The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
All smiles at Halloween
Lynne Robertson admires some handiwork in the charity carved pumpkin display at Ashbrook Nursery in Arbroath.
Scottish spiritualist medium Helen Duncan, aka Hellish Nell, was the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
Her supporters continue to campaign to have the Callander-born fraudster – who was rumbled for mocking up fake ectoplasm and“spirits ”– posthumously pardoned of the 1944 conviction.
Dressed in black, Helen Duncan sat at the front of the room, lit only by a dim, red light, as she conducted a seance.
A deathly silence gripped the audience as the plump woman’s eyes rolled back in her head, her body went limp and she entered a trance.
Silence turned to gasps of incredulity when, from behind a curtain, a ghostly white figure appeared and began to speak.
Pulses raced when Duncan, slumped in her chair, started to produce “ectoplasm” from her mouth and nose, which took on a human shape.
Duncan, who became known as Hellish Nell, is known as being Britain’s last witch, but she was nothing of the sort.
She was a spiritualist medium, hailed by many as one of the greatest that ever lived, and by others as a shameless fraudster.
In 1944, Duncan was the last woman to be tried and found guilty of witchcraft in the UK. She was jailed for nine months for having breached the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
Even prime minister Winston Churchill, who was one of the medium’s clients , deemed the conviction “obsolete tomfoolery” and demanded to know “why the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was used in a modern Court of Justice?”
By some accounts , Churchill also visited her in jail.
Helen Duncan was born Victoria Helen MacFarlane in Callander, Perthshire, on November 25 1897.
She was said to have displayed psychic abilities from a young age, having visions, seemingly communicating with spirits and getting visits from ghosts.
Her parents were wary of her unusual “gift” and warned her against using it.
Known for acting like a tomboy, her rowdiness, bad temper and outbursts of hysteria gave rise to her being nicknamed Hellish Nell.
After leaving school, she worked at Dundee Royal Infirmary, and in 1916 she married Henry Duncan, a cabinet maker and wounded war veteran, who was supportive of her supposed paranormal talents.
Duncan worked parttime in a bleach factory and the couple went on to have six children.
By the 1930s, Duncan had become one of Britain’s most celebrated mediums, travelling across the country to conduct seances.
The seances were always oversubscribed – there were hundreds of applications to take part – and they were surrounded in furious debate.
Duncan claimed to be able to permit the spirits of recently deceased people to materialise.
Her seances frequently included strings of otherworldly white ectoplasm produced from various orifices, as well as ghostly images of the faces and bodies of departed “spirit guides”.
Such activity attracted a great deal of scepticism and in 1928, photographer Harvey Met calf e took various flash photographs of Duncan and her alleged “materialisation” spirits during a seance.
The photographs revealed the spirits to be fraudulently produced, such as a doll made from a painted papier-mâché mask draped in an old sheet.
A 1931 investigation by famed psychic researcher Harry Price concluded that the ectoplasm was actually cheesecloth covered in egg whites, iron salts and other chemicals, which Duncan stored in her stomach and then regurgitated.
The “spirits” were pictures of heads cut from magazines, while a “spiritual hand” glimpsed in one seance was revealed to be a rubber glove.
It wasn’t until the Second World War that her seances began to attract the concern of the establishment.
In 1941, she is said to have informed her sitters of the sinking of a warship before the government had publicly released the information.
In 1943, a sailor wearing a hat with HMS Barham emblazoned on it supposedly appeared at one of her seances.
The Barham was not declared officially lost until a few months later.
The War Office became increasingly anxious about Duncan’s other worldly disclosures – might she even be a spy? – and were concerned she might somehow uncover topsecret plans.
Undercover policemen interrupted one of her sittings on January 19 1944 during which a white-shrouded figure appeared which turned out to be Duncan herself.
She was arrested and charged with vagrancy, conspiracy, larceny and contravening the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
The case, which included 75 defence witnesses, was a media sensation.
She was not, however, on trial accused of being a witch.
She was accused and found guilty of “pretending to exercise or use human con ju ra t ion ” and was sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison in London.
Duncan became the last person in Britain to be jailed under the act.
On her release in 1945, Duncan promised to stop conducting seances.
In 1951, Churchill finally repealed the 200-year-old Witchcraft Act , but Duncan’s conviction stood.
She died five years later, in 1956, at her home in Edinburgh, shortly after yet another police raid during a seance.
Descendants and supporters of Duncan continue to campaign to have her posthumously pardoned of witchcraft charges.
Last year, Call and er Community Council suggested naming a street in a new development in the Perth shire town, “Duncan Drive”, in her honour.