Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
The last woman to be convicted under a British witchcraft law from 1735, the so-called “Witchcraft Act,” was 46-year-old Scot Helen Duncan, better known as “Hellish Nell.” The Witchcraft Act did not criminalize witchcraft itself, but rather the exploitation of belief in witches for fraudulent purposes. On April 3, 1944, Helen Duncan was found guilty of fraudulent necromancy by the judges at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court in London, and sentenced to nine months in prison. Political motives were suspected behind the harsh sentence, as Helen Duncan was intended to be removed from the public eye for a short time. Helen Duncan was a mother of six who was married to Henry Edward Duncan, a World War I veteran with war injuries. She was born Helen MacFarlane on November 25, 1897, in Perthshire, Scotland. Even as a child, she predicted misfortunes before they occurred. To supplement her family’s income, she worked as a medium in addition to her job at a bleaching factory. As early as 1933, Helen Duncan was convicted of fraud, which did not deter her business. Especially after World War I and during World War II, her business boomed, as many people wanted to reconnect with their loved ones who had died in the war. To communicate with the spirits of the deceased, she would enter a trance and expel a white fluid—known as “ectoplasm”—from her mouth via a cloth soaked in egg white, which during the séance would take the form of a deceased person and answer questions. During World War II, Helen Duncan lived with her family in Portsmouth. The Royal Navy had its headquarters there. On November 25, 1941, the British battleship “HMS Barham” sank after being attacked by a German U-boat. A total of 861 crew members lost their lives. This disaster was treated as a military secret, to be kept under wraps until the end of 1942. Yet shortly after the shipwreck, Duncan made contact with a deceased sailor from the sunken “HMS Barham.” How did she know about it? Had she learned of it from the families of the deceased sailors, since they had received official letters of condolence? Helen Duncan also reported on the sinking of the Royal Navy battlecruiser “HMS Hood,” in which 1,400 people lost their lives, before the public learned of it. From then on, Helen Duncan was targeted by the secret service and the authorities. For under no circumstances was anyone to learn of the impending Allied landing. That is why the police had her arrested in January 1944 during one of her séances. The week-long trial against Helen Duncan was a show trial conducted on charges of potential treason, which ended with Helen Duncan being sentenced to nine months in prison, a sentence she had to serve at the notorious Holloway Prison until her pardon at the end of September 1944. Until her death on December 6, 1956, Helen Duncan continued to practice as a medium despite the ban. After World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had the Witchcraft Act repealed.
