SYMHC Classics: Helen Duncan

0:02 Happy Saturday and Happy Halloween, my favorite day of the year. Today's classic is on Helen Duncan, who has been nicknamed Scotland's Last Witch. In this episode, we mention a forthcoming episode related to Harry Houdini. If you're curious, that was our episode on Rose Mackenberg that came out on October 17th, 2022.

0:25 We also mention a move to repeal the UK's Vagrancy Act. That act was repealed on June 29th, 2026. This episode originally came out on October 10th, 2022. Enjoy! Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracey V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. Today we are going to talk about Helen Duncan, who is sometimes described as Scotland's last witch or as the last person imprisoned for witchcraft in Britain.

1:10 Sometimes people are like a little more precise than that and call her the last person to be tried under the UK's 1735 Witchcraft Act. None of that is quite correct though. All of them are wrong in slightly different ways. We, of course, will be talking about that. One of the many wild things about this story, though, is that it really did involve the Witchcraft Act of 1735. But it happened in 1944. Who doesn't love a little archaic law being applied to modern times? So, Helen Duncan was born, Victoria Helen McFarlane, on November 25th, 1897, in Colander, Scotland, which is roughly 35 miles, that's about 56 kilometers, north of Glasgow. She was the fourth of eight children born to Archibald MacFarlane and Isabel Rattray. Archibald worked as a slater,

2:09 that is, a person who slates roofs. Helen had a flair for the supernatural and the dramatic from a very early age. She would make these portentous statements about other people's impending doom. She said that she could see and talk to spirits. She was also headstrong. People didn't think of her as particularly feminine. All of this together earned her the nickname Hellish Nell while she was still a child.

2:37 Sources are very contradictory about whether this was sort of a lightly teasing and affectionate nickname or if it was a real condemnation of her behavior. In some accounts, there were mediums on both sides of the family, and Helen's parents didn't try to discourage her as long as she wasn't making predictions or talking about spirits around people who might disapprove. But in other accounts, this behavior went against the family's religious beliefs, and Helen's parents told her she was going to be burned at the stake if she kept it up. Helen left school when she was a teenager.

3:13 She got a job serving meals at a hotel. She got pregnant in 1914 when she was about 16, and at that point, her parents did kick her out. Helen moved to the coastal city of Dundee, where she gave birth to a daughter named Isabella in 1915. In Dundee, Helen worked at a mill and as an auxiliary nurse at the Dundee Royal Infirmary, and it was there that she met Henry Edward Duncan. He was the brother of one of her co-workers, and he had been discharged from the army after developing rheumatic fever. Helen said the first time they met, it had been in her dreams. They got married on May 27, 1916, and moved to Edinburgh.

3:56 Including Isabella, they had six children who survived to adulthood. Helen and Henry were both chronically ill, and the family often really struggled financially. Henry tried to start his own business as a cabinetmaker, which Helen helped him with. She also took a job at a bleach factory to try to help make ends meet. But then Henry had a heart attack, which he survived, but afterward he wasn't able to work anymore. Their already tight budget got even tighter, and Helen started conducting seances in the evenings to try to earn a little more money. Henry did what he could to encourage her and to manage her career. When we've talked about the spiritualist movement on the show before, we have usually been talking about things that happened before.

4:43 a little bit earlier than this, in the 19th or very early 20th century. Previous episodes have covered 19th century figures like the Sisters Fox and Madame Blavatsky, and spiritualism has come up in episodes about other people who lived during the same time, including mother Rebecca Cox Jackson and Sojourner Truth. But spiritualism didn't end with the Victorian era.

5:07 It was still going strong after the devastation of World War I, and the 1918 flu pandemic, as people tried to reconnect with loved ones who had died. So when Duncan started offering her services as a medium in the 1920s, she had plenty of potential customers. In 1926, the Duncan family moved from Edinburgh back to Dundee, and Helen started to really focus on her work as a medium. She specifically became a materialization medium. That's somebody whose spirit channeling process also included physical manifestations. In this case, producing ectoplasm from her body. If this ectoplasm also enabled a medium to perform some kind of telekinesis, it was described as teleplasm, and that comes up in accounts of Helen also. Duncan's

6:00 seances evolved over time, but they basically went like this. One corner of the room would be separated off from the rest of the space with hanging curtains, and this served as the medium's cabinet. It could also be an actual cabinet or a closet or an alcove, just some space that could be separated by a curtain. She would pass around a set of clothing for the people attending the seance, or the sitters, to inspect. If the sitters were satisfied that the clothes were not concealing anything or suspicious in some way, she would take some of the women into another room where they could watch as she changed into that set of clothes. These women could also inspect Duncan's hair and body to make sure that she

6:43 wasn't hiding something. Once all of that was done, Duncan would take a seat in the cabinet. After the curtains were closed in front of her and the room was lit with a dim red light, she would go into a trance, and when the curtain opened again, Spirit guides would manifest hovering close to her. She had two primary guides.

7:04 They were Albert and Peggy, and they would carry messages from the other side for various sitters in the room. Other spirits also manifested from time to time as well. And sometimes Duncan would manifest large amounts of white, wispy ectoplasm. Although Duncan had devoted supporters from the very beginning... It did not take long for people to point out that these manifestations were fake. They could look quite convincing under that dim red light, especially to spiritualists who already believed in things like spirit manifestation. But in 1928, photographer Harvey Metcalf took flash photos during a seance that Duncan conducted in her home, apparently with her permission. And what he captured looked almost laughably bad. Yeah, they did not hold

7:54 up under a camera flash. Like in one of the photos, Duncan is in a chair, blindfolded, and she has a length of what looks like rolled gauze leading from her nose to a figure that's hovering over her shoulder. This figure has very squared off shoulders, like maybe it's really fabric draped over a coat hanger, and its face looks a lot like the head of a Punch and Judy puppet made of paper mache. In another, the figure is similarly positioned with this gauzy rope leading out from under Duncan's blindfold to drape around a boxy white form that has a very doll-like head. Duncan's critics also included other spiritualists.

8:38 The London Spiritualist Alliance carried out an investigation that spanned from October of 1930 to June of 1931. Duncan participated in this investigation, traveling to London and being paid a flat fee for the roughly 50 seances that she conducted over those months. Investigators examined everything about them, her clothes, the ectoplasm, the information that she conveyed. They took x-rays and at one point had her swallow methylene blue to try to figure out if she was swallowing and regurgitating the substance that she said was ectoplasm. This did not work because she didn't produce any ectoplasm after swallowing the dye.

9:21 After the first few seances that Duncan conducted as part of this investigation, the London Spiritualist Alliance seems to have thought that she might actually be genuine, but the organization ultimately concluded that she was a fraud. They did not find definitive proof of where the ectoplasm came from, but they thought most likely the scenario was that she was swallowing it before the seance and then regurgitating it. Different pieces of ectoplasm that they examined seemed to have been made from different recipes, but they incorporated things like cheesecloth, egg white, and toilet paper. I read this prior to a recording, but somehow hearing that said aloud makes me want to regurgitate things. It's just like the thought of

10:07 swallowing that and then bringing it back up is gross. I'm not a fan. No. Psychic researcher Harry Price conducted his own investigation through his National Laboratory of Psychical Research in May of 1931, paying Duncan 50 pounds for a series of seances. He was skeptical from the start, saying that he had heard of Duncan through the Spiritualist Press, but, quote, as I do not believe one-tenth of what I read in the Spiritualist Press, I was not particularly thrilled. Price also concluded that Duncan was a fraud, with her teleplasm being made up of egg white mixed with various other ingredients.

10:47 He also took photos of Duncan during a seance, one of which showed her draped in what appeared to be cheesecloth. Price also described an effort to x-ray Duncan's stomach during a seance. Cheesecloth would not appear on an x-ray, but if there was a safety pin or some other solid object used, To keep all that together, that might show up.

11:11 But when it was time to do the x-rays, Duncan, purportedly in a trance, became agitated and physically aggressive and refused to cooperate. Don't swallow safety pins. Yeah, don't do that for sure. Don't do it. Duncan consented to all of these investigations and was paid for her work as a medium during them. Although her husband made the arrangements for Price's investigation... So it's not totally clear how much agency she had in that instance. But beyond that, these tests and examinations were degrading and invasive. Price's account repeatedly describes him and other men investigating, quote, every orifice of her body, and his descriptions of her body and her weight are really dehumanizing. Although the results of these investigations

11:57 were reported in newspapers, Duncan's most ardent supporters were not deterred. But not too long after this, she ran into bigger problems than just negative newspaper coverage, and we will get into that after a sponsor break. In spite of multiple investigations concluding that she was a fake, Helen Duncan still had a lot of support into the 1940s. and she really was not unique in that regard. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of people and organizations were investigating mediums, and a lot of those investigations concluded that nothing supernatural was going on. Sometimes there was some very clear evidence of fakery, like the sounds of knocking ghosts being made by the medium hitting the underside of

12:55 the table with a stick, or in the case of Helen Duncan, Photographs of these very puppet-like constructions and ectoplasm that was obviously made of cheesecloth and toilet paper. But this really did not dissuade a lot of spiritualists. They naturally distrusted people and organizations who were devoting themselves to debunking mediums. Even if a medium confessed that they'd been faking their work, people found explanations that let them keep believing.

13:24 Like the confession had been coerced and it wasn't true. Or the person was a real medium but had faked a seance that one time because they wanted so badly to help a sitter reconnect with a loved one on the other side. In a high-profile example, Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle bonded over their shared interest in spiritualism.

13:46 But when Houdini became convinced that it was not real and started doing demonstrations of phony seance techniques on stage, Doyle continued to insist that he really was psychic, calling him, quote, the greatest physical medium of modern times. Houdini's going to appear again this October. There has been quite a bit of psychological research into this during recent decades to understand why many people double down on incorrect beliefs, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Beyond that, the field of photography had been evolving for more than a century by the time Harvey Metcalf took those photos of Helen Duncan. But mass-marketed cameras had only been around for about 30 years. People didn't necessarily trust photographs. And as

14:36 we talked about in our previous episode on William Mumler's spirit photography, people had already taken photos that were then investigated for being deceptive. So, Even though there were these photos of Duncan's seances, which are laughable to a modern viewer, that didn't necessarily change people's minds. Duncan's first fraud conviction also did not necessarily change people's minds. This happened after a seance she conducted in Edinburgh in 1933. A sitter named SN Maul grabbed the manifestation of Peggy the Spirit Guide and and found that she was made from a knitted undervest. Maul reported this to the police, and Duncan was arrested, tried, convicted of fraud, and ordered to pay a fine of £ 10 or serve a month in prison.

15:29 After this, Duncan kept doing seances, and despite that fraud conviction, she became increasingly popular. She traveled all over Great Britain, particularly favoring coastal towns. And as World War II began, more and more people sought her help to try to speak to their loved ones who had been killed. In late May of 1941, Brigadier Roy C. Firebrace attended one of Duncan's seances. Firebrace was an astrologer. After the war, he would go on to help found the Astrological Association of Great Britain. During this seance, one of Duncan's spirit guides said that a Royal Navy ship had just been sunk.

16:11 Firebrace didn't know of any such thing happening, and when he checked with other people in the Royal Navy after the seance, they hadn't either. But the next day, he learned that the battlecruiser HMS Hood had exploded after being struck by the German battleship Bismarck at the Battle of Denmark Strait, killing all but three of its crew of more than 1,400. Something similar happened at another seance in Portsmouth about six months later. Duncan relayed a message from a sailor named Sid, whose mother was one of the sitters.

16:44 Sid had been aboard the HMS Barham, a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship, and Sid said the ship had been sunk. His mother, of course, was distraught, and she contacted the Admiralty about it. Once again, the Barham really had been sunk. On November 25, 1941, the ship had been struck by torpedoes from a German U-boat off the coast of Egypt. The ship had been hit by three of the four torpedoes fired at it, and it had exploded and sunk in under five minutes.

17:18 More than 850 of the 1,350 sailors aboard had been killed. The Admiralty had really tried to keep this quiet. They weren't sure if the German high command knew about the sinking, and if they didn't, Britain surely did not want them to find out. British authorities were also deeply concerned about the effect that the news of a sunken battleship and so much loss of life would have had on morale, both for the military and for the public. Sources contradict on whether the sailors next of kin were notified promptly or whether that didn't happen for several weeks. Either way, once the families heard, they were told to keep it a secret. One source even claims that the Royal Navy sent fake holiday messages on the deceased sailors' behalf before

18:08 informing anybody that they had actually been killed. I could not find verification of that, but it did come up in one of the sources that I used for this episode. Regardless, though, Britain did not publicly announce that the ship had been sunk until January 27th, 1942. more than two months after it happened, after German media had reported that it had happened, and also months after it had come up in this seance.

18:36 Although believers saw this as evidence that Helen Duncan really was communicating with people from beyond, others saw it as evidence that there was an information leak happening somewhere in the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy Command Headquarters is in Portsmouth, and Portsmouth was the Barham's home port. And even with efforts to keep things quiet, there were a lot of people who knew that the Barham had been sunk, both within the Royal Navy and outside of it. In addition to all the sailors aboard all the other ships in the convoy who witnessed that sinking, and everyone in the command structure who would have heard about it, and everyone who was part of the decision to keep it quiet, and everyone who helped fake holiday messages home if that

19:21 really happened, the ship's explosion and sinking... were captured on film by a newsreel reporter from British Pathé. So it's likely that thousands of people actually knew about this sinking. And that's a lot of people to keep a secret. Yeah, a lot of people and a lot of them concentrated in Portsmouth, where Helen Duncan was. There are also some discrepancies about exactly what it was that Duncan said during this seance in some accounts, she volunteered the name of the HMS Barham, and in others, it came from more of a cold read, asking questions of this sailor's mother until she mentioned the ship's name. It's widely concluded that these two seances, especially the second one, motivated British authorities

20:08 to try to keep Helen Duncan quiet during the planning of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, and that is why she was tried under the Witchcraft Act. Planning for D-Day started in 1943, and it was absolutely critical that it be kept secret. Duncan had become enormously popular, and if she revealed some secret information in a seance, it was going to be a serious problem. We'll talk more about that after another quick sponsor break. In January of 1944, Helen Duncan conducted a series of seances at the Master Temple Psychic Center in Portsmouth, England. The Master Temple Psychic Center was a space above Homer's Drugstore, and it was registered as a church. Homer's Drugstore was run by Ernest Homer and Elizabeth Jones, They weren't technically married, but they

21:08 lived and worked together as a couple, and most people just called them Mr. and Mrs. Homer. They were spiritualists. They donated any money they earned from spiritualist events that they hosted above their shop to various charities and spiritualist causes. They paid Helen Duncan 104 pounds for a week of seances, which she conducted with the help of her assistant, Frances Browne.

21:31 On January 14th, 1944, two officers from the Royal Navy attended one of these seances, a Lieutenant Worth and a Surgeon Lieutenant Fowler. Duncan claimed to manifest one of the men's mother and sister, but both of those people were actually alive. It is possible that she had meant this message for someone else in the room. The sitters had assigned seats, but there had been some shuffling. I will just take a moment to note that we are aware that in Britain people say that left in it, but we are not British. On the 19th, Worth went back for another seance, and this time he was accompanied by a War Reserve police officer. During this seance, one of these men switched on the main light and opened up

22:22 the curtain to the medium's cabinet. They found Duncan standing there barefoot. She had this piece of white material. Police were outside waiting for a signal, and when Worth blew a whistle to summon them, they came barging in. They wanted to get that material as evidence that it wasn't really ectoplasm, but it disappeared. Generally believed that it got, like, passed from hand to hand among the sitters, and somebody secreted it away. Her account was that it got absorbed back into her body. There are also reports that there was a hat band that had purportedly been manifested from one of the sailors aboard the Barham, but it was printed with HMS Barham when it should have just said HMS and not the name of the ship, and that

23:08 proved that it was fake. After this police raid, Helen Duncan, Frances Brown, and Mr. and Mrs. Homer were all arrested. This was apparently big enough news that the BBC interrupted a report on a Russian advance on the Eastern Front to talk about it. At first, all four of them were charged under the Vagrancy Act of 1824, or an act for the punishment of idle and disorderly persons and rogues and vagabonds in that part of Great Britain called England.

23:42 At this point, this was the act most often used to prosecute people who were conducting seances. Section 4 of it read in part, quote, every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes or using any subtle craft, means, or device by palmistry or otherwise to deceive and impose on any of his majesty's subjects shall be deemed a rogue and a vagabond. within the true intent and meaning of this act. So Duncan Brown and the Homers were by far not the only people to be charged under this law in the 1940s and other times too. Because of the ongoing war, there were a lot of people who were prosecuted, charged with basically taking advantage of grieving families to give them fake mediumship under this act. Parts of

24:38 the Vagrancy Act are still on the books, and in a lot of ways, it is a law that criminalizes poverty and homelessness. But most infractions of it were considered to be relatively minor. The maximum sentence for offenses related to fortune-telling was three months in prison, and most people just paid a fine. In spite of that, Duncan was jailed for four days until being released on bail. As we said before, it's generally understood that the point of all this was to try to make sure that Duncan would not be able to blab some kind of secret intelligence related to the D-Day invasion. That would require more than a fine and more than three months in jail.

25:21 And that is where the Witchcraft Act of 1735 comes in. This was... an act to repeal the statute made in the first year of the reign of King James I, entitled An Act Against Conjuration, Witchcraft, and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits, except so much thereof as repeals an act of the fifth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth against conjurations, enchantments, and witchcrafts, and to repeal an act passed in the Parliament of Scotland in the Ninth Parliament of Queen Mary entitled Anentus Witchcrafts, and for punishing such persons as pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration. Under this witchcraft act, a person could be sentenced to a fine and imprisonment

26:14 for up to a year, along with having to stand in the pillory for an hour every quarter, although at this point the pillory had been abolished in England for more than a century. To be extremely clear, if someone was tried for violating the Witchcraft Act of 1735, they were not being tried for witchcraft. It was not possible to try someone for witchcraft under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

26:41 In fact, the act outlawed trying people for witchcraft. Quote, no prosecution suit or proceeding shall be commenced or carried on against any person or persons for witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration, or for charging another with any such offense in any court whatsoever in Great Britain. Instead, this act targeted people who, quote, pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration, or to undertake to tell fortunes, or pretend from his or her skill or knowledge in any occult or crafty science, to discover where or in what manner any goods or chattels supposed to have been stolen or lost may be found. In other words, this was built around the idea that witchcraft

27:34 was not real and that the people who claimed to be witches or sorcerers or enchanters or conjurers or fortune tellers were defrauding people. This act was a response to the horrifying witch trials that had taken place in the UK and elsewhere, especially during the 17th and early 18th centuries, at which point witchcraft itself was illegal under those laws that the Witchcraft Act repealed. We have talked about those earlier laws and the witch hunts connected to them in previous episodes of the show, including our episode on Matthew Hopkins, who billed himself as the Witchfinder General, which we ran as a recent Saturday classic. So the Witchcraft Act of 1735 repealed the Kingdom of Great Britain's laws that framed

28:20 witchcraft as real and replaced them with one that framed witchcraft as pretend. Duncan Brown and the Homers were charged with seven crimes. including infractions of the Witchcraft Act. Those charges were connected to Duncan purporting, quote, to exercise or use a kind of conjuration that through the agency of Helen Duncan, spirits of deceased persons should appear to be present in such a place as Helen Duncan was then in, and that the said spirits were communicating with living persons then present. There were also charges under the Larceny Act because Duncan had taken money, quote, by falsely pretending that she was in a position to bring about the appearances of the spirits of deceased persons. And they were all

29:09 charged with, quote, affecting a public mischief. All these charges were connected to the seances that had taken place on January 14th and 19th, which we've already talked about, as well as one she conducted on the 17th, that was attended by a dock worker known as Mr. Burrell, and he was a medium himself, but did not find Duncan's manifestations to be convincing at all. This trial began on March 23, 1944, in Court 4 of the Central Criminal Court. Court, a.k.a.

29:40 the Old Bailey, before Recorder of London Sir Gerald Dodson. That building had been damaged in the Blitz. The public gallery was closed, but people thronged the entire area and packed into the accessible areas of the building to try to get a look. The The trial and its aftermath were widely reported all over the UK and in the United States. All four defendants pleaded not guilty, and at the start of the trial, Prosecutor John Maude stressed that they were not being tried as witches. Quote, I want to make it abundantly clear at the very commencement of this prosecution that this is in no way connected with witchcraft.

30:21 It is in no way aimed at the honest beliefs, whatever they may be, of any man or woman. What it is aimed at is something quite different. It is aimed at just ordinary common fraud. Meanwhile, the defense was led by Barrister C.E. Loseby, who is a spiritualist and whose services were arranged by the Spiritualists National Union. His defense was built around calling nearly 50 witnesses to attest to Duncan's seances being the real thing. This involved a very long chain of people recounting what they had seen at seances going all the way back to the early 1930s and all of the various things that they said she'd manifested or had told them. While on the stand, Portsmouth's Chief Constable Arthur West referenced the Barham sinking, saying, quote,

31:13 On one occasion in 1941, she was reported as having transgressed the security laws, again in a naval connection, when she foretold the loss of one of His Majesty's ships long before the fact was made public. I can only describe this woman as an unmitigated humbug who can only be regarded as a pest to a certain section of society.

31:37 The trial went on for seven days, and at the end of it, the recorder instructed the jury to simplify the issue and deliberate only on the charges related to the Witchcraft Act to ignore the others. After deliberating for less than half an hour, the jury found all four defendants guilty. You could argue that what her defense really did was establish that she had been doing this illegal thing for more than a decade. with a whole lot of witness testimony. Duncan was sentenced to nine months in prison.

32:14 Her assistant, Frances Brown, was sentenced to four months in prison. Brown had shown Lieutenant Worth some spirit photos in support of Duncan's claim to be a medium, so she was considered to have committed a fraud of her own. The Homers were bound over. In other words, they were released under the condition that they had to maintain good behavior and not re-offend. Don't hire any more mediums to come and hang out at your place. If this really was all an intentional effort to keep Duncan quiet through the Normandy invasion, Prime Minister Winston Churchill does not seem to have been aware of it. On April 3rd, 1944, apparently after reading news coverage of the trial, he sent a memo to the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, which read, quote,

33:02 let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act 1735 was used in a modern court of justice. What was the cost of this trial to the state, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London for a fortnight, and the recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery to the detriment of necessary work in the courts? The defendant's attorneys filed an appeal.

33:29 but in part because it took so incredibly long to transcribe the testimony of all those many defense witnesses that did not happen for months. By the time the appeal was heard, Frances Brown had already completed her sentence with time off for good behavior. The convictions were upheld, though Duncan was returned to Holloway Prison. The prison was damaged in a bombing in the summer of 1944 while Duncan was still incarcerated there. She reportedly conducted seances from her cell, and she was released on September 22, 1944, having served about six months. She was not, as it is widely reported, the last person tried for violating the Witchcraft Act. That seems to be Jane Rebecca York of Forest Gate in

34:16 East Ham, who was tried in late 1944, also in the Old Bailey, in the same court and with the same prosecutor as Duncan had been. Apparently, what got York in bad enough trouble to face charges under the Witchcraft Act instead of the Vagrancy Act included impersonating Queen Victoria. Although she was convicted, York was not jailed because of her age. She was in her 70s. She paid a fine of £ 5. Duncan's conviction and jail sentence have been credited with sparking a movement to repeal the Witchcraft Act, in part because it could be read as outlawing spiritualism across the board. In the words of D. Abdi Collins, writing in the Modern Law Review in July of 1945, quote, which was framed with entirely different ideas, the practice of

35:11 mediumship has, in effect, been made illegal. And here and there, police consider it their duty to try to put a stop to it. The Witchcraft Acts and the relevant parts of the Vagrancy Act were repealed under the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951, or an act to repeal the Witchcraft Act 1735 and to make in substitution for certain provisions of Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act, 1824, express provision for the punishment of persons who fraudulently purport to act as spiritualistic mediums or to exercise powers of telepathy, clairvoyance, or other similar powers. Under this new law, a person was guilty of an offense if they, quote, a. with intent to deceive, purport to act as a spiritualistic medium or exercise any powers of telepathy, clairvoyance, or other similar powers,

36:07 or B, in purporting to act as a spiritualistic medium or to exercise such powers as Afras said, uses any fraudulent device. In other words, spiritualism, acting as a medium, they were only a crime if carried out with the intent to deceive, Later on, the law specified that a person could only be convicted of this offense if they had taken money or something else of value in exchange for doing this. So if you genuinely believed that you could talk to spirits, that was no longer a crime.

36:43 But if you faked people out about it and took their money, it was. Even after these changes in the law, Helen Duncan was arrested at least one other time in 1956, although this time she did not face charges. But some of her family pointed to this arrest as causing a rapid decline in her health. She died just a few months later on December 6, 1956, at the age of 59.

37:08 Her cause of death was diabetes and heart failure. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered at a cemetery in Colander. The Fraudulent Mediums Act was repealed under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations in 2008. But aside from the sections related to fortune-telling, many other provisions of the Vagrancy Act are still on the books. That act is currently under review. As we said earlier, parts of it essentially criminalized homelessness without doing anything to address the causes of homelessness. The UK government has expressed an intent to repeal this law, but only after analyzing how its repeal would affect things like law enforcement and what they should include in a different law to take its place.

37:56 Some of Duncan's descendants have also taken up an effort to get her posthumously pardoned. The Scottish Parliament rejected a petition to do so in 2008. Yeah, I'm not totally sure if that effort is still ongoing. There used to be a website about it. But that website is no longer there. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.

38:24 If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is historypodcast at iheartradio.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.