Helen Duncan, (Not) Scotland’s Last Witch

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly try. Today we
are going to talk about Helen Duncan, who is sometimes

(00:21):
described as Scotland's last witch or as the last person
imprisoned for witchcraft in Britain. Sometimes people are like a
little more precise than that and call her the last
person to be tried under the UK's seventeen thirty five
Witchcraft Act. None of that is quite correct, though all

(00:42):
of them are wrong in slightly different ways. We, of course,
we'll be talking about that. One of the many wild
things about the story, though, is that it really did
involve the Witchcraft Act of seventeen thirty five, but it
happened in nineteen forty four. Who didn't love a little

(01:03):
archaic law being applied to modern times. So. Helen Duncan
was born Victoria Helen McFarlane on November in Colander, Scotland,
which is roughly thirty five miles that's about fifty six
kilometers north of Glasgow. She was the fourth of eight
children born to Archibald McFarlane and Isabelle retree Archibald worked

(01:27):
as a slater, that is, a person who slates roofs.
Helen had a flair for the supernatural and the dramatic
from a very early age. She would make these portentous
statements about other people's impending doom. She said that she
could see and talk to spirits. She was also headstrong,

(01:47):
people didn't think of her as particularly feminine. All of
this together earned her the nickname Hellish Nell while she
was still a child. Sources are very contradictory about whether
this was sort of a lightly teasing and affectionate nickname,
or if it was a real condemnation of her behavior.
In some accounts, there were mediums on both sides of

(02:09):
the family, and Helen's parents didn't try to discourage her
as long as she wasn't making predictions or talking about
spirits around people who might disapprove. But in other accounts,
this behavior went against the family's religious beliefs, and Helen's
parents told her she was going to be burned at
the stake if she kept it up. Helen left school

(02:32):
when she was a teenager. She got a job serving
meals at a hotel. She got pregnant in nineteen fourteen
when she was about sixteen, and at that point her
parents did kick her out. Helen moved to the coastal
city of Dundee, where she gave birth to a daughter
named Isabella in nineteen fifteen. In Dundee, Helen worked at
a mill and as an auxiliary nurse at the Dundee

(02:54):
Royal Infirmary, and it was there that she met Henry
Edward Duncan. He was the they're of one of her
co workers, and he had been discharged from the army
after developing rheumatic fever. Helen said the first time they
met it had been in her dreams. They got married
on May nineteen sixteen and moved to Edinburgh, including Isabella.

(03:16):
They had six children who survived to adulthood. Helen and
Henry were both chronically ill, and the family often really
struggled financially. Henry tried to start his own business as
a cabinet maker, which Helen helped him with. She also
took a job at a bleach factory to try to
help make ends meet, but then Henry had a heart attack,

(03:38):
which he survived, but afterward he wasn't able to work anymore.
They're already tight budget got even tighter, and Helen started
conducting seances in the evenings to try to earn a
little more money. Henry did what he could to encourage
her and to manage her career. When we've talked about
the spiritualist movement on the show before, we have usually

(04:01):
been talking about things that happened a little bit earlier
than this, in the nineteenth or very early twentieth century.
Previous episodes have covered nineteenth century figures like the Sisters
Fox and Madame Blovotsky, and spiritualism has come up in
episodes about other people who lived during the same time,
including Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson and Sojourner Truth. But spiritualism

(04:24):
didn't end with the Victorian era. It was still going
strong after the devastation of World War One in the
nineteen eighteen flu pandemic as people tried to reconnect with
loved ones who had died. So when Duncan started offering
her services as a medium in the nineteen twenties, she
had plenty of potential customers. In six the Duncan family

(04:46):
moved from Edinburgh back to Dundee and Helen started to
really focus on her work as a medium. She specifically
became a materialization medium. That's somebody who's spirit channeling process
also included physical manifestations, in this case producing ectoplasm from
her body. If this ectoplasm also enabled a medium to

(05:10):
perform some kind of telekinesis, it was described as teleplasm,
and that comes up in accounts of Helen Also. Duncan
seances evolved over time, but they basically went like this.
One corner of the room would be separated off from
the rest of the space with hanging curtains, and this
served as the medium's cabinet. It could also be an

(05:32):
actual cabinet, or a closet or an alcove, just some
space that could be separated by a curtain. She would
pass around a set of clothing for the people attending
the seance or the sitters to inspect. If the sitters
were satisfied that the clothes were not concealing anything or
suspicious in some way, she would take some of the

(05:52):
women into another room where they could watch as she
changed into that set of clothes. These women could also
inspect Duncan's hair and body to make sure that she
wasn't hiding something. Once all of that was done, Duncan
would take a seat in the cabinet. After the curtains
were closed in front of her and the room was

(06:13):
lit with a dim red light, she would go into
a trance, and when the curtain opened again, spirit guides
would manifest hovering close to her. She had two primary guides,
they were Albert and Peggy, and they would carry messages
from the other side for various sitters in the room.
Other spirits also manifested from time to time as well,

(06:34):
and sometimes Duncan would manifest large amounts of white, whispy ectoplasm.
Although Duncan had devoted supporters from the very beginning, it
did not take long for people to point out that
these manifestations were fake. They could look quite convincing under
that dim red light, especially to spiritualists who already believed

(06:56):
in things like spirit manifestation. But in eight photographer Harvey
Metcalf took flash photos during a seance that Duncan conducted
in her home, apparently with her permission, and what he
captured looked almost laughably bad. Yeah, they did not hold
up under a camera flash like. In one of the photos,

(07:17):
Duncan is in a chair, blindfolded and she has a
length of what looks like rolled gauze leading from her
nose to a figure that's hovering over her shoulder. This
figure has very squared off shoulders like maybe it's really
fabric draped over a coat hanger, and its face looks
a lot like the head of a Punch and Judy

(07:38):
puppet made of paper mache. And another the figure is
similarly positioned with this gauzy rope leading out from under
Duncan's blindfold to drape around a boxy white form that
has a very dull like head. Duncan's critics also included
other spiritualists. The London spiritualist A Lion, carried out an

(08:00):
investigation this fan from October of nineteen thirty to June
of nineteen thirty one. Duncan participated in this investigation, traveling
to London and being paid a flat fee for the
roughly fifty seances that she conducted over those months. Investigators
examined everything about them, her clothes, the ectoplasm, the information

(08:22):
that she conveyed. They took X rays and at one
point had her swallow methylene blue to try to figure
out if she was swallowing and regurgitating the substance that
she said was ectoplasm. This did not work because she
didn't produce any ectoplasm after swallowing the die. After the
first few seances that Duncan conducted as part of this investigation,

(08:46):
the London Spiritualist Alliance seems to a thought that she
might actually be genuine, but the organization ultimately concluded that
she was a fraud. They did not find definitive proof
of where the ectoplasm came from, but they thought most
likely the scenario was that she was swallowing it before
the seance and then regurgitating it. Different pieces of ectoplasm

(09:08):
that they examined seemed to have been made from different recipes,
but they incorporated things like cheesecloth, egg white and toilet paper.
I read this prior to us recording, but somehow hearing
that set aloud makes me want to regurgitate things. It's
just like the thought of swallowing that and then bringing

(09:28):
it back up is gross. I'm not a fan, no uh.
Psychic researcher Harry Price conducted his own investigation through his
National Laboratory of Psychical Research in May nine one, paying
Duncan fifty pounds for a series of seances. He was
skeptical from the start, saying that he had heard of

(09:49):
Duncan through the spiritualist press, but quote, as I do
not believe one tenth of what I read in the
spiritualist press, I was not particularly thrilled. Price also concluded
that Duncan was a fraud, with her teleplasm being made
up of egg white mixed with various other ingredients. He
also took photos of Duncan during a seance, one of

(10:10):
which showed her draped in what appeared to be cheesecloth.
Price also described an effort to X ray Duncan's stomach
during a seance. Cheesecloth would not appear on an X ray,
but if there was a safety pin or some other
solid object used to keep all that together, that might
show up. But when it was time to do the

(10:32):
X rays, Duncan, purportedly in a trance, became agitated and
physically aggressive and refused to cooperate. Don't don't swallow safety pins,
you don't, don't, don't, don't do it. Duncan consented to
all of these investigations. It was paid for her work
as a medium during them, although her husband made the
arrangements for Prices investigation, so it's not totally clear how

(10:56):
much agency she had in that instance, but beyond that,
these tests and examinations were degrading and invasive. Prices account
repeatedly describes him and other men investigating quote, every orifice
of her body, and his descriptions of her body and
her weight are really dehumanizing. Although the results of these
investigations were reported in newspapers, Duncan's most ardent supporters were

(11:21):
not deterred. But not too long after this she ran
into bigger problems than just negative newspaper coverage, and we
will get into that after a sponsor break. In spite
of multiple investigations concluding that she was a fake, Helen

(11:46):
Duncan still had a lot of support into the nineteen forties,
and she really was not unique in that regard. In
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a lot of people
and organizations were investigating mediums, and a lot of those
investigations concluded that nothing supernatural was going on. Sometimes there

(12:07):
was some very clear evidence of fakery, like the sounds
of knocking ghosts being made by the medium hitting the
underside of the table with a stick, or in the
case of Helen Duncan photographs of these very puppet like
constructions and ectoplasm that was obviously made of cheese cloth
and toilet paper. But this really did not dissuade a

(12:29):
lot of spiritualists. They naturally distrusted people and organizations who
were devoting themselves to debunking mediums. Even if a medium
confessed that they've been faking their work, people found explanations
that let them keep believing, like the confession had been
coerced and it wasn't true, or the person was a
real medium but had faked the say once that one

(12:51):
time because they wanted so badly to help usitter reconnect
with the loved one on the other side. In a
high profile example, Harry Hudini and Arthur Conan Doyle bonded
over their shared interest in spiritualism, but when Houdini became
convinced that it was not real and started doing demonstrations
of phony seance techniques on stage, Doyle continued to insist

(13:14):
that he really was psychic, calling him quote the greatest
physical medium of modern times. Houdini is going to appear
again this October. Uh There has been quite a bit
of psychological research into this during recent decades to understand
why many people double down on incorrect beliefs even when
presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Beyond that the

(13:39):
field of photography had been evolving for more than a
century by the time Harvey Metcalf took those photos of
Helen Duncan, but mass marketed cameras had only been around
for about thirty years. People didn't necessarily trust photographs, and
as we talked about in our previous episode on William
Mummler's Spirit at Photography, people had already taken photos that

(14:04):
were then investigated for being deceptive. So even though there
were these photos of Duncan's seances, which are laughable to
a modern viewer, that didn't necessarily change people's minds. Duncan's
first fraud conviction also did not necessarily change people's minds.

(14:25):
This happened after a seance she conducted in Edinburgh in
ninety three. A sitter named sen Mall grabbed the manifestation
of Peggy, the spirit guide and found that she was
made from a knitted undervest. Mall reported this to the
police and Duncan was arrested, tried, convicted of fraud and
ordered to pay a fine of ten pounds or serve

(14:47):
a month in prison. After this, Duncan kept doing seances,
and despite that fraud conviction, she became increasingly popular. She
traveled all over Great Britain, particularly favoring hostal towns, and
as World War two began, more and more people sought
her help to try to speak to their loved ones

(15:07):
who had been killed. In late May of one, Brigadier
roy C. Firebrace attended one of Duncan's seances. Firebrace was
an astrologer. After the war, he would go on to
help found the Astrological Association of Great Britain. During this seance,
one of Duncan's spirit guides said that a Royal Navy

(15:29):
ship had just been sunk. Firebrace didn't know of any
such thing happening, and when he checked with other people
in the Royal Navy after the seance, they hadn't either.
But the next day he learned that the battle cruiser
h MS Hood had exploded after being struck by the
German battleship Bismarck at the Battle of Denmark, straight killing
all but three of its crew of more than fourteen hundred.

(15:52):
Something similar happened at another seance in Portsmouth. About six
months later, Duncan relate a message from a sailor named Sid,
whose mother was one of the sitters. Sid had been
aboard the HMS bar Um Queen Elizabeth Glass battleship, and
Sid said the ship had been sunk. His mother, of course,

(16:14):
was distraught, and she contacted the Admiralty about it. Once again.
The bar Um really had been sunk on November. The
ship had been struck by torpedoes from a German U
boat off the coast of Egypt. The ship had been
hit by three of the four torpedoes fired at it,
and it had exploded and sunk in under five minutes.

(16:38):
More than eight hundred fifty of the hundred fifty sailors
aboard had been killed. The Admiralty had really tried to
keep this quiet. They weren't sure if the German high
command knew about the sinking, and if they didn't, Brittain
surely did not want them to find out. British authorities
were also deeply concerned about the effect that the news

(17:00):
of a sunken battleship and so much loss of life
would have had on morale, both for the military and
for the public sources contradict on whether the sailor's next
of kin were notified promptly or whether that didn't happen
for several weeks. Either way, once the families heard, they
were told to keep it a secret. One source even

(17:22):
claims that the Royal Navy sent fake holiday messages on
the deceased sailor's behalf before informing anybody that they had
actually been killed. I could not find verification of that,
but it did come up in one of those sources
that I used for this episode. Regardless, though Britain did
not publicly announced that the ship had been sunk until January,

(17:45):
more than two months after it happened, after German media
had reported that it had happened, and also months after
it had come up in this seance. Although believers saw
this as evidence that Helen Duncan really was communicating with
people from beyond, others saw it as evidence that there
was an information league happening somewhere in the Royal Navy.

(18:09):
The Royal Navy Command Headquarters is in Portsmouth, and Portsmouth
was the bomb's home port, and even with efforts to
keep things quiet, there were a lot of people who
knew that the bar Room had been sunk, both within
the Royal Navy and outside of it. In addition to
all the sailors aboard all the other ships in the
convoy who witnessed that sinking, and everyone in the command

(18:32):
structure who would have heard about it, and everyone who
was part of the decision to keep it quiet, and
everyone who helped fake holiday messages home if that really happened.
The ship's explosion and sinking were captured on film by
a newsreel reporter from British Pathay, so it's likely that
thousands of people actually knew about this sinking, and that's

(18:54):
a lot of people to keep a secret, a lot
of people, and a lot of them concentrated in Smith,
where Helen Duncan was. There are also some discrepancies about
exactly what it was that Duncan said during the seance,
and some accounts she volunteered the name of the HMS
bar Hum and in others that came from more of

(19:15):
a cold read asking questions of this sailor's mother until
she mentioned the ship's name. It's widely concluded that these
two seances, especially the second one, motivated British authorities to
try to keep Helen Duncan quiet during the planning of
the d D invasion of Normandy, and that is why
she was tried under the Witchcraft Act. Planning for d

(19:37):
D started in nine and it was absolutely critical that
it be kept secret. Duncan had become enormously popular and
if she revealed some secret information in a seance, it
was going to be a serious problem. Talk more about that.
After another quick sponsor break in January of nineteen forty four,

(20:07):
Helen Duncan conducted a series of seances at the Master
Temple Psychic Center in Portsmouth, England. The Master Temple Psychic
Center was a space above Homer's drug Store and it
was registered as a church. Homer's drug Store was run
by Ernest Homer and Elizabeth Jones. They weren't technically married,
but they lived and worked together as a couple, and

(20:29):
most people just called them Mr. And Mrs Homer. They
were spiritualists. They donated any money they earned from spiritualist
events that they hosted above their shop to various charities
and spiritualist causes. They paid Helen Duncan a hundred and
four pounds for a week of seances, which she conducted
with the help of her assistant, Francis Brown. On January fourteenth,

(20:52):
nine four, two officers from the Royal Navy attended one
of these seances, a Lieutenant Worth and a Urgin Lieutenant Fowler.
Duncan claimed to manifest one of the men's mother and sister,
but both of those people were actually alive. It is
possible that she had meant this message for someone else

(21:12):
in the room. The sitters had assigned seats, but there
had been some shuffling. I will just take a moment
to note that we are aware that in Britain people
say that left in it, but we are not British.
On the nineteen Worth went back for another seance, and
this time he was accompanied by a War Reserve Police officer.

(21:37):
During this seance, one of these men switched on the
main light and opened up the curtain to the medium's cabinet.
They found Duncan standing there barefoot, which she had this
piece of white material. Police were outside waiting for a signal,
and when Worth blew a whistle to summon them, they
came barging in. They wanted to get that material as

(21:59):
evidence that it wasn't really ectoplasm, but it disappeared generally
believed that it got like passed from hands in hand
among the sitters and somebody secreted it away. Her account
was that it got absorbed back into her body. There
are also reports that there was a hat band that
had purportedly been manifested from one of the sailors aboard

(22:21):
the bar room, but it was printed with HMS bar
um when it should have just said HMS and not
the name of the ship, and that proved that it
was fake. After this police raid, Helen Duncan, Francis Brown,
and Mr and Mrs Homer were all arrested. This was
apparently big enough news that the BBC interrupted a report
on a Russian advance on the Eastern Front to talk

(22:44):
about it. At first, all four of them were charged
under the Vagrancy Act of eighteen twenty four, or an
Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons and
robes and Vagabonds in that part of Great Britain Old England.
At this point, this was the act most often used

(23:05):
to prosecute people who were conducting seances. Section four of
it read, in part quote every person pretending or professing
to tell fortunes, or using any subtle craft, means or
device by Palmer Street, or otherwise to deceive and impose
on any of His Majesty's subjects, shall be deemed a

(23:27):
rogue and a vagabond within the true intent and meaning
of this Act. So Duncan, Brown and the Homers were
by far not the only people to be charged under
this law. In the nineteen forties and other times too,
because of the ongoing war, there were a lot of
people who were prosecuted, charged with basically taking advantage of

(23:51):
grieving families to give them fake mediumship under this act.
Part of the Vagrancy Act are still the books, and
in a lot of ways. It is a law that
criminalizes poverty and homelessness, but most infractions of it were
considered to be relatively minor. The maximum sentence for offenses

(24:12):
related to fortune telling was three months in prison, and
most people just paid a fine. In spite of that,
Duncan was jailed for four days until being released on bail.
As we said before, it's generally understood that the point
of all this was to try to make sure that
Duncan would not be able to blab some kind of

(24:33):
secret intelligence related to the D Day invasion that would
require more than a fine and more than three months
in jail, and that is where the Witchcraft Act of
seventeen thirty five comes in. This was an act to
repeal the statute made in the first year of the
reign of King James the First entitled an Act against Conjuration,

(24:55):
Witchcraft and dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits, except so
much thereof as repeals an Act of the fifth year
of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth against Conjurations, enchantments and Witchcrafts,
And to repeal an Act passed in the Parliament of
Scotland in the ninth Parliament of Queen Mary, entitled Anent

(25:15):
tous Witchcrafts, for and for punishing such persons as pretends
to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft sorcery, enchantment
or conjuration. Under this Witchcraft Act, a person could be
sentenced to a fine and imprisonment for up to a year,

(25:35):
along with having to stand in the pillory for an
hour every quarter, although at this point the pillory had
been abolished in England for more than a century. To
be extremely clear, if someone was tried for violating the
Witchcraft Act of five, they were not being tried for witchcraft.
It was not possible to try someone for witchcraft under

(25:58):
the Witchcraft Act of seven five. In fact, the Act
outlawed trying people for witchcraft. Quote No prosecution, suit or
proceedings shall be commenced or carried on against any person
or persons for witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration, or for
charging another with any such offense, in any court whatsoever

(26:21):
in Great Britain. Instead, this Act targeted people who quote
pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment,
or conjuration, or to 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,

(26:44):
any goods or chattel's supposed to have been stolen or
lost maybe found. In other words, this was built around
the idea that witchcraft was not real, and that the
people who claimed to be witches or sorcerers or enchanters
or conjurors or fortune tellers were defrauding people. This act

(27:05):
was a response to the horrifying witch trials that had
taken place in the UK and elsewhere, especially during the
seventeenth and early eighteen centuries, at which point witchcraft itself
was illegal under those laws that the Witchcraft Act repealed.
We have talked about those earlier laws and the witch
hunts connected to them in previous episodes of the show,

(27:26):
including our episode on Matthew Hopkins, who builled himself as
the witch Finder General, which we ran as a recent
Saturday classic. So the Witchcraft Act of seventeen thirty five
repealed the Kingdom of Great Britain's laws that framed witchcraft
is real and replaced them with one that framed witchcraft
as pretend. Duncan, Brown and the Homers were charged with

(27:49):
seven crimes, including in fractions of the Witchcraft Act. Those
charges were connected to Duncan purporting Quotes to exercise or
use a kind of conjuration, and that, through the agency
of Helen Duncan's, spirits of deceased persons should appear to
be present in such a place as Helen Duncan was
then in, and that the said spirits were communicating with

(28:13):
living persons then present. There were also charges under the
Larceny Act because Duncan had taken money quote by falsely
pretending that she was in a position to bring about
the appearances of the spirits of deceased persons, and they
were all charged with quote, affecting a public mischief. All

(28:33):
these charges were connected to the seances that had taken
place on January fourteenth and nineteenth, which we've already talked about,
as well as when she conducted on the seventeen that
was attended by a dock worker known as Mr Burrell,
and he was a medium himself, but did not find
Duncan's manifestations to be convincing at all. This trial began

(28:55):
on March twenty three, ninety four, in Court four of
the Central Criminal Court a k. The Old Bailey before
Recorder of London, Sir Gerald Dodson. That building had been
damaged in the blitz. The public gallery was closed, but
people thronged the entire area and packed into the accessible
areas of the building to try to get a look.

(29:16):
The trial and its aftermath were widely reported all over
the UK and in the United States. All for defendants
pleaded not guilty, and at the start of the trial,
prosecutor John Maud stressed that they were not being tried
as witches. Quote, I want to make it abundantly clear
at the very commencement of this prosecution that this is

(29:38):
in no way connected with witchcraft. It is in no
way aimed at the honest beliefs, whatever they may be,
of any man or woman. What it is aimed at
is something quite different. It is aimed at just ordinary
common fraud. Meanwhile, the defense was led by Barrister ce Lowsby,
who was a spiritualist and whose services were arranged by

(30:01):
the Spiritualists National Union. His defense was built around calling
nearly fifty witnesses to attest to Duncan seances being the
real thing. This involved a very long chain of people
recounting what they had seen at seances going all the
way back to the early nineteen thirties, and all of
the various things that they said she'd manifested or had

(30:24):
told them while on the stand. Portsmouth's Chief Constable Arthur
West referenced the bar Um sinking saying quote. On one
occasion in ninety one, she was reported as having transgressed
the security laws again in a naval connection, when she
foretold the loss of one of His Majesty's ships, long

(30:44):
before the fact was made public. I can only describe
this woman as an unmitigated humbug who can only be
regarded as a pest to a certain section of society.
The trial went on for seven days, and at the
end of the recorder instructed the jury to simplify the
issue and deliberate only on the charges related to the

(31:06):
Witchcraft Act, to ignore the others. After deliberating for less
than half an hour, the jury found all four defendants guilty.
You could argue that what her defense really did was
established that she had been doing this illegal thing for
more than a decade with a whole lot of witness testimony.

(31:31):
Duncan was sentenced to nine months in prison. Her assistant,
Francis Brown, was sentenced to four months in prison. Brown
had shown Lieutenant Worth some spirit photos and support of
Duncan's claim to be a medium, so she was considered
to have committed a fraud of her own. The homers
were bound over. In other words, they were released under

(31:52):
the condition that they had to maintain good behavior and
not reoffend. Don't hire any more mediums to come and
hang out of your place. If this really was all
an intentional effort to keep Duncan quiet through the Normandy invasion,
Prime Minister Winston Churchill does not seem to have been
aware of it. On April third, nine, apparently after reading

(32:15):
news coverage of the trial, he sent a memo to
the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, which read quote, let me
have a report on why the Witchcraft Acts seventeen thirty
five was used in a modern court of justice? What
was the cost of this trial to the state? Observing
that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in
this crowded London for a fortnight, and the recorder kept

(32:38):
busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of
necessary work in the courts. The defendants attorneys filed an appeal,
but in part because it took so incredibly long to
transcribe the testimony of all those many defense witnesses that
did not happen for months. By the time the appeal

(33:00):
was heard, Francis Brown had already completed her sentence with
time off for good behavior. The convictions were upheld, though
Duncan was returned to Holloway Prison. The prison was damaged
in a bombing in the summer of nineteen forty four
while Duncan was still incarcerated. There She reportedly conducted seances

(33:20):
from her cell, and she was released on September twenty two,
nineteen forty four, having served about six months. She was not,
as it is widely reported, the last person tried for
violating the Witchcraft Act. That seems to be Jane Rebecca
York of Forrest Gate in east Ham, who was tried
in late nineteen forty four, also in the Old Bailey,

(33:41):
in the same court and with the same prosecutor as
Duncan had been. Apparently, what got York in bad enough
trouble to face charges under the Witchcraft Act instead of
the Vagrancy Act included impersonating Queen Victoria. Although she was convicted,
York was not jailed because of her age she was
in her seventies. She paid a fine of five pounds.

(34:04):
Duncan's conviction and jail sentence have been credited with sparking
a movement to repeal the Witchcraft Act, in part because
it could be read as outlawing spiritualism across the board,
and the words of d ABD. Collins, writing in the
Modern Law Review in July of nine, quote now by
the invocation of an obsolete statute which was framed with

(34:29):
entirely different ideas. The practice of mediumship has in effect
been made illegal, and here and there police consider it
their duty to try to put a stop to it.
The Witchcraft Acts and the relevant parts of the Vagrancy
Act were repealed under the Fraudulent Medium's Act of nineteen
fifty one, or an Act to repeal the Witchcraft Act

(34:51):
seventeen thirty five and to make in substitution for certain
provisions of Section four of the Vagrancy Act. Four express
provision of the punishment of persons who fraudulently purport to
act as spiritualistic mediums or to exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance,
or other similar powers. Under this new law, a person

(35:13):
was guilty of an offense if they quote a with
intent to deceive, purport to act as a spiritualistic medium,
or exercise any powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers,
or be and purporting to act as a spiritualistic medium
or to exercise such powers, as Alford said, uses any

(35:35):
fraudulent device, in other words, spiritualism acting as a medium.
There were only a crime if carried out with the
intent to deceive. Later on, the law specified that a
person could only be convicted of this offense if they
had taken money or something else of value in exchange
for doing this. So if you genuinely believed that you

(35:59):
can talk to spirits, that was no longer a crime,
but if you faked people out about it and took
their money, it was. Even after these changes in the law,
Helen Duncan was arrested at least one other time in
nineteen fifty six, although this time she did not face charges,
but some of her family pointed to this arrest as
causing a rapid decline in her health. She died just

(36:22):
a few months later, on December six, ninety six, at
the age of fifty nine. Her cause of death was
diabetes and heart failure. She was cremated and her ashes
were scattered at a cemetery in Calendar. The Fraudulent Mediums
Act was repealed under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading
Regulations in two thousand eight, but aside from the sections

(36:46):
related to fortune telling, many other provisions of the Vagrancy
Act are still on the books. That act is currently
under review. As we said earlier, parts of it essentially
criminalized homelessness without doing any thing to address the causes
of homelessness. The UK government has expressed an intent to
repeal this law, but only after analyzing how it's repeal

(37:09):
would affect things like law enforcement and what they should
include in a different law to take its place. Some
of Duncan's descendants have also taken up an effort to
get her posthumously pardoned. The Scottish Parliament rejected a petition
to do so in two thousand eight. Yeah, I'm not
totally sure if that effort is still ongoing. There used
to be a website about it, but that website it's

(37:34):
no longer there. Do you have listener mail to take
us out of this medium discussion? I do? I do?
This is from Lauren. Lauren wrote, Hello, This will be
more of a comment and less of a letter. But
when I was in college undergrad for chemical engineering, I
was an undergraduate researcher a k A glorified dishwasher in

(37:55):
an environmental engineering lab at my school. Grad student I
was working with was trying to use ozone to remove
medicinal waste from waste water that arrived either through people
flushing their medicine down the toilet or urine. This was
certainly targeting one particular drug or type of drug. But
to be quite honest, I barely understood what was going
on then and it's been several years since so, but

(38:17):
I was listening to the behind the scenes episode on
this and when y'all were talking about it, I just
wanted to interrupt and say, yes, it's still an issue
and still is an issue for so many other drugs
than just antibiotics. Thanks so much for the podcast. It
makes doing all the paperwork at my job more bearable.
And it's so sorry for the complete lack of grammar.

(38:37):
It's possibly the Internet speak flush engineer's complete lack of
communication skills I possess. I did not notice any lack
of grammar, so there's no need to apologize for that.
Um it was indeed still comprehensible. And then attached is
a terrible picture of my kittie, Oliver and his new
fault bow tie. I love a kiddie in a bow tie.
It is an adorable picture, so thank you Lauren. Of course,

(39:00):
this followed our episode on penicillin and a brief discussion
we had about um penicillin and other drugs in wastewater UM,
and we sort of had a like unscripted discussion I
was like, yeah, I think it's still a problem. It's
definitely still a problem. Some drugs can be removed from
the wastewater through wastewater treatment, some of them can't, like

(39:20):
not all of them are, and then it makes its
way back into the ecosystem, not just into like the
drinking water in people's homes, but everywhere. Um so, yes,
it's a whole, big, ongoing issue. So thank you again, Lauren.
We're sending this email and the great cat picture if

(39:41):
you would like to send us a note. We're at
History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. We're all
over social media, missing history that story. I'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart Radio app or wherever you like to
get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is

(40:04):
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Dateline NBC

The Bobby Bones Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Helen Duncan, (Not) Scotland’s Last Witch