Criminal - Secrets and Séances

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

Helen Duncan was a famous medium who travelled around Britain in the 1940s performing séances. She claimed to speak to the dead, and even produce physical manifestations of their spirits. But when Helen Duncan seemed to know wartime secrets about the whereabouts of military ships, like the sunken HMS Barham, she caught the attention of MI5 and notable psychic investigator Harry Price. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Everybody would be seated, the lights would go down, usually just one red bulb would be glowing, and then they'd put on a gramophone record.

Helen Dunker would then come in in a black gown, and then people would just wait. And that's how the seance began. This is Malcolm Gaskell. He's talking about a woman named Helen Duncan and her seances. He's a professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Helen Duncan traveled around England in the 1930s and 40s, going from big cities to seaside towns, and people flocked to see her. She would begin each seance by going into a trance, and then she would summon the dead. People said they could actually see their dead

relatives in the room. A man named Vincent Woodcock claimed that he'd seen his dead wife 19 times at Helen Duncan seances, and that his wife was so real she even touched him. She removed his wedding ring and put it on the hand of another woman at the seance. He then went on to marry that other woman. Helen Duncan was said to have summoned spirits of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, sometimes more than 20 spirits in a single sitting. She could even bring back pets. One of the most famous was a parrot named Bronco. Sitters who went to the seances probably went for two reasons. Some people would go because they thought it was a bit of a lark and a bit of fun. Other people, bereaved people often, would be going because they wanted to see once again

the spirits of those that they'd loved and lost. This was the 1940s, and many of the people who came to see Helen Duncan had sons and husbands and brothers fighting in World War II. They wanted to hear anything about how the war was going. Because with censorship and news blackouts and restrictions on movement and news coming fairly intermittently from abroad where soldiers are fighting, there's just this great kind of vacuum of information, but also a very great desire to know what's going on, knowing when bombing raids are going,

knowing where men have moved, and so on. Helen Duncan often traveled to the seaside town of Portsmouth. It was a naval town, where it seemed every other family had someone on a warship. She held seances in a small room above a drugstore, and reportedly, one night a ghost-like figure in a sailor's uniform appeared. He wore a cap that said HMS Barham, the name of a British battleship. The ghost of the sailor hovered around a woman and said, sorry, sweetheart, my ship sank in the Mediterranean. I've crossed over to the other side. And Britain only has a handful of really big battleships, so the news which then

this sailor imparts that the Bahrim has been sunk is really a very big deal. The Bahrim was stationed off the coast of Egypt as part of the Mediterranean fleet, with more than a thousand men stationed on board. The next day, a woman from the seance called the Royal Navy to ask if it was true that the HMS Barham had gone down. And, incredibly, it had. The ship was hit by three torpedoes from a German submarine. More than 800 men died, but no one was supposed to know that. The British government had been keeping the ship's loss a secret,

partially because morale was already so low, and partially for strategic reasons. There were reports that the British government wanted so badly to keep the secret that they forged Christmas cards from the deceased sailors. It gets around, or it gets back to the Admiralty and to the security services that there is a medium who is talking about ships and that she should be watched. The British Intelligence Agency, MI5, began investigating her. It's funny to think British intelligence worried that a woman putting herself in a trance above a drugstore could compromise British safety.

On the other hand, the British War Office had also hired an astrologer to predict Hitler's next move. Still, no one's ever figured out how Helen Duncan knew that ship had gone down. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. She was born in Callender, Scotland in 1897. And growing up, she bragged that she never needed to study in school. The answers just popped into her head.

She knew so much that she was accused of cheating. A school inspector ordered a fellow classmate to search her for a hidden book or cheat sheet. But there was nothing. She just seemed to know things. Well, for example, once a man went missing in their Perthshire town. So this is sort of mountainous region of Scotland, or the mountains overlook the town. And a man went missing and Helen as a child supposedly said that he'd been trapped in a snowdrift. And this, so the story goes, turned out to be the case. She wrote, strange sayings fell

from my lips. I could not control my tongue. They said she was rather an unusual child, that she just wasn't quite like other children and that she used to make these kind of predictions which rather spooked other kids at school and worried her parents. But it seemed that this skill within her, this desire to predict the future, couldn't really be contained. What happened next in her life? Well, she leaves school. She gets a job at Dundee Royal Infirmary, the town of Dundee. And in 1916, she meets a man called Henry Duncan.

But it's said that when they meet each other, they feel that they've already met in their psychic dreams. So they are married rather quickly, and they start a family, and they struggle to make a living. She goes and works in a bleach factory, which is a terrible place to work. And gradually, during this time, she starts to develop her psychic gifts. One night, Helen had a vision of her mother-in-law's coffin. Soon after, she saw her mother-in-law's hand tapping on her bedroom window. She recognized it because of the scars. Her mother-in-law

gutted a lot of fish. The next morning, they learned she was dead. Henry documented the accuracy of Helen's visions, and she started to experiment. She began small. She would rub a sealed letter along her spine and try to receive what it said. She tried levitating small objects. And then, one day, sitting with Henry and his friend, she slipped into a trance and began speaking in a deep voice that introduced itself as a Dr. Williams. After that, she and Henry began hosting seances in their house every Thursday. The thing about the seance is that it's a kind of strange mixture of genre. So that at one level it's like a small, non-conformist,

congregational church gathering, like a church service. And in other ways it's a bit like a vaudeville act, or it's a music hall act, where there's a bit of fun and there's a bit of music, and sometimes the spirits will dance, and then the mood changes and it becomes somber again. So that, like any kind of variety show, you need a master of ceremonies.

In the tradition of spiritualism, mediums like Helen had their own guides. They were ghosts who helped the medium perform the seance, connecting the medium to the dead. So Helen would go into her trance and her spirit guide, his name was Albert, would emerge. Sometimes people said they could see him. Other times, they just heard him. So he has this rather odd accent. It's sometimes Australian. It's sometimes kind of BBC posh English.

It's, you know, it's really rather all over the place. But Albert is the person who protects Mrs. Duncan because, of course, during the seance, the medium is in a trance. The medium is kind of unconscious. So the spirit guide is presenting this to the audience, as it were. But she has another guide who is a little girl called Peggy, rather Shirley Temple-like, who comes out and rather winsomely sings, sings Bar Bar Black Sheep, typically. This seems like kind of a motley crew she got together up there, huh?

Yeah, I think it's, there's something for everyone at a seance. You know, there's a like kind of a motley crew she got together up there, huh? Yeah, I think there's something for everyone at a seance. You know, there's a real kind of, I say it's a mixture of fun with the deeply serious and often extremely emotional. One woman claimed she was visited by her son, who had died young, and that he was so real she could hug him. She was overwhelmed with gratitude. I'm a new woman, she told Helen. The spiritualist movement had begun a century before in the United States, in upstate New

York, with two girls who were 11 and 14 years old. The sisters, the Fox sisters, claimed to develop these skills of speaking to the dead. People said the Fox family had been bothered by thumps and knocking that followed the girls around the house. Neighbors came to listen. They heard it too. Someone got the idea to try to communicate with whatever was making the noise

and got knocks in reply. The whole town got involved and it was determined that the house was occupied by the spirit of a young man who'd been murdered there years before. Hair and bone fragments were found in the walls. After that, everyone wanted to meet the sisters. Eventually, they signed a contract with P.T. Barnum. And like other spiritualists and mediums subsequently, they divide opinions. Some people think that these pure, innocent children can't possibly be lying, and therefore they are actually contacting spirits. Others think it's just kids mucking about.

But of course they're taken seriously enough that the religion that they found, spiritualism, travels across the Atlantic and into Europe and into Britain. Decades later, one of the Fox sisters confessed to a large audience that none of it was ever real they'd fake those knocking sounds with a specific technique of cracking their own toes then she took off her shoe put her foot up on the table and demonstrated but it didn't even matter by this point spiritualism was an international movement. People said they communicated with the dead by levitating,

writing messages on chalkboards. And then there was Helen Duncan's specialty, materialization, where the dead would appear. What tended to happen is that the curtains would open and that there would be some kind of white form would appear. Now, this is often said to be ectoplasm, this rather strange, flowing, sinuous substance, which came out of the medium's body, spiritually said, and which was then used in order to clothe the spirits of the dead so that the living could see them. I'm a little confused about this ectoplasm. Some people said that it would typically pour out of the mouth, sometimes of the nose of the medium.

It was a sort of a, it's its own stuff. Some people called it a kind of sticky plasma. It was glowing. It's like a kind of a system well some people said it was a it was the stuff of life you know it was a it was a biological substance but it was plastic and it flowed and that the spirits when they Helen Duncan managed to channel them back to earth were invisible and that somehow that this stuff would clothe the spirits so that they could be seen. I interviewed somebody once who said, who had been to Helen Duncan's seance and was utterly convinced by it,

who said that the ectoplasm flowed out and formed a kind of puddle. And that out of this puddle, that this form of her friend just rose up from the ground upwards until it became a kind of statue. Unlike other spiritualists, Helen was producing something that could be tested, something physical. Organizations asked her to come to London. They wanted to study her, and they were willing to pay her for her time. Scientists have an eye on mediums because they feel that this is an untapped dimension of physics, that if only that they can reproduce the phenomena of the séance in the laboratory, somebody will get a Nobel Prize.

In 1931, Helen agreed to be tested at the London Spiritualist Association, and then by the National Laboratory of Psychical Research. This is rather a grand title for what was really just a one-man show, and that one man was a psychical researcher called Harry Price. And Harry Price is a rather curious figure because he's very sceptical of most of the evidence, but I think sort of deep down is a believer because he spends an awful lot of time and actually a lot of money trying to discover the truth of mediumship, but because he can't, that actually what he's really doing is most of the time

debunking it. Harry Price observed Helen at five seances in his lab. He took flash photographs of the ectoplasm and enlarged the images to see where it was coming from and what it was made of. So as soon as Helen Duncan starts being tested in the laboratory, it quickly transpires that she's using a number of tricks in order to achieve the spectacular effects at her seances. The dominant trick really is regurgitation so the swallowing of cheesecloth some other kind of gauzy cloth of lavatory paper blotting paper egg white sometimes all mixed together and swallowed and somehow regurgitated but there's a there's a more innocent if that's the right word, kind of trick, which is just to manipulate one's image in a dark room. So you've got these dark curtains around the cabinet, and it can be demonstrated that if you're wearing light clothing

or you're draped in some kind of white material, just by adjusting the width of these curtains, that one can look either large or thin or sometimes by crouching down small or tall and that in a very dark room especially when people are in rather a suggestible mood this can look quite good I think so it's a it's a form of stage trickery it's an illusion that will make you look small or make you look big. Sometimes Helen Duncan just has bits of cloth that she jiggles around. I met somebody once, psychosocial, who said he could see cheesecloth just hanging on a coat hanger.

She also cuts pictures out of magazines. She also has rubber gloves that she blows up. What would she blow up the gloves for? To put a hand out, so that it seemed like a hand was reaching out from the beyond. Harry Price went public about the cheesecloth. He published a report called Regurgitation and the Duncan Mediumship. Newspapers all over picked up the story. Supporters came forward to defend her.

One man said he'd seen spirits sit on people's knees and eat apples and drink water. He said they took off his boots and wore them around. He wanted to know how regurgitated cheesecloth could have done that. I mean, you really must have wanted to believe this stuff. Because if I saw just a blown-up rubber glove and a piece of cheesecloth on it, I mean, I would just have my eyes open for spirits of the dead. It is quite extraordinary how, in a sense, I mean, we're used to the idea of seeing is believing, but really believing is seeing. You can reverse that.

Harry Price's report ultimately served as good publicity, really putting her on the map. Everyone wanted to see a Helen Duncan seance for themselves, and she was happy to charge them for admission. Of course she was. Her seances were interrupted a number of times, and this cheesecloth was seized. So in 1939 in Wales, there was a seance where a man who was a believer went to see the spirit of his brother, but was dissatisfied by what he saw,

jumped up, grabbed the cloth, Helen Duncan punched him, but he managed to get this cloth away. And so there was actually some of this physical evidence actually taken from seances, which really said pretty unequivocally that what people were watching was a trick. That cloth survived and is archived in the University Library in Cambridge, where Malcolm Gaskell lives. So some years ago, when I did actually order this box up in the archive

and opened it up, and there was actually this cloth and the whole story contained within it. And when the archivist wasn't looking, I did actually pull this piece of cloth out and just throw it in the air. And it just, it was like parachute silk they just caught the air and it just sort of slightly shimmered down and just for a second I got a glimpse of what that might look like in a dark room in the right kind of intense atmosphere and it just was a just was a momentary insight and then I was immediately reprimanded for throwing the manuscripts around the room as they said at the time um but she always said well you know this was this was some sometimes I had to

do this because people's expectations were so great and I couldn't always summon the energy and the power and the ectoplasm in order to give people what they wanted. So I kind of had to, because I didn't want to disappoint my loyal following. This happened more than once. At another seance, a woman grabbed at Helen's spirit guide, Peggy, and snatched the figure out of the air. When everyone looked closely at what the woman had in her hand, it turned out to be women's underwear. The police were called, and Helen was arrested for fraud. So, she was already a controversial figure by 1941,

when the Royal Navy got that phone call asking if the HMS Barham had gone down. They start to watch her. She starts to be followed. There is information gathered about what she's doing and what she's saying. And then this all reaches ahead in the run-up to the Normandy landings in the early part of 1944 when she gives another seance at which a naval lieutenant is very, very unhappy. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials.

This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.

Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge,

to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics her, goes to one of her seances, and he's called upon by albert the spirit guide and he basically i think plays with them and he claims that he has an aunt and his sister that they've died in fact he's got no aunt and his sister is alive and well but actually that spiritual communications come back from both his relatives so at that point he knows that it's really is nonsense so he reports this is in january 1944 and he puts this to local police and undercover policemen go to a subsequent seance and then as a given signal they blow their whistles they jump up the lights are switched on and that there's a struggle. They grab at the cloth Helen Duncan is using to produce these so-called spirit forms. One of her followers, helpers, manages to grab the cloth back.

But in all the kerfuffle with furniture flying and so on, Helen Duncan is arrested and taken into custody. Normally, a fraud like this would be charged under something called the Vagrancy Act. She'd get a fine and a slap on the wrist. That's what happened last time. But this time, Helen was charged with something unusual. They use a very old act, the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Now, this was an act which was introduced in order to

end the period of witch hunting of the 16th and 17th centuries. But the terms of the 1735 Witchcraft Act, particularly Section 4, are that it is illegal to attempt or pretend to conjure the spirits of the dead. Helen's defence attorney claimed to have 300 witnesses prepared to testify that she was absolutely genuine. The trial is a really rather extraordinary event. It is, of course, celebrity. You've got to imagine that by this point in time that Britain is really tired of the war.

There isn't much fun, there isn't much entertainment, it's a drab and colourless environment in London. So to have something as kind of exciting and bizarre as this attracts an awful lot of public attention. So a lot of people queue up trying to get into the central criminal court, the Old Bailey, and the press have a field day. Winston Churchill was very annoyed and didn't understand why this was happening while bombs were being dropped on London. He wanted to know why the court was wasting time on what he called obsolete tomfoolery. Of course, Churchill is really exposing the fact that it does seem a bit bizarre that there is a witch trial,

as everybody wants to call it, being held in bomb-damaged, war-torn London at this absolutely pivotal moment in World War II. The prosecutor was an MI5 officer and barrister named John Maud. He read from Harry Price's report and showed Price's photographs from the seances. He also, in a pretty theatrical move, pulled out a long piece of cheesecloth and waved it around.

He had everyone laughing, and in the end, he won. Helen was convicted and sentenced to nine months in prison. She was the last person to be imprisoned for violation of the Witchcraft Act. But the judge made it clear the issue was not whether genuine manifestations of the dead were possible. He said the court didn't deal in such abstract questions. For him, it was

a case of plain dishonesty. Helen's followers believed she was charged under the Witchcraft Act because it carried a heavier sentence, including jail time. Sending her to jail was a way to make sure she didn't spill any more military secrets, just in case she actually did know things she shouldn't. She served her time and swore to never perform another seance. But, of course, she did. In 1956, one of her seances was raided. The lights were suddenly flipped on and Helen fainted. But they decide that actually she's too ill to prosecute. And by that point, she's by December 1956, she is bedridden and really she's really dying. And then she dies.

But instantly, mediums up and down the country say that the spirit of Helen Duncan has come back to them. So this is the thing about spiritualism. Nobody dies, really. And it's reported that Helen Duncan is, you know, again, commenting on her innocence, coming from the spirit worlds, preaching messages of love, and so on, and therefore vindicating herself in spirit in a way that could never actually really properly be done on earth. And, you know, ever since Helen Duncan was convicted, there have been those who would seek to clear her name. I must have been about 12.

And my mom, we were in the store. And the National Enquirer, that magazine, I don't know if there was a picture of my grandmother. But my mom picked it up, she bought it, and she said, if you ever want to know what happened to your grandma, it's right here. And I've still got that article. This is Margaret Hahn. She was 18 months old when her grandmother,

Helen Duncan, died. I mean, we were brought up that my grandmother had a gift from God. My dad was probably one of the biggest skeptics around. And he ended up sitting with my grandmother because his first wife had passed away. And she would materialize. He could see her. He could talk to her, he could touch her. And that's actually how my dad met my mom,

was by going to seances with my grandmother. She was genuine. I have no doubt in my mind. And, you know, an innocent woman was put into jail. It just fascinated me that the 1735 Witchcraft Act should be brought in in 1944 to prosecute a case when the Witchcraft Act really wasn't applicable. Graham Hewitt is a former lawyer

working with Helen's granddaughter to get a pardon for Helen. It went first to the Scottish Parliament and they said this is an English case and so they couldn't get involved. It then went to the Criminal Cases Review Commission who said there is no new evidence to warrant a review of the case. It's very hard to get new evidence because the people who were there are now dead, unless I go to a medium. But I have interviewed people who are now in their 90s who have been to Helen Duncan Sciences and can give statements to support that she was authentic. So if you'd win, you'd like to reset her legacy? Yes. In some ways, at the moment, she's a martyr for the cause.

But in my view, she was a martyr because the Home Office and the War Cabinet felt that she was a threat to national security and had to be shut up. I had called the Home Office, and they said they were going to review the file because it was public interest. Well, I said, my understanding is it's closed till 2046. And they said, that's correct. And I said, why? And they said, for reasons of national security. And I told the gentleman, I said, I doubt that my grandmother is a threat to national security.

She's been dead for, you know, so many years. It's easy to understand why you wouldn't want your grandmother to be remembered as a fraud. When I look at the photographs, all I see is cheesecloth and sleight of hand. But I also know that people get help where they can, and she offered relief at a time when a lot of people really needed it.

I also once met an old lady whose father had been killed in the First World War, and she said to me, you know, I think she was sort of rather perhaps annoyed by what I was saying, but suggesting that Helen Duncan might have been a fraud. But she said to me, well, my father was killed in the First World War. And that when we met Mrs. Duncan, our father came back to us. And before then, the family had been broken.

And now the family was remade. And of course, you know, somebody telling that kind of story in that emotional way, it's rather hard to argue with the emotion, even if, you know, I perhaps don't believe that her father really did return to her. But that's why there's such a rather difficult story to tell, because, of course, for her, the meaning of the sounds that she went to was, really can't be argued with. I mean, it really did help their family. ¶¶ makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, where we've also got pictures of Helen Duncan and her seances.

We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Special thanks to Adzerk for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. from PRX. Lactobotulinum toxin A is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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