advertised her “phenomena” as genuine.

Harry Price, Leaves from a Psychist’s Case-Book

Price immediately realized that Helen’s act involved cheap magic tricks and cold reading techniques, and she wasn’t particularly adept at either.

What really intrigued him was the ectoplasm. Not because it was good, mind you. He managed to feel some during the seance and immediately realized it was cheesecloth covered in some slimy gunk. The figures formed out of it were crappy puppets who only looked good in the dim lighting conditions.

What intrigued him was that he couldn’t figure out where it was all coming from. He would have to figure that out if he was going to do a proper debunking. Price retained the Duncans’ services for additional seances, for which they were handsomely compensated to the tune of £500 — more than they had earned in six months with the London Spiritualist Alliance.

The next few seances helped narrow things down. Helen Duncan could not produce ectoplasm when she was restrained tightly. She could produce ectoplasm when clad head-to-toe in a special “seance garment” (a fancy onesie, basically). Photographs of the ectoplasm confirmed it was cheesecloth and clearly showed every warp, weft, and and fold along with the safety pins that held it in place. A spectral hand turned out to be a rubber glove. Peggy’s face was a photo cut out of a magazine.

Price suspected that the ectoplasm was being stored somewhere inside Helen Duncan. Photos often showed it issuing from her nostrils and mouth, and the small morsels he was able to salvage often had a cheesy, vomity smell. When a piece of snagged on investigator Mollie Goldney she yanked it free; Helen screamed and later showed blood on her face near where the ectoplasm had been attached. After each seance, the medium spent several minutes in the loo vomiting.

Ultimately, he concluded that Helen Duncan was somehow storing these items in her stomach and then regurgitating them later. It was not without precedent; at the time you could find regurgitation acts in circuses all over the world. Houdini purportedly saw one in Warsaw where the performer swallowed some frogs, then regurgitated them alive after downing 40 glasses of beer. Another could swallow a series of small items and then regurgitate them in any order the audience requested.

Other skeptics have criticized Price’s conclusions, which is fair because they are based on some pretty sketchy evidence. He did, after all, think that Duncan had a second stomach like some sort of human cow. However their proposed alternatives are usually no better.

• They frequently suggest the sheer volume of ectoplasm suggests an alternative hiding place, demonstrating that they don’t know how compressible cheesecloth is.
• Joe Nickell thinks she may have sewn the cloth into secret pockets in her garments.
• Others suspect that Helen was keeping it in her vagina, which, fair enough, lots of mediums hid stuff in their hoo-has but that wouldn’t explain how Helen was able to get it out of Price’s seance onesie.
• Malcolm Gaskill terrifyingly, wonders if the presence of urine in analyses of the samples indicate that she was keeping it in her urethra. Which… okay, yes, would explain her extreme incontinence but also yikes and ow.

Price, though, was convinced it was the stomach. So after their fourth seance on May 28 he wheeled an x-ray machine into the room. He knew that cheesecloth wouldn’t show up on x-rays, but he was hoping to catch a safety pin or something else that would. He was also hoping it might force Duncan to tip her hand.

When Helen Duncan saw the x-ray machine she lost it. She threw a tantrum, and when Henry went over to reassure her she punched him in the face, jumped up and bowled over two of the investigators, then dashed out of the building into the street, wailing hysterically and rending her garments. She latched onto a nearby railing and refused to be budged.

Someone called an ambulance, and while Price dealt with that Henry went to calm his wife. When the ambulance finally let, Helen began enthusiastically demanding to be x-rayed. Price realized something was up, and began to suspect that while the Duncans were out of sight Helen had passed the cheesecloth off to Harry. Who then refused to turn out his pockets, on the excuse that he wasn’t wearing underwear and was therefore carrying sanitary napkins… which, uh, game, set, and match my dude.

The Duncans sat for Price one more time. Shortly afterward Price confronted Henry Duncan with proof that Helen was a fake. Henry denied everything, and said that if his wife was guilty of anything it was just “subconscious regurgitation,” to which Price asked if she was also guilty of subconsciously purchasing and swallowing cheesecloth because that suggested some serious mental health issues.

Henry still maintained that Helen could produce genuine psychic phenomena and scheduled another seance on July 2 to prove it. A week beforehand the Duncans moved back to Scotland in the middle of the night.

Price published a detailed report debunking Helen Duncan as a fraudulent medium. The London Spiritualist Alliance quickly followed suit, though it also hedged its bets by sticking to the Spiritualist party line that she was a genuine medium who used magic tricks to supplement her performances.

Helen Duncan began to spiral into depression. She announced her retirement and purportedly tried to commit suicide by drinking a bottle of boric acid. The doctors who pumped her stomach disagreed, claiming it was merely a cheap stunt to regain the sympathy of the public.

You Bloody Bugger

If so, it worked. The Spiritualists National Union and the Edinburgh Psychic College rallied around the Duncans, and it wasn’t long before Helen was more popular than ever.

That popularity did not translate to increased income, at least not right away. The Duncans eventually realized that while the Spiritualist National Union was making £20 for every seance they held, Helen was only being paid 2 guineas (£2 2d, or about 11% of the take). They severed ties with the Spiritualist National Union and began scheduling their own private sittings.

On January 4, 1933 they were booked by a Miss Esson Maule to conduct a seance in Edinburgh. There would be eight attendees, each of whom was kicking in 10s, a total take that was more than double what she had previously been earning. What the Duncans did not realize was that it was a set-up. Miss Maule was actually a Spiritualist, but one of the ones who did not suffer frauds and fools. (She had also been corresponding with Harry Price, who encouraged her plan.)

In the middle of the seance, Miss Maule turned on a flashlight and grabbed at the manifested spirit of Peggy, who turned out to be a woman’s stockingette undervest. (A flimsy one at that, because Maule’s hand went right through it.) The medium and the skeptic struggled, the flashlight was dropped, and then one of Maule’s confederates turned on the lights to reveal Duncan out of the cabinet, hunched over and desperately trying to stuff the remaining ectoplasm into her garments.

Maule launched into a prepared speech:

Mrs. Duncan, you are taking money for producing fraudulent materialisations, purporting to be deceased friends of sitters. It is disgraceful and I refuse to stand by it any longer. Each time I stretch my hand and find the chair where you are supposed to be sitting…

Duncan cut Maule off by throwing shoes at her head. Then she screamed, “I’ll brain you, you bloody bugger!” grabbed a folding chair and began swinging it around. The police had to wrestle it out of her hands.

She was charged with eight counts of fraud, “obtaining money by pretending to be a medium,” and “use of foul and blasphemous language.” he pled not guilty.

The case went to trial in May 1933. Harry Price watched from the gallery, and he was not impressed.

I sat through this trial, and my only comment is that I was amazed at the credulity exhibited by some of the witnesses for the defence: it was credulity bordering on imbecility.

Harry Price, Leaves from a Psychist’s Case-Book

It’s not clear who Price was referring to.

• He could have been talking about defense witness Dr. Montague Rust, one of those true believers who had helped neuter the London Spiritualist Alliance’s report on Duncan.
• Or he maybe he meant solicitor Ian Dickson, who made Rust’s argument that Duncan only resorted to tricks to supplement her genuine supernatural abilities the cornerstone of the defense.
• Possibly he meant Helen herself, who testified that she did could not remember anything as she was in a trance at the time.
• Most likely he was talking about the jury. who found the charges of fraud unproven but convicted her of blasphemy and fined her £10.

Two months later Helen Duncan was “re-certified” by the Spiritualists’ National Union and went right back to conducting seances, with one small change. Before performing she had female audience search her seance garments and watch her change into them. Mind you, it was classic misdirection: draw the audience’s attention to something small so they miss something big. There were still plenty of chances for items to be hidden on her person before dressing, or to be slipped to her after she changed.

The Last Witchcraft Trial in England

Then World War II broke out. This time the Spiritualist revival didn’t wait until after the war was over.

Helen Duncan was more in demand than ever, which allowed her to charge £8 per seance, four times what the Spiritualists’ National Union had been paying them and twice what they’d been able to earn from their early solo efforts. A multi-week engagement in a city usually meant thirteen performances and about £104 in revenue (or about £5,800 in 2024 money). She travelled all over the country, though Henry was no longer healthy enough to go with her so she was accompanied by fellow medium Frances Brown who served as her travel agent.

She played in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Durham, Manchester, York, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bristol, Gloucester, Taunton, Swindon, Torquay, Ventor… and Portsmouth.

It was Portsmouth what got her in trouble.

On two separate occasions 1941, she conjured up the spirits of dead sailors who revealed that a British warship had been destroyed: on May 24 it was the HMS Hood, and on November 25 it was the HMS Barham. Both ships had been sunk and all hands lost, but that knowledge was not yet public because the Admiralty was sitting on the information for intelligence regions.

Apologists often point to these revelations of proof of Helen Duncan’s genuine talent. The problem is that while the sinkings were not public knowledge, they were not exactly secret either. Families had received death notices, and in a naval town like Portsmouth there would have been gossip. There’s no proof of psychic ability here, merely proof that Duncan or someone on her advance team had their ear to the ground.

These incidents brought Helen Duncan to the attention of the Ministry of Defense and the police, who put her on a list of problems they might have to deal with some day.

In January 1944 Helen was brought back to Portsmouth by Ernest Homer and his common-law wife Elizabeth, who owned a drug store and operated the “Master Temple Church of Spiritual Healing” on the second floor. The Master Temple was a registered Spiritualist church, where Bessie conducted Spiritualist services and did healing ceremonies.

Helen was to give a series of seances at the Master Temple, and in exchange she would be paid £104, with a bonus for every seance that sold more than sixteen tickets. Well, Helen packed them in, selling out every show. The Master Temple was quickly flush with cash, because each ticket cost 12s 6p (or about £32 in 2024 money).

By now Helen’s seances had settled into a comfortable routine. Albert would call forth a parade of spirits, Peggy would sing and dance to lighten the heavy mood. It was great fun… assuming that you could live with the fact that most of the evening was spent giving false hope to grieving family members by conjuring up the spirits of sons and husbands who had died during the war.

One person who could not live with that was Lieutenant Stanley Raymond Worth.

Lt. Worth was in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, assigned to the HMS Excellent. He was also a regular customer of Homer’s Drug Store, where Bessie Homer tried to make him a convert to Spiritualism.

Worth was openly skeptical, but Bessie convinced him to buy a seance ticket so he could make up his mind. Two tickets, actually, because he also bought a ticket for his friend, Surgeon Lieutanant Elijah Fowler. Mrs. Homer even gave them prime front row seats.

On Friday, January 14 Lts. Worth and Fowler arrived at the Master Temple for the seance. They took in the setting: about twenty chairs faced a corner, where a curtain had been put up to form the cabinet. The windows were covered with blackout curtains, and illumination was provided by three dim lamps, one which had a red bulb.

As the seance began, the two men made a crucial critical mistake: when they sat down, they sat down in each others’ assigned seats.

The Homers passed around the seance garments so everyone could examine them, then three female audience members went in to an adjacent room to watch Helen Duncan change. She emerged dressed in all black and retired to the cabinet. The lights were doused, except for the red one, which was further dimmed by a red silk handkerchief.

They said a few prayers, sang a few hymns and popular songs, and then the curtains of the cabinet parted and Albert emerged. Worth was not impressed, thinking that the spirit was nothing more than a poorly-made puppet.

Albert declared, “I have here a lady who passed with the lower part of her body affected in some way, with some trouble to her bowels. Will someone please claim this lady?” No one spoke up, so Albert added, “It is for the gentleman on Mr. Homer’s right.”

Now, that should have been Lt. Fowler, but because they had switched seats, it was Lt. Worth. Worth struggled to come up with something to ask, then blurted out, “Are you my aunt?” to which the spirit responded, “Yes.” Worth could not think of any questions to ask, so the spirit retired.

Albert brought out another spirit. “I have a man who passed with some trouble to his chest.” Worth, once again befuddled, asked if it was his uncle, to which it responded yes. Worth could not think of any questions to ask, so the spirit retired.

Albert brought out a third spirit. “I have here your sister.” This set Worth off. He had some aunts and uncles who may or may not have been dead, but he only had one sister and she was very much alive. He spoke up.

WORTH: There must be some mistake, because I only have one sister and she is alive.

ALBERT: You many not understand, but she was a premature child. You say you think you have only one sister living, but in fact there was some embryonic infant that your mother had, and it is that little creature which has come to visit you in the Temple.

Flabbergasted, Worth sat down. The frustrated Albert moved on to other sitters and other spirits. He conjured up a dead RAF aviator, a soldier who had been blown to bits, and sailor so mutilated none of the sitters could recognize him.

Albert was replaced by Peggy, who danced and sang “Loch Lomond” in a voice that sounded exactly like an old woman imitating a young girl. Then Albert came back out for an encore, and then the ghost of a cat, then a spirit named Granny, then a ghost parrot, and finally someone named “Dad” (who was apparently a policeman because he refused to speak until he could get his helmet on). Eventually the seance ended and the lights were turned up.

Worth was not impressed. When Bessie Homer and Frances Brown asked him if he enjoyed it he gave ambiguous and noncommittal replies like, “That was interesting.” Brown tried to sell him copies of spirit photographs taken during a previous seances, and Worth declined because he thought they looked like shite.

The following day Worth went to the Portsmouth police and swore out a fraud complaint against Duncan and the Homers. The police asked him to gather more evidence, and sent him back to the Master Temple for another seance on Sunday, January 16. This one was held in full daylight, with no materializations, and just featured Albert preaching using Duncan’s body like a ventriloquist dummy.

In the middle of the sermon, Duncan froze and declared, “A little girl has just got hold of my hand, her name is Audrey. Now she has run down the room to the gentleman sitting at the end of the row at the back, and she is standing by him.” She pointed to the man in question, a Mr. Barnes.

Barnes looked confused and said, “My daughter’s name is Shirley, not Audrey.”

Duncan equivocated. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I should have said Shirley; I got the name wrong.” Worth had to the realization Price had a decade earlier: Duncan’s act only worked if she had intelligence on her sitters. When she didn’t have it, or if that information was incorrect, it didn’t work at all.

The police had Worth buy seats for another seance on Wednesday, January 19. This time his guest was War Reserve Police Constable Thomas Cross. The seance started normally, but when Albert brought forth the third spirit Cross pushed over the chair in front of him and grabbed at the ectoplasmic figure. At the same time Worth switched on a flashlight he had hidden under his coat and lit up the form of Helen Duncan, barefoot, not only standing outside the cabinet (where she was supposed to be seated) but actively puppeteering a sheet of cheesecloth and frantically attempting to get rid of it.

Someone lunged at the flashlight, which was knocked to the floor and shut off. Someone else snatched the puppet out of Cross’s grasp. When the lights came on they were nowhere to be seen. What could be seen was Helen Duncan, red as a beet and hurriedly putting her shoes back on. Worth asked if she had seen where the puppet had gone, she retorted, “It has gone. Of course it has gone. It had to go somewhere.”

Then she began to scream for a doctor. The police had been waiting outside, and chose this moment to burst in. Detectives asked everyone to remain seated while they gathered names and addresses.

Constable Cross told his superior that someone had grabbed the “spirit” out of his hands, and gesticulated in the direction of the Homers’ daughter Christine. Christine took the occasion to go full Karen, screaming, “Are you accusing me? You heard that statement, friends; I have been accused.” Then she began demanding to be searched, but the police demurred. (The puppet was never found).

Helen Duncan, Frances Brown, and Edward and Elizabeth Homer were all placed under arrest. On January 25 the Crown filed charges against them under the Vagrancy Act:

…every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle craft, means or device, by palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose on any of His Majesty’s subjects… shall be deemed a rogue or a vagabond…

However, the punishment proscribed by the Vagrancy Act was only three months imprisonment. Prosecutors felt that was inadequate, so on February 8 they amended the charges to invoke the Witchcraft Act of 1735, which called for one year’s imprisonment for anyone who…

…[may] pretend to excercise or use any kind of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Enchantment, or Conjuration, or undertake to tell Fortunes, or pretend, from his or her Skill or Knowledge in any occult or crafty Science, to discover where or in what manner any Goods or Chattels, supposed to have been stolen or lost, may be found.

There were seven charges in total:

• one charge of pretending to conjure the spirits of the deceased, in contravention of the Witchcraft Act;
• one charge of conspiracy to contravene the Witchcraft Act;
• two counts of intent to defraud, for taking money from Worth and another complainant;
• and three counts of “effecting public mischief,” one for each seance Worth had attended.

The defendants pled not guilty, of course.

The prosecution was careful to make clear that that though the defendants had been charged with violating the Witchcraft Act of 1735, this was not a witch hunt. Unlike earlier statutes, the Witchcraft Act assumed that witches were not real; it outlined punishments not for witches, but for those pretending to be witches. They spent several days making a clean, well-argued case for simple fraud complete with a parade of expert witnesses who demonstrated how Helen Duncan’s supposedly supernatural feats could be replicated through mundane means.

The Spiritualists National Union organized the defense, and hired Sir Charles Loseby to head it. Perhaps realizing that the truth would be an absolute defense against the charges being leveled, Loseby attempted to prove that Helen Duncan had genuine supernatural powers and make the trial a referendum on Spiritualism.

The problem was the arguments he made boiled down to nothing more than clever sophistry.

• He produced more than forty witnesses and satisfied customers who testified that the supernatural was real, though they weren’t very convincing and had nothing to say relevant to the case at hand.
• He argued from authority, rattling off a list of notable public figures who believed in Spiritualism.
• He split hairs, claiming the dead aunts and uncles Worth did not recognize may have been great aunts and great uncles.
• He tried to confuse matters by introducing irrelevant facts, like that the Master Temple donated its profits to charity, or by trying to alter the facts in evidence, like consistently referring to Duncan’s “shoes” as “slippers.”
• He tried character assassination, accusing Worth of being a liar for politely telling the Homers that the performance had been “amazing”, and accusing Cross of being a coward who panicked in the presence of ghosts..
• He even threatened to charge Worth for assault, because “everyone” knew that shining bright light on a medium in a trance could kill them.
• He wondered out loud if the raid had been organized by the Admiralty as revenge for Duncan revealing the loss of the Hood and the Barham in 1941, and accused Worth of being a “spy for the police” without offering any sort of evidence. (That certainly would have been news to the government, which seemed embarassed by the entire affair. Winston Churchill himself was heard to grumble that the trial was “obsolete tomfoolery” and a distraction from more important issues.)
• He even offered to have Duncan hold a seance for the jury, which declined on the grounds that it was irrelevant.

Alas, all of Loseby’s clever posturing was for naught. After his closing remarks the judge’s jury instructions made it very clear that the trial was not a referendum on Spiritualism, and that the validity of its doctrines (or lack thereof) should not come into their deliberations.

On March 31, 1944 it took the jury only 25 minutes to find all four defendants guilty as charged. Upon hearing the verdict, Helen Duncan wailed, “I have done nothing. I have never done anything. Oh God! Is there a God? It’s all lies!”

Helen Duncan was sentenced to nine months in prison. Frances Brown was sentenced to four. The Homers were given parole. They immediately appealed, and those appeals were immediately denied.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

Nine months in Holloway Prison did nothing to change Helen Duncan. As soon as she was released she picked up right where she left off, giving seances all over the country for another decade.

She had one more brush with the law. On October 26, 1956 she was conducting a seance in the Nottingham home of chiropodist J. Timmons when the police burst in. Helen immediately turned gray and passed out. It might have been a heart attack (she was old, diabetic, and had a pre-existing heart condition). Then again, it might have been an act (Albert apparently assured attendees she would be fine). A doctor summoned by the police refused to either move her or to examine her private parts for “ectoplasm.”

Eventually an ambulance took her to the nearest hospital. She was discharged on November 30, readmitted a few days later, and died on November 6, 1956.

Sir Charles Loseby claimed she was murdered, and used her name to raise money for Spiritualism.

Over the years, Helen Duncan has been frequently lionized by New Age types and her 1944 trial called the last witchcraft trial in England. It’s not true.

First, as established, though charges were filed under the Witchcraft Act. the act itself is about fraud and not witchcraft.

And secondly, it wasn’t the last trial under the Witchcraft Act.

In September 1944, prosecutors charged another woman for violating the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Jane Rebecca Yorke, a wheelchair-bound 72-year-old widow, had been conducting seances at her home in East London. If anything, Yorke’s seances were even more embarrassing than Duncan’s had been. Her control was a Zulu chief (who was known to chant “unga bunga bunga”) and she conjured up the spirits of Queen Victoria and Arthur Conan Doyle. Her downfall came when she carried messages to a policewoman from her dead husband, and to a policeman from his late Uncle Charles, neither of whom existed. Yorke tried a variation of Duncan’s Edinburgh defense, offering that she had no idea what she was saying because it was all spirits acting through her. It didn’t work either, and she was found guilty.

Prosecutors continued to threaten defendants with the Witchcraft Act right up until about 1950, though the charges never made it to trial. In 1951 the act was superceded by the far more lenient Fraudlent Mediums Act.

That makes Jane Yorke’s trial the last trial under the Witchcraft Act. Yorke got probation, though, so at least Helen Duncan can claim to be the last person imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act.

Which still doesn’t make her an actual witch, no matter how you cut it.