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Of all the suffering endured during the Second World War, the brief
imprisonment of Helen Duncan, a Scottish grandmother who claimed to
have paranormal powers, was a minor injustice at worst. But, six
decades later, it is still causing hubble, bubble, toil and trouble.
Mrs Duncan was one of the last people in Britain to be convicted
under the 1735 Witchcraft Act. Yesterday, the Scottish Parliament
received a petition with more than 200 signatures, demanding that she
be given a full posthumous pardon. It was organised by Full Moon
Investigations, a team of Scottish ghost-busters who claim to have
paranormal gifts.
During the war, Mrs Duncan made several visits
to Portsmouth where the desperate relatives of men killed or missing in
action would flock to her seances, paying an admission price of 25
shillings a head – a huge sum in those days – hoping to hear the voices
of their loved ones.
At one seance, she claimed to have made
contact with a sailor from HMS Barham, a ship which had not been
officially declared sunk. When it was announced, several weeks later,
that the ship had indeed gone down, some took it as proof that Mrs
Duncan was psychic. Others believed she had been tipped off and was
giving away naval secrets to improve trade.
When she held another
seance in Portsmouth, in January 1944, a plain-clothes policeman was
waiting in the audience to arrest her the minute the first spirit from
beyond turned up. She was sentenced to nine months in prison. After her
release, she was more cautious about summoning the dead. She went off
to join them in 1956, aged 59.
She was not, as is sometimes
asserted, the last person convicted under the Witchcraft Act because
six months later the same Act was use to jail a 72-year-old called Jane
Yorke.
Her defenders at Full Moon Investigations are in no doubt
that Mrs Duncan was a gifted medium persecuted by the authorities for
fear of what else she might cause the dead to reveal. They see it as a
late example of centuries of persecution of real or imagined witches,
many of whom may have been faith healers, herbalists, or people who
were either benevolent or just a bit cranky.
James VI of
Scotland, who reigned in England as James I, was notoriously obsessed
with witches, which was why writing Macbeth was a smart career move by
William Shakespeare. Poor Agnes Simpson, the "grace wife of Keith", was
interrogated by the king in person, then deprived of sleep and
subjected to days of barbaric torture until she confessed to being the
leader of 200 witches who rode out to sea in sieves at Halloween and
enjoyed a rendezvous with Satan in North Berwick.
Read full article from the Independent
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