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Helen Duncan had a gift. She told the world that the gift was the ability to communicate with the dead and see the future. Her real talent was puking up swatches of fabric and brawling with clients. Either way, people paid to see her act. But then she messed with the Royal Navy in wartime, and that never ends well. She could see the future, but she didn't have getting tried as a witch on her spiritual bingo card.
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Zarin. Elizabeth.
Zarin, how are you?
Doing pretty good, girl. How about you?
I'm great.
Nice. Great. Look at you. Tiger in your tank.
No, it's called acting.
I thought it was called urban mate.
No, wasn't that tastes like dirt or something?
Yeah, I actually liked it, but it does taste like dirt. Yeah, I do. You like dirt, don't you, you sicko?
Hey, chief. You know what's ridiculous?
Oh, man, do I ever. So longtime rude dude, Eric Buchholz, sent me this.
Okay, yeah.
Right?
A-B. Exactly. You know the man.
A reek the freak.
There was a news story, and this is like my version of a mashup. It's history gone awry. So there was a politician in a Peruvian town who recently won election, and his name? Hitler Mussolini.
Hitler Mussolini.
Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores. He was elected the mayor of his town on a left-wing party ticket. Wait, what? Yes.
Change your name, dude.
Well, he, old Hitler, he was not the first Hitler in Peruvian politics. There was also Hitler Gushlin Alba Sanchez of the center-right We Are Peru party. And he ran as the mayor of a different town in the Andes. He claimed in his campaign literature that he was, quote, the good Hitler. And his campaign slogan was, Hitler returns.
Oh.
And Hitler with the people.
Oh, God.
Yes.
Oh, this is horrible.
Now, that guy, Hitler Alba, in 2018, he faced a challenger. His challenger? Lenin Vladimir Rodriguez Valverde.
What is even happening?
So it was Hitler versus Lenin in Peruvian politics. And he claimed that his father was totally unaware of the Nazi German dictator when he named his child Hitler. Oh, BS. Yeah. There was a third Hitler who served in Peru's Congress. Yes. And his name was Hitler Saavedra. And over, for a more worldly perspective, over in Namibia, there was also Adolf Hitler Unona, and he won an election last year, his fifth in a row. And he told the BBC when they asked him about his curious name, he was like, as a child, I saw it as a totally normal name.
I was like, see, you didn't read widely as a child.
No one ever said anything? No one ever said anything to him?
You would think somebody would, right? Anyway, the Namibian newspaper, The Namibian, they reported that... This Hitler, Adolf Hitler Unona. This Hitler. He's had to remove the Hitler from his identity documents due to years of backlash. And so now he's just Adolf Unona.
Adolf, well, that's fine.
So there you go. I thought that was fun. Adolf versus Vladimir Lenin. Incredible. And Hitler with the people.
Hitler Mussolini, though. That's just going in. Hard. Yeah, you can't explain that one away.
It's a family name. I like Hitler Returns is your campaign slogan. Like, what's going on in Peruvian politics?
Good God.
So there you go. Ridiculous, huh?
That is ridiculous. Do you want to know what else is ridiculous?
Please.
I love ridiculous.
Having a tummy full of cheesecloth.
What? What?
This is Ridiculous Crime, a podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, heists, and cons. It's always 99% murder-free and 100% ridiculous.
Oh, you damn right. I am.
Zarin, I meant to ask you, did you have a good Halloween?
Did I have a good Halloween?
Yeah, did you have a good Halloween?
Yeah, I mean, like, I... I didn't really get really dressed up. I just wore my Pink Panther costume, the one that I stole from that college team's mascot. So part of it's torn because I had to get the guy out of it. But it looks cool. The kids liked it. I had a bunch of kids stop by, and I gave them a candy and like a Surt's Breath Mints. And so they loved me.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah. I was like, hey, you've been eating a lot of candy. Here's your Breath Mints. So there you go. How was your Halloween?
It was good. I got arrested.
Oh, did you? What for this time? This time.
Kids came to the door. Trick or treat. I said, oh, I'll take treat and put your hands out. And I filled them with Spooky Ranch.
Their hands or the kids? Just squirting them out? Their hands.
And then one kid came and I shoved the bottle in his mouth and then like deep injected it into his throat. And that's when I got arrested.
Did parents come back? Like, did you give my child spooky ranch?
I was like, oh, you want a bang off this? And they were like.
Give you some too.
It's her officer. It was her.
That's me.
I want to keep the Halloween spirit alive, though, because mine was cut short with a trip to the clink.
I get that.
The Halloween spirit. You get it?
Oh, experience store.
Yeah. It'll make more sense when I start talking about this. I have for you today a medium.
A medium?
A seer.
Oh, a psychic.
A witch.
A witch.
In fact, she was the last person in Britain jailed under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. The Witchcraft Act of 1735. She was the last one convicted?
Jailed.
Jailed. Okay.
Jailed. So. When was she jailed?
This takes place way after 1735.
Okay.
Way after. So I want to tell you.
This is still in the books. Okay. I want to.
Tell you about Victoria Helen McFarlane.
Victoria Helen McFarlane.
And later she went as Helen Duncan.
Okay.
But she was born on November 25th, 1897 in Collander, which is a small Perthshire town on the edge of the highlands of Scotland.
Okay. If you say so, I trust you. You seem legit.
Her dad, Archbald McFarlane, he was a Slater.
What is that?
He was Kelly Slater.
Oh, okay. Cool.
He was a Slater. You know, like a fella who does slate roofs.
Oh, right. Because they have the stone slabs.
I mean, it's my understanding that they would pretty much put a roof... anywhere any kind of roof if the price was right it didn't have to be.
Slate now also is a slate or somebody who like did you know you have to crack the slate off you gotta put the chisel in and break off I.
Think he did it he did all of it farm to table okay right there he from the quarry to the above um anyway so okay so that's what the dad does right up on the rooftop.
Gotcha quarry to lorry all the time There it is. Cory DeLorean.
I like that. And so the mom, religious lady, she had eight kids. She ran a tight ship. And so in this little town, they didn't have a whole lot of work there. It's about 16 miles or so northwest of Sterling, which is the home of the William Wallace Monument.
Okay.
So in Helen's day, it was a struggling little town. And now it's kind of like a tourist stop as people make their way up to the highlands.
Okay. Let me do it.
So there's Helen. Small town.
Helen Duncan.
Helen Duncan, bunch of brothers and sisters and a gift or a curse, depending on how you looked at it. Cause like Helen, she started reporting clairvoyant experiences at around the age of seven. And so her mom was like, don't do that in public. Don't say this.
Stuff outside the house.
Yeah.
And it's cause it's, it's not like the folks up there didn't believe in second sight and stuff like that. Like they had in the past, but it just wasn't a mainstream thing.
And, The mom didn't.
Want it to bring Helen or the family this unwanted negative attention. But she couldn't help it, right?
She didn't care. And also it could be like you're not taking it seriously, like you're making fun of it. Right. Either side, it's bad.
Right. And so it's just like, keep your head down, Helen.
Yeah, I got you.
But Helen, she kept her head up. What did she care?
Walk route, Helen.
So she would warn people about impending bad news, and then it would happen. Oh. Like, you know, your boy is going to lose a thumb. And then you know what? Some gets cut off by a wagon wheel or something.
I don't know. You know what Spooky Girl told me today?
Yeah.
So... And she wasn't like this quiet, creepy soothsayer.
Oh, she wasn't?
No, she's like a wild child, which makes it so much better. Like a super loud, frenetic tomboy.
I love it.
She's not just sitting there quiet. She's running up like, your uncle's going to die tomorrow.
And then jumps back in the bog.
Oh, yeah. She was so crazy that she had the nickname Hellish Nell.
That's awesome.
Hellish Nell. And that would stick with her. Until like later when she had her time in the spotlight, Hella Chanel. So she may have been a loud kid, but she was like, she got quiet as an adult, like quiet and passive for the most part, but like prone to rage filled outbursts.
Really?
Oh, I hear you sister. Basically she would like put up with stuff and put up with stuff until she snapped. Okay. Like she needed boundaries. Helen, you need to establish boundaries. So 1914, she's 16 years old.
Okay.
All around her, her male peers are signing up to fight in World War I.
Going to the Somme.
Going to the Somme. And Helen, pregnant and unmarried, which was very shameful for her family.
Yes.
And so they sent her off to Dundee. And that was in part to keep the family name clean, but also like, you got to work. We're not feeding a new baron. Get out of here. So- She went to get a job at a munitions factory since the pay was really good and steady.
And there's a lot of work.
There's a lot of work. But there was a physical to pass to get the gig and she didn't pass it.
Oh, for what reason?
It turns out she had tuberculosis.
Very common.
Yeah. So off to the sanatorium for her.
Okay.
And then she recovered. She gets out of the hospital. and then she got a job at a mill and one day a co-worker she wanted to.
Get tuberculosis again she's like i kind of.
Miss it i miss it uh did you see the thing as an aside did you see that there's a strain of tuberculosis going around san francisco right now oh i did see the tb especially virulent resistant and you see where it came from no A strip club.
What? Oh, crazy horse.
I think that's the one.
Yes. I did see that.
Strip club TV.
That's powerful stuff.
That's some powerful stuff right there. You're in the hospital. How'd you get tuberculosis in 2026?
I was in the crazy horse. I was a blusty lady when I picked up diphtheria.
So anyway, okay, so she's like, look, I'm going to get a job at a mill. There's no crazy horse here in Dundee. One day this coworker's like, listen, I got a brother, Henry Duncan.
Mm-hmm.
And you got to meet him. You guys would be perfect together.
I'm sensing a love match.
He wasn't off fighting because he'd already enlisted when he was 16 and then he came down with rheumatic fever.
Oh, yeah.
And she's like, you two are sickly. You know, I'm just fine.
You can complain at each other.
According to Psy Encyclopedia, each of them claimed to have seen the other in a vision before they met. Oh. So goth.
Yeah.
Yeah, meant to be. So they married on May 27th, 1916. Wow. Henry was a cabinetmaker by trade, but he didn't get a lot of work because he never fully recovered from the rheumatic fever.
Okay.
Like, his health was never 100%. And another thing about Henry is that his family was haunted.
How so?
They were haunted.
Wait, what?
I just kept seeing it mentioned. His family was haunted.
What is that?
I don't know. Just like ghosts following him around.
Yeah, ghosts love him. They're like ghost magnets.
You go into their house, it's like, ooh.
Or you go there and they're like, they just have like empty eyes.
I think it was maybe a little bit of both. So like, but they leaned into it. You know, Henry's family, they're like, we are so haunted.
Yeah.
And it's awesome. Helen's family is like, no, we don't know anything supernatural. Henry's family is like, just own it. So Henry was crazy superstitious, like really sensitive, smart guy. But he was also kind of an operator, like manipulative, a little loose with the truth. So.
Hank the Crank.
This happy couple, right? They're always on the verge of being totally broke.
This happy couple.
They're a haunted happy couple. They're like barely scraping by.
Not working.
They're so happy. And it seems like at least one of them was usually too sick to work. Sometimes both of them.
Okay. And she's still getting full on visions at this point. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And like Henry, like his cabinet making business was suffering and then it went under.
So at no point did she see a vision of him succeeding in anything.
No, but I don't think she warned him either. And then he had a heart attack.
Oh.
I don't know if she gave him a heads up on that one either.
Wondering.
But it's so young, that heart attack. Very. So he survived it, but it took.
A toll on him. Probably the rheumatic fever.
Yeah.
Helen.
Meanwhile, she went out to work in the bleach fields.
Oh, Lord.
Yeah, I had to look that one up.
I don't even know what that is, but it sounds horrendous.
That's what I was like.
It sounds terrible.
What is it?
It's really like farm Clorox?
Women would do the washing for people and then lay the laundry out in the fields to be bleached and sanitized by the sun.
Oh, that's not bad.
Well, it was really hard work. The lye. Yeah, caustic chemicals. It was like backbreaking. You're hauling around all this wet sheets.
Oh, the wet laundry.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And at this point, by the time she's up in the bleach field.
God, it sounds so bad.
Henry, he's not working at all. He's just too sick to work.
He can't even work in the bleach field.
He just spends his days reading books.
He can't get like a stick and turn the laundry in the big boiling pot?
He's fake. Well, no, he just doesn't. He's not. He doesn't feel good.
I got you.
But I'm just going to read books all day, he says. But not just any books.
Of course. What books, Elizabeth?
Spiritualist books.
Oh, yes.
I mean, it's too early for him to just read World War II books.
So his library is also haunted.
It makes me think of like the like 80s, 90s books of like the time life, like ESP books.
Exactly. People who smoke the cigarettes right down to the filter. They're reading it above a garage in like an apartment the family made.
Yeah. Oh, I love that. But you know what? He was sick, but he wasn't too ill to make babies with Helen.
Oh, so that part didn't get sick.
All told, they had 12 kids.
Damn, it never got sick.
Six of whom didn't make it out of infancy. It's not like Helen was the picture of health.
No.
So she had high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney damage, pleurisy, and abdominal pains.
Dear Lord.
Yeah, and the last bit, the abdominal pains, I think was likely caused by what sounds like pica.
Oh, pica? I can never remember. I think it's pica. Yeah, pica.
She had a habit of swallowing carpet tacks and cigarette ends.
What?
Yeah.
I can't even imagine that.
Cigarette ends. And I assume that's not the lit end. It's the butt. They don't have filters. It's the part that's the little bit of tobacco is left.
It's got someone's dried saliva on it.
Exactly.
It's one thing to nibble chalk and dirt, but tacks and butts.
That's right.
I saw a clip a long time ago from one of those exploitive reality shows where people have a compulsive behavior.
Yeah.
And there was a woman who ate the foam out.
Of couch cushions.
Oh, yeah.
I think you told me about this.
And I feel like there must be a combination of nutritional deficiency and like... early trauma that would.
Cause that heavy on the early trauma it's tragic yeah yeah have you seen the thing about that i think the guy ate a car piece by.
Piece yes yeah yeah one one piece.
At a time johnny cash wrote a song about.
Him he did uh so okay now we got helen sick as a dog eating nails dropping the litter of kids working in the bleach fields tending to a sick husband who sits around and read books about ghosts all.
Day this is a life someone needs to cut.
This lady a break And that's the end of my story. Ridiculous crime.
Okay.
Who's that someone?
Who, Elizabeth?
Dr.
Williams.
Not the Dr.
Williams.
Dr. Williams was more like a something than a someone.
How so?
So apparently a voice calling itself Dr. Williams spoke through Helen while she was in a deep trance.
Of course.
And Dr. Williams was like, Henry, do you know that your wife can materialize spirits? And he's like, what? He's like, yeah, sure. You should ever do it. You know what? You should go ahead and charge folks to watch. Like, forget making armoires for people. This is a business plan.
So the voice is coming through his wife, who's possessed at the moment. Yeah, she's like, my name's Dr.
Williams.
Your wife's amazing.
She should do this for everybody. And they're like, oh, okay, cool. And, you know, he puts down his book on, like, spirit world.
And the Franco-Prussian War.
Tell me more.
So they got, like, a full-on, like, Edgar Cayce thing. But she doesn't have to go to sleep. She can just do it while she's awake.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. Why not?
She's in a trance.
Yeah.
So we're now in 1926. She's doing readings, sharing her visions. She's like an omen factory. She'd be doing readings all over the kingdom at this point, not just Scotland.
Okay.
But it wasn't enough. Like she had to take it to the next level.
What's the next level?
So what people wanted, it had to get physical.
Oh no.
Her sittings started following the standard format for what's called physical mediumship. So the people would sit in this crescent facing a curtained corner.
Okay.
Called the cabinet, lit by a dim red light.
Oh.
And then she would be searched, put into specially designed garments, and then led to a chair behind the curtain. And then Henry would usually park himself in the back. And then she would go into a trance, and her spirit control would start speaking. But it wasn't Dr. Williams anymore.
No, moved on.
It was Albert Stewart.
Okay.
And he was a dead guy from Dundee who'd been a pattern maker and who had immigrated to Australia. Wow. And he was tall. He was like, thought he was better than everybody. He loved the song South of the Border.
Down Mexico way?
Yeah, his accent would kind of go between being like Helen's in Australia.
I relate.
Like someone I know.
Exactly.
And so Albert, he ran the evening. He was like the emcee. And he would decide who could touch what. He loved making fun of Henry. He was like, look at that guy in the back. Bump on a log. Kisses like a dead fish. He also had Peggy. Peggy would come out. She was a mischievous child spirit. And she sang Baa Baa Black Sheep. And then she could do like one verse of Loch Lomond. Okay. But then she didn't know the other words.
So we're kind of getting into like a many faces of Sybil. Yes.
But then came the ectoplasm.
The whoa, God.
What is the ectoplasm? That always follows.
Like Slimer from Ghostbusters.
It was like some white material that would come out of her mouth and nose.
Oh, the ectoplasm.
And it would form into like recognizable figures, sometimes like relatives of people who were in the room and it would speak to them.
What?
And she made like gagging noises and groans as she sat in the cabinet, like regurgitating the stuff. Wait, what? Just ride with it, baby. And so 1928, this photographer, Harvey Metcalf, goes to a bunch of these sittings and takes flash photographs. And then develops them and you can see that it's like a paper mache mask covered in an old sheet. Not like high quality special effects. And it's like people didn't want to pay for this once they saw it. So she honed her craft. And like soon enough she's in London and she's like reading the nights away with like all these eager sitters. Like so if you're going to become a famous medium sooner or later, someone's going to test you.
Yeah, that's the rule.
Someone's going to check you, boo. The first systematic investigation was run by the research committee of the london spiritualist alliance the lsa okay they did like 50 sittings between october 1930 and june of 1931 and the controls were super extreme like even by the standards of that whole genre.
This is like sir arthur conan doyle's type people okay.
Yes So she would get sewn into a suit that was made so that, like, any tampering would show.
Okay.
They'd put gloves and foot covers stitched onto her, and then they would tape her hands and feet to the chair.
All right.
Give her a full-body cavity search.
It's science.
Yeah.
So they collected five specimens of, quote, ectoplasm.
Uh-huh.
And one, they snipped it off while it was hanging out of her mouth. And it wasn't very mystical when the results came back. Two of the specimens were cheesecloth mixed with something resembling egg white. Two were surgical gauze or like sanitary pads soaked in some sort of fluid.
And she's coughing this up.
And the last was a bunch of toilet paper stuck together. And so the committee, they tried this experiment, right? They're like, take this tablet and it's going to stain the contents of your stomach. And weirdly at that sitting and only at that one, no ectoplasm appeared. That's strange.
Messed up the chemistry. I guess.
So then their final report concluded that, you know, she had obviously swallowed it beforehand and then puked it up like a cat in a hairball for display.
So she didn't have to pass it.
No, she was just bringing it back up.
Oh, I know.
But when she didn't bring it back up.
No, she didn't eat any of that time. She probably did pass it.
I was thinking, yeah, because they gave her the staining material.
It was just like they hurt Henry and just had to keep pulling and pulling.
Dear God. Why did I ask? There were these two....
Into reports in a publication called light that were like actually she might be on to something that might actually be ectoplasm and then so like the committee's final report was like well you know it's kind of a split decision could be could be not and so henry was like look she goes into this dissociated state before the sittings and like in that state she like she might hide stuff in herself and then without even knowing it okay then like hell they're like helen what is this she's like look you're giving me credit for way more than i can do.
She's like i'm just a simple country girl from.
The bleach i am not that good of a regurgitator so let's stop and take an ad break and when we come back more readings.
Zarin.
Oh, God.
Sorry, I was working on my ectoplasm.
Helen Duncan. Uh-huh. Hella Schnell. She's out there barfing up cheesecloth, calling in a visitor from the spirit realm.
Why didn't she just swallow like spider web or something that.
Would be easier? It's going to dissolve.
Oh, good point.
You know, and she had to shape it into things.
Oh, she was actually shaping. And then when you coughed it up, it would have like, you know, structural memory.
Well, she had to drape it over a paper mache mask.
Oh, Lord.
And then be.
Like, whoa, very scary. So spooky.
This is your grandfather talking.
Oh.
All right. So she's doing all these sittings, right? These spiritualist sittings. And some of them, they get analyzed. She just keeps trucking along. 1931. She sat for a guy named Harry Price, and he was like a showman researcher. He ran the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in London.
Okay.
He founded that in 1925. So he did five sittings in his lab with her. He brought her in.
At the first one— He's like the amazing Randy of his day.
Yes.
Yes.
May 4th, 1931. The first one, Albert Stewart, that dead Doug D.
Pattermaker. Oh, I remember him, yeah.
He let Prince feel the ectoplasm. Come feel my ectoplasm.
Come over and feel my ectoplasm.
To like my ectoplasm. And Price is like.
It's still warm.
Pulls at it. He's like, okay, it's about 30 inches wide. It is damp. And it feels exactly like my undershirt. His summer weight undershirt. And he said, this is my favorite thing, like, all day.
Okay.
It also smelled, he wrote, like a bit of ripe gorgonzola. Helen, what are you eating before you do this? Like, what is just a good damp cheese?
What's going on in your gut, Helen?
Helen. Yeah, she needs a probiotic.
Or maybe fewer.
So a sample from an earlier of Helen's readings was given to Price by a friend. He had it analyzed and it was found to be egg white mixed with chemicals on cheesecloth. So he's like ramping up the inspections. This time he's taking photographs. And he reports that these lengths of material in the photographs all had the same dimensions, the same warp and weft, you know, wear, tears, frayed edges, even dirt marks where like he had stepped on one.
It is his shirt.
And it came back. No, she just keeps using the same pieces.
Oh, God.
And then one hand, like a hand came out.
What?
And it turned out to be a rubber glove on a cheesecloth support. There's a photo of it. It is absolutely hilarious.
She coughed up a full glove on the support. How is she getting this? I don't know.
She's like a reverse sword swallower. I don't know about the glove part. I think that she had that hidden behind the curtain already and then just.
Have you ever done like brain flossing where you put floss up your nose and have it cough out of your throat and you go.
Absolutely not.
I didn't think so. That sensation alone.
Why?
What is wrong? What's wrong with you?
I've tried to freak people out in parties. So anyway.
You could be a medium.
No, I'm just saying it's like coughing stuff up and the control she has is like sword swallowing level.
Oh, yeah.
No, 100%.
So then Peggy, remember the little creepy girl Peggy?
Uh-huh, yeah.
That was a girl's head cut from a magazine cover and stuck on a piece of the cloth.
Okay.
And you can see in the picture in the lab that he took the safety pins off. Attaching it to the cloth.
She's swallowing safety pins.
I don't think she's swallowing these. I think she had them like hidden somewhere.
Somewhere on her person. On her person. And then she fake coughs and then just throws that.
Yeah.
Like fake cough. Like she has this picture and then like coughs it up. And while she's like, I'm Peggy. And then it's like. Pinning it to a piece of fabric really quickly and then, like, shoving it outside the curtain. Oh, hi.
Oh, okay. I keep forgetting that she's doing this behind a curtain. She's behind a curtain. Yeah, yeah. She's got a little time to work.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so the fourth sitting, there was an incident that, like, haunted her reputation.
How so?
Price was like, I want to x-ray you to see if you've swallowed anything.
Oh, you're going to get caught up now.
And so she punched her husband in the face. Ran out into the street wearing just like tights and then was like clawing at the railings and screaming. She just lost it. The police came.
Whoa.
The doctors were like, no, no, no, no. Don't like, don't get an ambulance. We'll just take her back inside. And then she's like, no, you know what? I want the x-ray. X-ray me. But by then, Price was like, I saw you puke it up and pass it to your husband. And then the husband was like, let me see your pockets. Empty your pockets. He's like, no. He's just got like a wad of like gorgonzola cheese in his pockets. So at the last sitting, a piece was cut from the substance. Helen screamed as the rest went back down her throat. And that turned out to be cheap paper soaked in egg white and then folded into like a flat tube. And there was this psychologist there, William McDougall. And he was like, this whole thing's fraudulent. Like, oh, really?
You're really good at your job, William McDougall. Come on, I'm just reading about it.
Thanks, Nicky Diggs.
Yeah, so Price, though, he wasn't like a neutral party. He went into this wanting to humiliate Helen and then also make a buck off that process.
Oh, I forgot about that impulse.
His own writing, he called the whole affair the antics of a, quote, fat female crook. Whoa.
Right?
And after his report, Helen's former maid wrote a sworn statement that she used to buy and wash cheesecloth for Helen. And that Henry told her that Helen passed him a roll of what's called butter muslin.
Yeah, it's really thin.
In the street that night. And so sources differ on the timing. Like one said that the declaration... Came right before the report, one said after, either way. In 1936, Nander Fordor, who was a Hungarian parapsychologist, he offered her money to be filmed with an infrared camera during a sitting. And she's like, no, I'm good, thanks.
She's like, I don't need money that bad.
No, I don't like that.
You're going to mess up my bit.
So you have the laboratory fiasco, and you're thinking, like, maybe call it a day, Helen. Like, this is just getting worse and worse. She didn't care. She kept going. And people kept coming to readings.
That part does not surprise me. Why she decided the ectoplasm is the impressive part, that surprised me. I mean, if you can do voices, just do that.
She went back home to Scotland. Things got dicey up there.
How so?
Zarin, close your eyes.
Oh, I'm scared. My eyes are closed.
I want you to picture it. It's January 5th, 1933. You are Hilda Soden, friend of Scottish socialite, Essen Mall. Essen has paid you to have a sitting in her home with the Psychic Media Helen Duncan. And Essen wants you there for the adventure. Essen is a sturdy woman, no nonsense. She keeps her hair in a small rolled bun and usually wears a very smart jacket and long wool skirt. And she takes no guff from anyone. She went to one of this Helen Duncan's readings and wasn't impressed.
She also didn't like Helen's attitude, so she's having her over for a reading right here in her very own home. You walk up the creaking stairs of her lovely house in the west end of Edinburgh toward the top floor parlor where the sitting will take place. The room has been all kitted out for the occasion. A dim red light bulb, a chair behind some heavy curtains. A few more guests arrive, settling into chairs facing the curtain. Then a woman is led into the room, Helen Duncan. She heads to the chair behind the curtains and draws them closed.
The seance is about to begin. Helen hums and sings a bit from behind the curtain. And then there's a squeaky voice. I'm Peggy.
Peggy Hazeldean.
You wince at how creepy this is. Then the curtain parts slightly and you see a figure floating in front of it. The light is so dim and tinted that you can't see exactly what it is. It looks to be some sort of white blob. Hey, Peggy, Essendon says. Come and shake hands with me, Peggy. The blob shimmies a little. Hi, I'm Peggy and I'm shy. Oh, who are you? I'm Peggy, everybody. Just little Peggy. I want to make friends and meet you all. And then I might sing a song for you. He he. Essendon leans forward in her chair. The white blob flits around, never straying far from the curtains. You squint and look closer.
Is it Fabric? Just then, the supposed Peggy swings by Essin just within her reach. Essin mutters, come here and let me see what you're made of. Then she reaches out and grabs the spirit Peggy. Peggy won't budge and appears to be pulled from behind the curtain. You reach out and grab spirit Peggy too, helping Essin pull the thing toward her. It feels like a soft, stretchy, damp material.
Just when you think you and Essin will gain control of it, it's pulled violently away from you both. disappearing behind the curtain, but not before you hear a big ripping sound. Essen jumps up and throws open the curtain. A man behind you turns on a hand lamp. I've caught you, you fraud, yells Essen. Now that there's enough light to really see, all of you in the room watch as Helen Duncan tries to shove something up her skirt.
Essen yells for all the men to leave the room and the women to stay. You're all going to make Helen strip down and show everyone what's under her skirt. There's a tussle. Helen lifts a chair above her head and threatens to kill Essen with it. I'll brain you, you bloody bugger! Another woman grabs the chair and a third holds Helen's arms behind her. A thin lady's undershirt falls from Helen's skirt and onto the floor. This is Peggy, Essen states. Helen spits at her. It might have been.
I'll not say it's not, you dirty swine!
From down the hall, a man calls out, I've called the police. You catch Essence's eyes. She smiles at you and winks. She takes no guff from anyone.
That's amazing. It's like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas roughing it up.
And the pictures of all of them are so amazing. These are just like no-nonsense ladies.
Some brassy brats.
And they're down to throw hands if need be.
If you grab a spirit.
And they all were like grappling each other. So the cops came.
By the way, good voices.
Thank you. The cops came. Helen was arrested. She goes to court. She's charged with fraud. On May 11th, 1933, she gets convicted of fraudulent mediumship.
Is there a positive in a normal mediumship?
Yeah. Fraudulent mediumship.
Okay.
And then given the option of a $ 10 fine or a month in prison. And then the under vest was like the star exhibit. They had pictures of it and you could see where it had ripped, where they fought over it. And it's like the least convincing child in Scotland. It's not a child. The newspaper articles for it are incredible.
And like the testimony that Essin gives is.
Oh, I bet they're quote worthy.
You know, like they're arguing over who, she weighs two more stone than I do. And I took her on and like, you know, I didn't like the way she talked to me. It's incredible.
Highly quotable, Essin.
Very much so. Essin's amazing. And I could only find one picture of her.
Really?
Like sort of from the side at the reading. Like she recreated what it looks like in the room.
Okay.
And I was trying to find all this stuff. And it's just like, she gets referenced in the papers and stuff for this, but then nothing outside of it. Anyway.
Okay.
And I think there's another person with that name that, anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. So the conviction did not do what a conviction might be expected to do. So like the spiritualist journal Light, they actually endorsed the verdict. And Price's findings. So like, yeah, she's a fraud.
She's a fraud. We love spooky stuff.
She's a fraud.
Yeah.
But then the movement's rank and file went the other way. So the London Spiritualist Alliance, they were like, she's a fraud.
Yeah.
But then all their members were like, but she's awesome.
But we love her. Yeah.
So like the Spiritualist National Union, they renewed her diploma that she had with them.
They saw which side the bread was buttered on and they're like, this is good for business.
Oh, yeah.
She got a column in a Saturday newspaper.
A column. Yeah.
Yeah.
Like Helen's world.
Nothing has changed.
Peggy says hi. So over the next decade, she becomes Britain's best known materializing medium.
Materializing medium.
And like sitters, she like ups the ante too. Like people who go, they're like, oh, things were levitating. You know, deceased relatives were coming and they knew intimate facts about me that like she would not have known. Like you can't puke that up, man.
Yeah.
And they're like, I don't know. So like World War II was really good for spiritualism.
Oh, yeah.
And then also very bad for like the government's sense of humor. So bereavement, right? Reaching every class. Belief was common, not just among like the poorly educated, but among like dons, clergymen, officers. 1941, the Royal Navy formally recognized spiritualism as a religion so that sailors could hold spiritualist services at sea.
Like they wanted to do seances at sea. They're like, ooh, scary.
They're like, look, man, you're out here risking it all.
As long as you'll fight the Jerrys, we don't care.
You do what you gotta do, pal. Yeah, 41. And so Helen, she was invited to Portsmouth by a local church organization in 1941. And she found, like she comes there and here's a city with the Royal Navy's home fleet in port. A lot of worried families, steady supply of customers. Time for an ad break, Zarin.
Unbelievable.
When those are done, we'll talk WW2. Zarin.
Elizabeth.
Hey. So, check this out. HMS Barham was a Queen Elizabeth class battleship.
Big boat.
Yeah.
And November 25th, 1941, she was torpedoed in the Mediterranean off the Egyptian coast by a German sub. Huge, giant explosion. Terrible. And they caught it on film.
Really?
Yeah. And sources say the death toll was like 861, 662, depending on who you ask. So it's a horrible tragedy.
Yeah.
And so, but the Admiralty, they kept the loss quiet. They didn't announce it to the public until late January 1942, next year. So the families get told. Now remember, so this is November 25th, 1941. The families are told right away. Okay. And like letters of condolence are, went out and asked them to please keep this to yourself.
All right.
So they handled their business and being respectful, but they just want the public to lose faith.
They want the public to not know.
Yeah.
And so at a sitting in Portsmouth at the end of November, 1941, a spirit sailor materialized out of Helen and said his ship HMS Barham had gone down. Now this is just days after it actually happened. But way before the information was made public.
Yeah, nobody else knows unless they're a surviving family member.
Yeah, and apparently he was wearing– he had a cap ribbon, so she must have barfed up a ribbon that had the ship's name on it. And she said that his first name was Sid. Like, hi, I'm Sid.
I'm dead.
And so there are two kinds of skepticism here. They're worth separating out. The first is about the story. It's not clear how specific Helen's claim was and whether the precision grew in the retelling. So like maybe she was like, you know, my name's Sid and I blew up on the ship. And then they're like, oh, Sid, I'm so sorry.
And then people are like, oh, like it grows. Like, did she name the ship? Who's to say? Because, you know, we have fuzzy narration. Did she draw the name out of like an anxious sitter? And like produce a ghost to match.
Okay.
That's the oldest trick, right?
Yeah, the cold readings.
Cold readings. And so the sinners, they're in a city where a lot of people have relatives on war so that makes sense. The second is about the leak, right? So the popular version has Helen as like a woman with a hotline to classified information. And so there's this researcher, Graham Donald. He figured that if the families of the 861 dead were each told... and each family member told only one other person, it would get out to 20,000 people.
Yeah, so do the math. That's a pretty quick spread. So, like, loose lips.
About sunk ships.
Like, it's too late.
So, Helen, she may have just picked it up as word on the street.
Just heard it talking.
Yeah, so either, like, it was, you know, enhanced by other people's misrememberings, or she heard about it and just threw it in there for shiggles. So, what is clear is that the Navy noticed it. And they had MI5 build a case against her.
So they thought that she knew too much.
She knew too much. Yeah. And so she was regarded as a security risk or at a minimum as like damaging to morale. So let's say she just has someone's telling her stuff. She doesn't know how to keep her mouth shut. Like it's all about keeping your mouth shut then.
And being like, you know, a charlatan clairvoyant would be a great cover for a spy.
Oh yeah, totally.
Totally.
So like, Their investigator, she doesn't know. She just carries on touring and sitting. But then January 1944, it all caught up with her. So by the winter of 44, Helen's working out of a house in Portsmouth run by this couple, Ernest and Elizabeth Homer. And they ran a center called the Master Temple Psychic Center.
Ernest Homer and the Master Temple Psychic Center?
Yes. Yes.
That's like my favorite band. And then she had an agent now, Francis Brown, who traveled with her to set things up. So into the scene walks Lieutenant or Lieutenant Stanley Wirth of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. And Mr. Homer had invited him. And Stanley's like, hey, let me bring my friend. He's a surgeon lieutenant. This guy Fowler.
So the two officers, they go to the January 14th, 1944 reading. It did not go well, Zarin.
How, Elizabeth?
Helen did her whole floating white cloth thing.
Oh, I'm coughing up ectoplasm over here. She was going to barf it up.
And then the cloth introduced itself as Lieutenant Worth's dead aunt come to see her nephew.
Oh, no.
The problem is that Lieutenant Worth, Lieutenant Worth, didn't have a dead aunt. And then another figure like, oh, never mind. Another one comes up. Albert, don't forget, Albert's still the emcee. He's like, and who do we have here, mate? And Albert pulls up another ghost. This one's Worth's dead sister.
No.
Strike two, his sister's totally alive and well.
Bro, why are you doing this?
So Worth and Fowler, they could hear a rustling sound whenever a spirit entered or exited the room via the curtain. Like, not really ghostly, you know what I mean? Um, so like, this is totally fake. They're like, wait, can you believe this?
This is like a low grade puppet show.
I've been defrauded. They're like, I want my money back. And so instead of just though, like taking it on the chin and chalking it up to like a goofy lark in a port town.
They called the home office.
Yeah. Worth went to the cops. Like, be cool, man. Just like, you're an idiot. You thought this was, come on. So the police arranged a second visit and a war reserve constable named Cross. He went undercover with Worth. Like he was like, I'm just a normal guy, and I just like psychics. Like, I'm not a constable.
What?
No. I've got all this loose money in my pocket.
Come on, Worth. So they paid 25 shillings for two seats. The constable, like, when the spirit comes out, like, hey, I'm Peggy, the constable lunged at the spirit and then found Helen standing on her chair trying to hide a white cloth. And, like, so Helen, the homers, and the agent Brown, they all get arrested. And here's where the case turns from, like, tawdry to wild, mediums who were caught at that point were usually dealt with under the Vagrancy Act of 1824. Okay. And that covered fortune telling.
And pretended magic.
And was heard by magistrates. And you just got a fine at the end of it.
Somebody's got a misdemeanor. Right.
So Helen, she originally gets arrested under section four of that act. Then the authorities were like, we got to find something heavier to get her with.
This is wartime.
They probably got an MI5 whispering in their ear. They found section four of the Witchcraft Act of 1735. They went deep in the books.
Yeah.
This allowed Helen to be tried before a jury and it carried a prison sentence. They were upping it. The thing is, the 1735 Act wasn't like a witch burning statute. It ended the earlier death penalty witch laws and replaced them with like a skeptical position. But since magic does not exist, claiming to conjure spirits is fraud.
Oh, so it's just fraud. Like that's the kind of logic.
So history.co.uk says, even by the terms of this old law, Helen wasn't a witch. So the act hadn't been used for more than a century. She gets charged with seven counts. Two of conspiracy to contravene the Witchcraft Act. Two of obtaining.
That just sounds awesome.
I know, right? That's what I'm going to get charged. That's what I was like, when you haul me off for putting ranch dressing in a kid's hand, you better tell... You better say I'm violating the Witchcraft Act. You got me? And they're like, we're not trying to arrest you, ma'am. We're not police. We're eight-year-old boys in police costumes. I'm like, back off, officer. But kick you in the chest. All right, so...
Two counts of contravening the Witchcraft Act, two counts of obtaining money by false pretenses, and three of public mischief. And that's a common law offense, but I love public mischief.
You get charged with that a lot.
All the time, dude.
Mostly by yourself.
Yes.
Yes.
I just stopped myself in the street.
Elizabeth. Damn it, Elizabeth.
I cuffed myself behind my back and they tripped me. Like, oh, you hit your head getting into the car again. It's just a whole thing.
You start doing voices.
I'm Peggy. All right. So according to National Geographic, the magistrates decided that the quote, unusually grave character of the case meant that They're not going to hear it in Portsmouth. They took it to the old Bailey in London.
Oh.
Yeah.
Homers and Brown, they get charged with her. So the raid itself, interestingly enough, left the prosecution with a problem because they didn't have physical evidence. No cheesecloth.
Yeah, nothing coughed up.
Well, no, they just didn't do a clear search after the cops were called and the ectoplasm sheet was never found.
Yeah. When they had the fight over the thing, nobody actually logged it.
Yeah, and so I don't know what she did with it. They only had witness statements and testimony. So they were going to go after her for fraud, but they also wanted to punish her for that HMS Barham stunt.
Right.
So the trial opens up March 23, 1944. Like, Old Bailey is bomb damaged, and they're having it in there. Crowds packed the public gallery. And the prosecution told the court that it wasn't interested in beliefs about witchcraft, but, quote, ordinary common fraud and its paraphernalia. So, like, the darkened room, the red light, the two voices, the traditional ghost, the prompting from the host, the cheesecloth.
Wow.
So the defense, they take a different view of the job. The Scotsman newspaper said the defense called 44 witnesses and the Spiritualist National Union bankrolled the whole thing.
I bet they got witnesses on tap.
They wanted to show that Helen was genuine. And you'd think that this would be like a totally sensational trial. But the jury was, quote, bored rigid.
Why?
Because... I don't know.
Like all these, the people from the public are like, this is going to be good. They pile in there. The jury's like, boring.
So are the witnesses trying to normalize everything? So they're intentionally making it boring?
I think that they were going into such minute detail about every little thing that they're like, I thought there were going to be.
Ghosts, man.
Puke something up, lady.
I want ectoplasm.
I want like... We want ectoplasm.
Astral plane fights. So.
At one point, the defense lawyer offered a test sitting in court so the jury could see for themselves. And at first, the judge was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're not going to trouble the jury with matters of that sort. But then the defense is like, no, she has a right to show her skills. And the jury is like, no, we're good.
We don't need to see it.
Yeah, they didn't want to see it. So Helen didn't get to show off her incredible powers. They were like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The trial goes on for a week. The jury, according to the Portsmouth News, took half an hour to come to a decision.
That's never good.
Yeah.
They were asked to consider the first count only, conspiracy to contravene the Witchcraft Act. And they found all four defendants guilty. And then the judge discharged them from giving the verdicts on the remaining counts because they were like alternate offenses.
Okay.
The verdict came. Helen cries out. The Times reported her words as, quote, I've done nothing. Is there a God? No, but there's Peggy. So Helen got nine months. Her agent, Brown, got four. The Homers just were like sent on their way.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
The charge is dismissed?
When passing the sentence, the judge said, according to the Scotsman, that people were seeking solace in spiritualism and they were poor and the law was trying to protect them against themselves. Because you're poor, you're too dumb to know better. And we're going to try and protect you. But that's not who was up in there.
That's a patronizing attitude. Yeah, completely.
It became like a lot of this became like a class thing.
Okay, I was wondering.
Yeah. So Helen did her time in Holloway Prison in London. She got out September 22nd, 1944. She was inside when the alleyways landed in Normandy, June 6th, 44.
A lot of spirits flying around that day.
They let her out. That's how she got out. They came over and opened it up. She's like, we need you.
Communicate for us.
So she was like, you know what? She gets out. She looks up at the sky. I promise to stop. I'm not going to do this anymore. Okay. I'm never going to hold another sitting. But pretty soon the spirit world reached out to her and was like, come back.
Do it.
Peggy misses you.
Give us voice.
So she went back to holding sittings, of course.
She's got to pay rent.
The end came in November of 1956. Police raided a sitting in Nottingham and laid hands on her while she was in a trance. And that's a big no-no for spiritualists.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
The thin line between this world and the next is breached if you do that.
Okay.
And it can, according to these folks, injure the psychic if this happens.
Oh, I thought it would be like you basically puncture the veil and they can now move through your body.
Oh, that would be amazing.
They're like, no, you're hurting the psychic.
No, like they didn't arrest her, but a doctor came and reportedly found two second degree burns on her stomach where they touched her.
Was this a real doctor?
No, of course not. Probably Henry in the costume.
Dr.
Bombay. It was Peggy, baby Peggy. So her backers attributed the burns to the ectoplasm snapping back into her body. I hate when that happens.
Of course.
When you get ectoburns. Yeah, I got mad ectoburns.
Because someone touches you while you're in the middle of it.
I'm going to need some Pepto-Bismol.
So five weeks later, on December 6, 1956, she died at her home in Edinburgh, age 59.
Did she have any premonitions?
No, she did not see. If she did, she kept them to herself. Her medical records did show a really long history of poor health. So she's obese, inactive, heart trouble, diabetic, kidney damage, high blood pressure. She may have still been eating tax. I don't know. And she had to have esophageal.
Oh, my God. I cannot imagine her esophagus.
Yeah. Oh, God.
The damage and the stress.
And her teeth.
Oh, yeah.
She's basically a bulimic. The stomach acid she's coughing up.
And that's a lot of the heart issues, too. So the trial almost certainly helped kill the witchcraft act. It took seven years, though. So the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951.
They got a new one for her?
Yeah, June 22nd, 1951. That got royal assent. And it was introduced as a private member's bill by Walter Monslow, who was a labor MP, after campaigning led by another labor MP, Thomas Brooks, who was a spiritualist.
So he didn't want.
To be the one to introduce it, so he had his buddy do it.
They should have called it the Hellish Nell Act. They should have.
Well, it made it an offense to claim to be a medium or a psychic with the intent to deceive and profit. It did not apply to claims made solely for entertainment. And we have that here where you see like this is for entertainment purposes only. So prosecutions for it needed the involvement of the director of public prosecutions.
And it was basically like a statute that was friendly to the trade. And the act itself was repealed in 2008 by consumer protection regulations implemented in an EU directive. Under unfair commercial practices.
Okay.
So they just generalized it.
Yeah. Helen's conviction was never quashed. Her family and supporters have campaigned for years.
Why?
To no avail. They want her record wiped.
She's been besmirched?
Yes. Her granddaughter, Mary Martin, remembers being taunted at school in 1944 as, quote, witch spawned.
Yeah. They do carry that stuff. I can get it. Yeah.
She relaunched the push for Helen's record to be wiped in 2006.
Isn't Mary Martin the actress who played Peter Pan?
I think there are a lot of women named Mary Martin.
I guess there are, but you brought it up and I was like, it's probably not the same, but is that the right name?
Her granddaughter is Peter Pan.
We're talking spiritualism here.
So there's this guy, Lord Preston Grange. He backed the push to wipe the record. He's the Baron of Prestonpans.
Of course.
Why not?
Prest-in-pans.
Prestonpans. I know I'm saying that incorrectly.
I know I'm saying it incorrectly.
2004 old Lord Preston Grange. He pardoned 81 people executed for witchcraft in earlier centuries. But I guess he couldn't wipe her record.
Retroactively, they're dead and gone? Is this for like? For the other side? Like you don't have like a mark on your supernatural record?
I don't know the point of this.
Anyway. So you're telling me, they tell me like this goes on your permanent record. We're talking really permanent record.
Yeah, exactly. The afterlife record. Petitions were made to the Scottish Parliament for a posthumous pardon in 2001, 2008, 2012.
All rejected.
Oh. In 2016, a campaigner for the grandkids, this guy Graham Hewitt, he argued that the Turing Law, which pardoned men convicted under now repealed anti-gay laws, set a precedent. How so? And everyone's like, no. Yeah, that makes no sense.
No.
And so they keep pushing for it. The best twist in the afterlife of the case came from a library. Malcolm Gaskell, searching the Society for Psychical Research Holdings at Cambridge University Library, found a sample of Helen's ectoplasm. And it turned out to be a length of artificial silk. And you can go and see it at the Ashmolean.
Like early nylon?
Yeah.
Okay.
There's a museum at Oxford that has it. You can go look at it. There's a photo of it in the Cambridge Library website. In 2016, the library also displayed items in the case, you know, as like a part of their anniversary celebration. Like, hooray.
Look what we have. Ectoplasm. Who doesn't love fake ectoplasm?
Someone made a bronze bust of Helen, offered it to her hometown. And there was such a controversy among the townspeople who were like super religious that they sent it off to a gallery instead. It's just like.
Melted down and turned into a bust of Ronaldo.
It's... That's otherworldly. So again, put it in Sterling. We don't want it here. There are books about her. Hellish No, Last of Britain's Witches. Nina Chandler's The Strange Case of Hellish No. There's a BBC Radio 4 play, The Last Witch Trial. And then a heavy metal band, Seventh Son, wrote her a song in 2009. So there you.
Go.
Lastly, The Skull Circle, which is a group of mediums in the 1990s, claimed that a brand new copy of the April 1st, 1944 Daily Mail newspaper reporting her conviction materialized at one of their sittings.
A brand new edition. Mm-hmm. Dismaterialized.
Yeah.
And so much so that they could touch it or like visually they all saw it.
I don't know if someone barfed it up or not, but there it was. Yarking it. So, Zarin, what's your ridiculous takeaway?
Oh, man. Well, one, I have to ask you, do you think when she was a wee barren hellish, young hellish Nell, do you think that her, you said that her premonitions were coming true. Do you think that she had the gift?
I could see where she would like make these statements. And if they didn't come true, people ignore it. But then if one or two turn out to happen, you're grand's going to die. Well, you know, she's old and sick. Oh my God, Helen got it right. So that's kind of what I think happened there.
Okay. Interesting. Now, as far as my ridiculous takeaway is, I do not. I mean, like, I understand, like, oh, I'm going to be a charlatan. I'm like, cool. Rock on. Like, I'm going to put on a show. Excellent. I got a curtain. My husband's down. He's haunted, too. Perfect. This sounds like a winning routine. And they're like, my whole thing is going to be I cough up easily disproven materials.
I'm like, what? why would you go through all that effort to cough up ectoplasm that is cheesecloth? Like if you could put on a show, like maybe use some lights, some smoke, some mirrors, the classic gambits, but no, they're like, nope, cheesecloth, gorgonzola. We got it covered. I'm like, And then she keeps being blown. She's like, sticking with it. Like, why? Do you like this? Is this about you? So what's your ridiculous takeaway, Elizabeth?
It kept reminding me of, you have to like the Fox Mulder I want to believe. Yeah. Like, you go into these things, if you want to believe it, sure. But if you're a skeptic, it's not for you. Oh, no, yeah. It reminded me very much of when my friend Sarah and I went to the Edinburgh, like, underground dungeon tour thing.
Of course you did. And it was so bad. You, like, get in a cart and they're, like, motorized cart. And you're supposed to be like, oh, I'm in this, like, little river in a boat. Like, the whole thing. But it's underground and dark and there's curtains. And so you're pretending.
Are there like chains and dungeon iron bars?
And like, oh, we're going to take you down into like the bowels of the city and show you all these things. And I like lit a lighter so you could see like where we were and we couldn't stop laughing. And then we get into this room and there's this lady who's in character with all the people on the tour as like. Typhoid Mary or something. I don't know what she was, but.
She's, like.
She looked like Courtney Love. Like, she was all, like.
Oh, really?
In, like, the kinder horror days where she's, like, bleached. And she's got, like, this streaked makeup and she's, like, supposed to be scary. And that made us laugh. And then she... kicked like a piece of fabric and um sarah said it was kurt cobain's flannel and i lost it and then we wanted to like see what was whether because it was so dark you know and you could just barely make this out and people were enjoying it and we're jerks so i took some flash photography and the pictures are amazing. But she got so mad.
She kicked us out like mid tour.
It was like out.
Yeah.
Disneyland style. They're pulling you out the side.
Yeah. We ruined it. And it was, so that's how I feel like anytime I like this dark room and, and they're trying to get you in the mood.
You got to do a lot of the work on your own as a believer. They're just going to kind of push you in that direction.
I don't want to believe.
No, you don't want to do that work.
Uh but i do you know what i do want what dave talk back oh.
Yeah hi zarin.
And elizabeth my name is armis and i was the victim of a ridiculous crime recently my car was broken.
Into and Wait, that's amazing. Wow, I applaud your spirit. I'm so sorry about the sweater. Yeah, for real.
Because I have, like, sentimental attachments to pieces of clothing. Especially if it's from someone else, like, It means a lot if they've passed on. But, like, I do love that you got yours back and now you have a new shirt.
Yeah.
And what is it with, like— And you kind of transfer the memory because now it's, like, the shirt for your dad's sweater. So it's still attached to your dad.
Yeah, but people break into cars and leave stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Like, it's crazy.
Yeah.
And then also, yeah, does this just take a sweater?
And also what they don't take— I' ve had a car broke into in L.A., And I was upset because I had to assume that the person might have needed all of the clothing I had in my car because I had a lot of clothing in my car. They're like, no, not this, not this. I felt judged. Like, what, my clothing's not good enough to steal? You don't like this jacket, this sweater?
Your dad had a nice sweater. He had good taste. And I'm sure you do, too. Good point. It's a compliment. I'm sorry to hear that. That's it for today. You can find us online at RidiculousCrime.com. We're also at Ridiculous Crime on both Blue Sky and Instagram. You can email RidiculousCrime at gmail.com. Leave us a talk back on the iHeart app. Please reach out. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by Elizabeth Dutton and Zarin Burnett. Produced and edited by artisan craft ectoplasm brewer Dave Kustin. Our ridiculous assistant is Terry, terrible Terry, Maldonado Fong. Research is by flea market cheesecloth vendor Marissa Brown. The theme song is by two sailors in port looking to connect with dead relatives while their
shipmates live it up with live nude girls, Thomas Lee and Travis Dutton. Post wardrobe is provided by Botany 500. Producer Dave Kustin's wardrobe by Mr. Guy of Beverly Hills. Guest hair and makeup by Sparkle Shot and Mr. Andre. Executive producers are MI5 Witchcraft Division Chiefs Ben Bolin and Noel Brown.
Crime.
Say it one more time. Ridiculous crime.
Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
