ByParissa DJangi
Published October 10, 2023
• 8 min read
On March 23, 1944, deep into World War II, crowds filed into London’s Old Bailey, just as they had for two centuries. As the site of criminal justice in the city, the storied institution hosted scores of high-profile court cases, ranging from the salacious to the sinister.
Yet, on that early spring day, the Old Bailey was the staging ground for a trial unlike the others: Centuries after the last person had been executed for witchcraft in Britain, a medium named Helen Duncan stood accused of the same offense—and she would soon become the last person imprisoned under a witchcraft-themed law in Great Britain.
Duncan’s path to the Old Bailey was paved with state secrets and dramatic raids. It is the story of how a middle-aged mother of six spooked the wartime establishment—and paid for it dearly.
Raising spirits
Born in 1897, Helen MacFarlane chafed against the confines of her life in the small Scottish town of Callander. Nicknamed “Hellish Nell,” she seemed to possess otherworldly gifts: Young Helen MacFarlane could supposedly see spirits.
By 1926, Hellish Nell—whose name changed after she married Henry Duncan in 1916—was working as a medium, first in Dundee, Scotland, and then across the country, to support her growing family, which would eventually include six children.
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Duncan found a primed audience for her work. After World War I and a deadly influenza pandemic had left millions of corpses in their wake, many Britons embraced Spiritualism, a belief system that claimed the living could contact the dead.
Duncan conducted her séances in the dark, illuminated only by a soft red light. Sitting behind curtains, she entered a trance and relied on her “spirit guides”—named Peggy and Albert—to lead the proceedings. During sittings, Duncan produced ectoplasm, which poured from her mouth and nose. A ghostly white substance that seemed to materialize in the shape of spirits, it shocked and amazed her sitters.
As Duncan’s fame spread, she attracted the attention of skeptics like Harry Price, a psychical researcher. With Duncan’s permission, Price investigated her in 1931. He believed Duncan was a fraud—and though he could not definitively prove how she produced ectoplasm, he had a theory: Her ectoplasm was simply cheesecloth and egg whites that she swallowed and regurgitated. Moreover, the spirits she materialized looked like dolls, not real people.
Price’s conclusion did not deter her fans, however. They scrambled to attend her séances, even as Britain careened once more toward war.
Séances and espionage during World War II
On September 3, 1939, Great Britain entered World War II. As the country shifted to a wartime footing, it tightened the flow of information to bolster morale and prevent military secrets from falling into the wrong hands. One potential source of leaks that the tabloid press worried about? Mediums. If mediums conjured the spirits of soldiers, the rationale went, what would stop enemy spies from learning intelligence through séances?
Helen Duncan was not conducting séances for Nazis, but the war found Duncan as her work continued across Britain. On May 24, 1941, she was leading a sitting in Edinburgh when a spirit delivered shocking news: a British warship had sunk.
(See how Nazi U-boats nearly won WWII in these striking maps.)
Roy Firebrace, Scotland’s chief of military intelligence, was at the sitting. His high-ranking position made him privy to confidential information, yet he had heard no such news. After the séance, he fact-checked Duncan’s allegations and learned that the H.M.S. Hood had recently been lost in the Battle of Denmark Strait. How had she known before him?
Then in November 1941, Duncan was channeling in Portsmouth, England, when the apparent spirit of a sailor brought news of another naval disaster. A German submarine had torpedoed the H.M.S. Barham, which went down with 862 souls. The British government would not publicly acknowledge the sinking until January 1942.
How had Duncan known about these classified events? Authorities quietly kept tabs on her.
Two years later, Duncan was back in Portsmouth. Her audience included Lieutenant Stanley Worth, a Royal Navy officer. Worth doubted Duncan’s abilities, especially when she claimed to have conjured the spirits of Worth’s very-much-alive relatives. Eager to expose Duncan as a fraud, Worth attended another sitting—this time with a disguised police officer. In the middle of the séance, the policeman sprang from his seat, pulled back Duncan’s curtain, and arrested her.
The witch trial of the 20th century
The specter of witchcraft had long haunted English and Scottish courts, especially in the 16th century when witchcraft was a crime punishable by death. According to tradition, the last person executed for witchcraft in Great Britain was Janet Horne in 1727.
By the time of Duncan’s arrest, however, British courts instead typically charged fraudulent mediums with violating the Vagrancy Act, a 19th-century law aimed at preventing fortune-tellers and psychics from defrauding the public.
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Yet the prosecution feared that Duncan could be acquitted on the technicality that she charged for admission to séances, not for magical services rendered. And so authorities accused Duncan of violating the 1735 Witchcraft Act, which had been passed just years after Horne’s execution and was meant to drag the country into the modern age by simply punishing people who claimed to practice, or accused others of practicing, witchcraft. It carried a sentence of imprisonment.
Though Duncan’s trial could have been in Portsmouth, the magistrates decided that, due to the “unusually grave” nature of the case, she should be tried at London’s Central Criminal Court—the Old Bailey.
Between the atypical charge and the high-profile stage, Duncan’s trial was destined to be a media circus when it began on March 23, 1944. The press breathlessly reported on what amounted to a modern witch trial. It even captured the notice of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who called the peculiar proceedings “obsolete tomfoolery.”
On April 3, the jury reached its verdict: guilty.
Afterlife
On June 6, 1944, only months after Duncan’s trial, Allied troops launched a secret invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The timing between Duncan’s arrest and D-Day has led some to theorize that the British government targeted the Scottish medium to prevent her from revealing state secrets ahead of the invasion. Historian Francis Young cautions “there is nothing to substantiate these rumours directly,” but concedes that “the courts did treat Duncan most unusually.”
As D-Day unfolded hundreds of miles away, Duncan’s team was preparing a Hail Mary appeal. It failed. And so Helen Duncan entered Holloway Prison, becoming the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act. One more person would be convicted under the law—72-year-old medium Jane Yorke was fined £5 in September 1944 but saw no prison time—before it would be repealed in 1951.
After her release in late 1944, Duncan resumed channeling, making her the target of more police raids. Duncan’s supporters continued to rally around her. Even after she died in 1956, they petitioned the British government to pardon her.
The mystery of Duncan’s art survived her death, since no one knows for certain how she knew of the Hood and Barham’s fate. Like the discarnate spirits she conjured, Duncan’s secrets vanished with her.
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