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everybody would be seated the lights would go down usually just a one red bulb would be glowing and then they put
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on a gramophone record Helen dunker would then would come in in a black gown and then people would just
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wait and that's how the the Seance began this is Malcolm Gaskill he's talking about a woman named Helen Duncan and her
00:00:27
seances he's a professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia
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in Norwich England Helen Duncan traveled around England in the 1930s and 40s going from big cities
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to Seaside towns and people flocked to see her she would begin each Seance by going into a trance and then she would
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summon the Dead people said they could actually see their dead relatives in the room
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a man named Vincent Woodcock claimed that he'd seen his dead wife 19 times at Helen Duncan seances and that his wife
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was so real she even touched him she removed his wedding ring and put it on the hand of another woman at the Seance
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he then went on to marry that other woman Helen Duncan was said to have summoned
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spirits of parents siblings aunts and uncles sometimes more than 20 Spirits in a single sitting
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she could even bring back pets one of the most famous was a parrot named Bronco sitters would who went to the seances
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probably went for two reasons some people would go because they thought it was a bit of a lark and a bit of fun
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other people bereaved people often would be going because they wanted to see once
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again the spirits of those that they'd loved and lost this was the 1940s and many of the
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people who came to see Helen Duncan had sons and husbands and brothers fighting in World War II they wanted to hear
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anything about how the war was going because with censorship and news blackouts and restrictions on movement
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um and news coming fairly intermittently from abroad where soldiers are fighting
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there's just this great kind of vacuum of information but also a very great desire to know what's going on knowing
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when bombing raids are going knowing where men have moved and so on Helen Duncan often traveled to the seaside
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town of Portsmouth it was a naval town where it seemed every other family had someone on a warship
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she held seances in a small room above a drugstore and reportedly one night a ghost-like figure in a sailor's uniform
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appeared he wore a cap that said HMS Barham the name of a British battleship the ghost of the Sailor hovered around a
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woman and said sorry sweetheart my ship sank in the Mediterranean I've crossed over to the other side
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and um you know Britain only has a handful of really big battleships so that the news which then they sailor in
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parts that the baron has been sunk is really a very big deal the Borum was stationed off the coast of Egypt as part
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of the Mediterranean Fleet with more than a thousand men stationed on board stay
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called The Royal Navy if it was true that the HMS Forum had gone down incredibly it had the ship was hit by
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three Torpedoes from a German submarine more than 800 men died but no one was supposed to know that the British
00:03:42
government had been keeping the ship's loss a secret partially because morale was already so low and partially for
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strategic reasons there were reports that the British government wanted so badly to keep the
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secret that they forged Christmas cards from the deceased sailors gets around we he gets back to the
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admiralty into the security services that there is a medium who is talking about ships and that she should be
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watched the British intelligence agency MI5 began investigating her it's funny to think British intelligence worried
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that a woman putting herself in a trance above a drugstore could compromise British safety
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on the other hand the British war office had also hired an astrologer to predict
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Hitler's next move still no one's ever figured out how Helen Duncan knew that ship had gone
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down I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music] she was born in calendar Scotland in
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1897 and growing up she bragged that she never needed to study in school the answers just popped into her head she
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knew so much that she was accused of cheating School inspector ordered a fellow classmate to search her for a hidden
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book or cheat sheet but there is nothing she just seemed to know things well for example once a man went missing
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in their perthshire town so this is sort of mountainous region of Scotland or the
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mountains overlooked the town and a man was missing and Helen as a child supposedly said that uh he'd been
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trapped in a snow drift and this so The Story Goes turned out to be the case she wrote strange sayings fell from my
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lips I could not control my tongue they said she was rather an unusual child that she just wasn't quite like other
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children and then she used to make these kind of predictions which rather spooked other
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kids at school and worried her parents but it seemed that this skill within her this uh this desire to predict the
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future and couldn't really be contained what happened next in her life well um she leaves school she gets a job
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at Dundee Royal infirmary the town of Dundee um and in 1916 she meets a man called
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Henry Duncan but it's said that that when they meet each other they feel that they've already met in their psychic
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dreams so they are married rather quickly um and they start a family and they struggle to make a living she goes and
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works in a bleach Factory which is a terrible place to work and gradually during this time she
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starts to develop her psychic gifts one night Helen had a vision of her mother-in-law's coffin soon after she
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saw her mother-in-law's hand tapping on her bedroom window she recognized it because of the scars her mother-in-law
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gutted a lot of fish the next morning they learned she was dead Henry documented the accuracy of Helen's
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visions and she started to experiment she began small she would rub a sealed letter along her spine and try to
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receive what it said she tried levitating small objects and then one day sitting with Henry and
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his friend she slipped into a trance and began speaking in a deep voice that introduced itself as a Dr Williams
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after that she and Henry began hosting seances in their house every Thursday the thing about the sounds is that it's
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it's a kind of a strange mixture genre so that at one level it's like a small non-conformist Congregational Church
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Gathering like a church service and in other ways it's a bit like a Vaudeville act or it's a music hall act where
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there's a bit of fun and there's a bit of music and sometimes the spirits will dance and then the mood changes and it
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becomes somber again so that like any kind of variety show you need a Master of Ceremonies in the tradition of
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spiritualism mediums like Helen had their own guides they were ghosts who helped the medium perform the Seance
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connecting the medium to the Dead so Helen would go into her trance and her spirit guide his name was Albert
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would emerge sometimes people said they could see him other times they just heard him so he
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has this rather odd accent it's sometimes Australian it's sometimes kind of BBC Posh English
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it's you know it's really rather all over the place but Albert is the person who protects Mrs Duncan because of
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course during the sense the medium is in a trance the medium is kind of unconscious
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so the the the spirit guide is presenting this to the audience as it were but she has another guide who is a
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little girl called Peggy rather Shirley Temple like who comes out and rather winsomely sings
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um sings Baa Baa Black Sheep typically it seems like kind of a Motley Crew she got together up there huh
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yeah I think it's there's something for everyone at the Seance you know there's a real kind of
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um it's I say it's a mixture of fun um with um you know the deeply serious and often
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extremely emotional one woman claimed she was visited by her son who had died young and that he was so real she could
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hug him she was overwhelmed with gratitude I'm a new woman she told Helen [Music]
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the spiritualist movement had begun a century before in the United States in Upstate New York with two girls who were
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11 and 14 years old the sisters the fox sisters claimed to develop these skills of
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speaking to the Dead people said the fox family had been bothered by thumps and knocking that
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followed the girls around the house neighbors came to listen they heard it too someone got the idea to try to
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communicate with whatever was making the noise and got knocks and reply the whole town got involved and it was
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determined that the house was occupied by the spirit of a young man who'd been murdered there years before
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hair and bone fragments were found in the walls after that everyone wanted to meet the
00:10:39
sisters eventually they signed a contract with PT Barnum and like other spiritualists and medium subsequently
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they divide opinions some people think that these pure innocent children can't possibly be lying and therefore they are
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actually contacting Spirits others think it's just kids mucking about but of course they're taken seriously enough
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that they are um the the religion that they found spiritualism um you know travels across the Atlantic
00:11:12
and into Europe and to Britain decades later one of the fox sisters confessed to a large audience that none
00:11:20
of it was ever real they'd fake those knocking sounds with a specific technique of cracking their own toes
00:11:28
then she took off her shoe put her foot up on the table and demonstrated but it didn't even matter
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by this point spiritualism was an international movement people said they communicated with the dead by levitating
00:11:44
writing messages on chalkboards and then there was Helen Duncan's specialty materialization where the debt
00:11:52
would appear what tended to happen is that the curtains would open and that there would be some kind of
00:12:00
um white form would appear now this was often said to be ectoplasm this rather strange flowing sinuous substance
00:12:09
um which came out of the medium's body spiritually said and which was then used in order to clothe the spirits of the
00:12:16
dead so that the living could see them I'm a little confused by this ectoplasm some people said that it would uh it
00:12:26
would typically pour out of the mouth sometimes of the nose of the medium it was a sort of a it's it it's his own
00:12:32
stuff some people called it a kind of sticky plasma it was glowing it's like a kind of a it's just well some people
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said it was a it was the stuff of life you know it was a it was a biological substance but it was plastic and it
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flowed and that the spirits when they Helen Duncan managed to channel them back to Earth were invisible and that
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somehow that this stuff would clothe the spirit so that they could be seen um I interviewed somebody once who said
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who had been to Helen dun could say on some was utterly convinced by it who said that the ectoplasm flowed out and
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formed a kind of puddle and that out of this puddle that this form of her friend
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just rose up from the ground upwards until it became a kind of statue unlike other spiritualists Helen was producing
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something that could be tested something physical organizations asked her to come to
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London they wanted to study her and they were willing to pay her for her time scientists have an eye on medium because
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they feel that this is a non-tech dimension of physics that if only that they can reproduce the phenomena of the
00:13:38
Seance in the laboratory somebody will get a Nobel Prize in 1931 Helen agreed to be tested at the London spiritualist
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Association and then by the National Laboratory of psychical research this is rather Grand title for what was really
00:13:55
just a one-man show and that one man was a psychic researcher called Harry price
00:14:00
and Harry prices for other curious figure because he's he's very skeptical of most of the evidence but I think so
00:14:07
deep down is a Believer because he spends an awful lot of time and actually a lot of money trying to discover the
00:14:13
truth of mediumship but because he can't that actually what he's really doing is
00:14:18
most of the time debunking him Harry price observed Helen at five seances in his lap he took flash photographs of the
00:14:27
ectoplasm and enlarged the images to see where it was coming from and what it was
00:14:32
made of so as soon as Helen Duncan starts being tested in the laboratory it quickly transpires that she's using a
00:14:42
number of tricks in order to achieve the spectacular effects at her seances uh the the dominant trick really is uh
00:14:53
regurgitation so the swallowing of cheesecloth or some other kind of Gauzy cloth of lavatory
00:15:02
paper blotting paper egg white sometimes all mixed together and swallowed and somehow regurgitated
00:15:12
but there's a there's a more innocent if that's the right word kind of trick which is just to
00:15:18
manipulate one's image in a dark room so um that you've got these dark curtains around the cabinet and it it's it can be
00:15:28
demonstrated that if you're wearing light clothing or you're draped in some kind of white material just by adjusting
00:15:35
the width of these curtains that you know one can look either large or thin or sometimes by crouching down small or
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tall and that in a very dark room especially when people are in rather a suggestible mood
00:15:49
this can look quite good I think so it's a it's a former stage trickery it's an illusion that will make you look small
00:15:59
or make you look big sometimes Helen Duncan just has bits of cloth that she Jiggles around I met somebody once cycle
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research who said he could see cheese cloth just hanging on a coat hanger she also Cuts pictures out of magazines
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she also has rubber gloves that she blows up what would she blow up the gloves for
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um to to put a hand out so that it seemed like a hand was reaching out from the Beyond
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Harry praise went public about the cheesecloth he published a report called regurgitation and the Duncan mediumship
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newspapers all over picked up the story supporters came forward to defend her one man said he'd seen Spirit sit on
00:16:42
people's knees and eat apples and drink water he said they took off his boots and wore them around
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he wanted to know how regurgitated cheesecloth could have done that I mean you I you really must have wanted
00:16:56
to believe this stuff because if I saw just a blown up rubber glove and a piece of cheesecloth I mean I would just have
00:17:02
my eyes open for all of this stuff yeah well some people are um but other people are in a dark room
00:17:12
when they've gone along they're expecting to see spirits of the dead it is quite
00:17:18
extraordinary how in a sense I mean we used to the idea of seeing is believing but really believing is seeing you can
00:17:27
reverse that Harry Price's report ultimately served as good publicity really putting her on
00:17:34
the map everyone wanted to see a Helen Duncan seance for themselves and she was happy to charge them for admission of
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course she was her seances were interrupted a number of times and this cheesecloth was seized so in 1939 in
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Wales that there was a um there was a seance where a man was who was a Believer went to see the spirit of his
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brother but was dissatisfied by what he saw jumped up grabbed the cloth Helen Duncan punched him but he managed to get
00:18:05
this cloth away and so that there was actually some of this physical evidence actually taken from seances which really
00:18:11
said pretty unequivocally that what people were watching was a trick that cloth survived and is archived in the
00:18:19
University Library in Cambridge where Malcolm Gasko lives so some years ago when I did actually order this box up in
00:18:27
the archive and opened it up and there is actually this cloth on the whole story uh contained within it and when
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the archivist wasn't looking I did actually pull this piece of cloth out and just throw it in the air and it just
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it was like parachute silk they just caught the air and it just sort of slightly shimmered down and just for a
00:18:45
second I got a glimpse of what that might look like in a dark room in the right kind of intense atmosphere and it
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just was a just was a momentary insight and then I was immediately reprimanded for throwing the manuscripts around the
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room as they said at the time [Music] um but she always said well you know this was this was some sometimes I had
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to do this because people's expectations were so great and I couldn't always summon the energy and the power and the
00:19:17
ectoplasm in order to give people what they wanted so I kind of had to because I didn't want to disappoint my loyal
00:19:24
following spend more than once at another Seance a woman grabbed at Helen's spirit guide Peggy and snatched
00:19:33
the figure out of the air when everyone looked closely at what the woman had in her hand
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it turned out to be women's underwear the police were called and Helen was arrested for fraud
00:19:47
so she was already a controversial figure by 1941 when the Royal Navy got that phone call asking if the HMS
00:19:57
Ballroom had gone down they start to watch her she starts to be followed there is information gathered about what
00:20:03
she's doing and what she's saying and then this all reach us ahead in the run-up to the Normandy Landings in the
00:20:11
early part of 1944 when she gives another Seance at which her Naval Lieutenant is very very unhappy
00:20:20
so um this Naval attendant goes to her and goes to one of her seances and he's called upon by Albert the spirit guide
00:20:29
and he basically I think plays with them and he claims that he has an aunt and his sister and that they've died in fact
00:20:40
he's got no aunt and his sister is alive and well but actually that spiritual Communications come back from both his
00:20:47
relatives so at that point he knows that it's really is nonsense so he reports this is in January 1944 and he bought
00:20:56
this is the local police an undercover policeman go to a subsequent Seance and then as a given signal they blow their
00:21:02
whistles they jump up the lights are switched on and that there's a struggle they grab at the cloth Helen Duncan is
00:21:09
using to um to produce these so-called Spirit forms um one of her followers helpers manages
00:21:17
to grab the cloth back but in all the cafe Shuffle with Furniture flying and so on Helen Duncan is arrested and taken
00:21:25
into custody normally a fraud like this would be charged under something called the
00:21:31
vagrancy Act she'd get a fine and a slap on the wrist that's what happened last time
00:21:37
but this time Helen was charged with something unusual they use a very old act the Witchcraft Act of 1735 now this
00:21:46
was an act which was introduced in order to end the period of witch hunting of the 16th and 17th centuries but the
00:21:54
terms of the 1735 which have like particularly section 4 are that it is illegal to attempt or
00:22:02
pretend to conjure the spirits of the Dead Helen's defense attorney claimed to have
00:22:11
300 Witnesses prepared to testify that she was absolutely genuine the trial is really rather extraordinary event it is
00:22:20
a course celeb you've got to imagine that by this point in time that that Britain is really tired of the war you
00:22:27
know it's there isn't much fun there isn't much entertainment it's a drab and colorless
00:22:33
environment in London so to have something as kind of exciting and bizarre as this attracts an awful lot of
00:22:39
public attention so a lot of people queue up trying to get into the central Criminal Court the old bayley and the
00:22:44
Press have a field day Winston Churchill was very annoyed and didn't understand why this was happening while bombs were
00:22:52
being dropped on London he wanted to know why the court was wasting time on what he called obsolete
00:23:00
tomfoolery because Churchill is um really exposing the fact that it does seem a bit bizarre that there is a witch
00:23:08
trial as everybody wants to call it um being held in you know bomb damaged water in London at this absolutely
00:23:16
pivotal moment in World War II the prosecutor was an MI5 officer and Barrister named John Maude he read from
00:23:25
Harry Price's report and showed prices photographs from the seances he also in a pretty theatrical move pulled out a
00:23:34
long piece of cheesecloth then waved it around he had everyone laughing and in the end
00:23:40
he won Helen was convicted and sentenced to nine months in prison she was the last
00:23:46
person to be imprisoned for violation of the Witchcraft Act but the judge made it
00:23:52
clear the issue was not whether genuine manifestations of the Dead were possible
00:23:57
he said the court didn't deal in such abstract questions for him it was a case of plain
00:24:04
dishonesty Helen's followers believed she was charged under the Witchcraft Act because
00:24:11
it carried a heavier sentence including jail time sending her to jail was a way to make
00:24:18
sure she didn't spill any more military Secrets just in case she actually did know things she shouldn't
00:24:27
she served her time and soar to never perform another Seance but of course she did in 1956 one of her seances was
00:24:37
raided the lights were suddenly flipped on and Helen fainted but they decided that actually she's too ill to prosecute
00:24:44
and by that point she's by December 1956 she is bedridden and really um she's really dying
00:24:53
um and then she dies um but instantly mediums up and down the country say that the spirit of Helen
00:25:00
Duncan has come back to them so this is the thing about spiritualism nobody dies
00:25:05
really um and it's reported that Ellen Duncan is you know again commenting on her
00:25:12
innocence coming from the spirit world's preaching messages of love and so on and
00:25:17
therefore vindicating herself in spirit in a way that could never actually really properly be done on Earth and
00:25:24
um you know ever since Helen Duncan was convicted there have been those who would seek to clear her name
00:25:32
[Music] I must have been about 12. and my mom we were in the store and the National Enquirer that back in
00:25:45
the magazine I don't know if there was a picture of my grandmother but my mom picked it up she bought it and she said
00:25:52
if you ever want to know what happened to your grandma's right here and I've still got that article
00:25:59
this is Margaret Hahn she was 18 months old when her grandmother Helen Duncan died I mean we were brought up that my
00:26:06
grandmother had a gift from God my dad was a probably one of the biggest Skeptics
00:26:14
around and he he uh he ended up sitting with my grandmother because his first wife had passed away
00:26:24
and she would materialize if he could see her he could talk to her he could touch her
00:26:31
and that's actually how my dad met my mom was by going to seances with with my grandmother
00:26:41
she was genuine I have no doubt in my mind and uh you know an innocent woman was put
00:26:50
into jail it just fascinated me that um the 1735 act Witchcraft Act should be brought in
00:26:58
in 1944 to prosecute the case when the Witchcraft Act really wasn't applicable Graham Hewitt is a former lawyer working
00:27:07
with Helen's granddaughter to get a pardon for Helen it went first to the Scottish Parliament and they said this
00:27:13
is an English case and so they couldn't get involved it then went to the criminal cases
00:27:18
review commission who said there is no new evidence to Warrant a review of the case
00:27:25
it's very hard to get new evidence because the people who were there are now dead unless I go to a medium but I
00:27:34
have interviewed people who are now in their 90s who have been to Helen Duncan sounds his and can give statements to
00:27:41
support that she was authentic so if you'd win you'd like to reset her Legacy yes in some ways at the moment she's a
00:27:52
martyr for the cause but in my view she was a martyr because the home office and
00:27:58
the war cabinet felt that she was a threat to National Security and had to be shut up
00:28:04
I had called the home office and they said they were going to review the file because it was public interest
00:28:11
well I said my understanding is it's closed till um 2046 and they said that's correct
00:28:21
and I said why and they said for reasons of National Security and I told you I told the gentleman I
00:28:28
said I doubt that my grandmother is a threat to National Security she's been dead for
00:28:35
you know some so many years it's easy to understand why you wouldn't want your grandmother to be remembered
00:28:44
as a fraud when I look at the photographs all I see is cheesecloth and sleight of hand
00:28:51
but I also know that people get help where they can and she offered relief at a time when a lot of people really
00:28:59
needed it I I also once met an old lady whose father had been killed in the first
00:29:05
world war and she said to me you know I think she was sort of rather perhaps annoyed by what I was saying but
00:29:13
um suggesting that Helen Duncan might have been a fraud but she said to me well my father was killed in the first
00:29:17
world war and that when we met Mrs Duncan our father came back to us um and before then the family has been
00:29:25
broken and now the family was remade and of course you know somebody telling that
00:29:30
kind of story in that emotional way it's rather hard to argue with the emotion even if you know I perhaps don't believe
00:29:37
that her father really did return to her but that's that's why this such a rather
00:29:42
difficult story to tell because um of course for her the the meaning of the the sounds that she went to was is
00:29:51
really can't be argued with I mean that's it really did help their family foreign
00:30:05
[Music] Spore Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob Byers Matilda fellino is our intern
00:30:21
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at
00:30:28
thisiscriminal.com where we've also got pictures of Helen Duncan and her seances
00:30:33
we're on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina public
00:30:41
radio wunc we're a proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around special thanks to
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adzerk for providing their ad serving platform to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
00:31:00
[Music] radiotopiax [Music]