Secrets and Séances | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

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

Helen Duncan was a famous medium who travelled around Britain in the 1940s performing séances. She claimed to speak to the dead, and even produce physical manifestations of their spirits. But when Helen Duncan seemed to know wartime secrets about the whereabouts of military ships, like the sunken HMS Barham, she caught the attention of MI5 and notable psychic investigator Harry Price.

Music in the episode “Encounter” by Podington Bear “Suppose It Is” by Podington Bear “Union Hall Melody” by Blue Dot Sessions “Pulsars” by Podington Bear “Base Camp” by Blue Dot Sessions “Jetsam” by Podington Bear “Doghouse” by Podington Bear

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 79 originally published 11/17/2017 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-78-the-botanist-11-3-2017

Brief Summary

Helen Duncan's seances during WWII led to her arrest under the Witchcraft Act, sparking debates about her authenticity and legacy.

Key points

The Seance Begins. Helen Duncan's seances captivated audiences, as she claimed to summon the dead.
The Ghostly Sailor. A ghost in a sailor's uniform appears, revealing the sinking of HMS Barham.
The Ectoplasm Mystery. Helen Duncan's ectoplasm was a source of intrigue and skepticism during her séances.
The Arrest of Helen Duncan. Helen Duncan is arrested under the Witchcraft Act for fraud during a séance.
Helen Duncan's Conviction. Helen Duncan was convicted under the Witchcraft Act, marking a controversial moment in history.
Legacy of a Medium. Despite her conviction, Helen Duncan's spirit is said to live on through her followers.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It's funny to think British intelligence worried about a woman in a trance.

British intelligence investigates Helen Duncan's séances.

4:16WatchJan 4, 2023

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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