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.

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