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service for free in home, pickup shop in store online or download the app and get twenty percent off select items with the promo code, real, that's the real real dot com, promo code, real for twenty percent off select items, everybody would be seated. The light should go down, usually just a one red bulb would be glowing and then put on a gramophone record Alan Duncan would then would come in in a black gown, and then people would just wait. And that's how the saints began. This is Malcolm Gaskill, he's talking about a woman named Helen Duncan and her seances he's a professor of early modern history at the University of E Anglia in Norwhich 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 sale. Just by going into a trance and then should summon the dead people said they could actually see their dead relatives in the room, Man named Vincent Woodcock claimed that had seen his dead wife, nineteen times at Hell and uh since answers, and that his wife was so real. She even touched him she removed his wedding ring and put it on the

end of another woman at the seance. He then went on to marry that other woman Helen Duncan was said to summon spirits of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, sometimes more than twenty spirits in a single sitting, she could even bring back pets. One of the most famous was a parrot named Bronco, which is which who went to the silence is probably went for two reasons. Some people would go because they thought it was a bit of a lark, a bit of from other people. Briefed people often would be going because they will 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 huh opens in brothers fighting in world war. Two they wanted to hear anything, but how the war was going because with censorship news blackout, certain restrictions on movement and

he was 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 now, when bombing raids are going knowing where men have moved and so on, Health Dunkin, often traveled to the seaside town of Portsmouth, there was a naval town where it seemed every other family. Had someone on a warship shield, seances in a small, room above a drug store and reportedly one night, a ghost, like figure in a sailors uniform appeared. He wore a cap that said HMS Barham the name of a british battle, sh 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 you have. Britain only has a handful of really big battleships, so the new

switch, then this sailor in parts that the bar has been sunk is really a very big deal. The barn was stationed off the coast of Egypt as part of the Mediterranean Fleet, with more than one thousand men stationed onboard 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 in credibly it had. The ship was hit by three torpedoes from a german submarine. More than eight hundred men died, but known one was just to know that the british government had been keeping the ships LOS a secret partially because morale was already so low and partially for strategic reasons. There are reports that the british government wanted so badly to keep the secret that they forge Christmas cards from the deceased sailors it gets around when he gets back to the Apple T into the security services that there is a

medium who was talking about ships and that she should be watched. The british intelligence agency MI five began in instigating her it's funny to think british intelligence worried that a woman pudding herself in a trance above a drugstore could compromise British say city. On the other hand, the British WAR Office had also hired in Astrolog are to predict Hitler's next move still no one's ever figured out how Helen Duncan knew that chip had gone down. I'm Phoebe Judge this is criminal. She was born in calendar, Scotland, in eighteen. Ninety seven and growing up she bragged that you never needed to study in school.

The answer is 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 is nothing. She just seemed to know things. For example, once a man went missing in their Perthshire town, so this is sort of mountainous region. Schottland or the mountains overlook the town and a man was made I sing in Helena Charles Supposedly said that that he'd been trapped in a snow drift in this, so the story goes turned out to be the case she wrote stream say, fell from my lips. I could not control my tongue. They said she was rather an unusual child, but she just wasn't quite like other children and that she used to make these kinds of predictions. We try spooked

uh the kids at school and worried her parents, but it seemed that this scale 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 the Dundee Royal Infirmary, the town of Dundee and in one thousand nine hundred and sixteen she meets a man called Henry Duncan, but it's uh. That when they meet each other, they feel that they've already met in their psychic dreams, so they marriage rather quickly and they start a family and they straw call 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,

so her mother in law's hand, tapping on 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. We 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, Henry and his friend she slipped into a trance and again speaking in a deep voice that produced itself as a doctor Williams, after that she in Henry began hosting seances in their house every Thursday. The thing about the silence is that it's kind of strange mixture of genre,

so that a 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 farm, it'd, music and sometimes the spirits will dance in the mood changes and it becomes somber again so that, like any kind of variety show you need a master ceremonies in the tradition of spiritualism mediums like Helen had their own guides. They were go 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 his rather old accent sometimes australian. It sometimes could of BBC Pasha Porsche English. It's

is really rather all over the place, but Albert is the person who protects MRS Duncan, because, of course, during the sounds, the medium is in a trance. The medium is kind of unconscious so that the Spirit Guide is presenting this to the audience, it works, 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 it's something for everyone to sales. You know, there's a real kind of it's. I say it's a mixture of fun with that Dpc serious, often extremely emotional. One morning claims to have 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 eleven and Fourteen years old, the sisters, the Fox sisters claim to develop these skills of speaking to the dead people said the fox and have been bothered by thumbs and knocking that follow 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 and reply the whole town got involved, and it was determined that the house was occupied by spirit of a young man with Anne Murray. There years before and bone fragments were found in the walls. After that, everyone I wanted to meet the sisters. Eventually, they

sign a contract with Pt Barnum and, like other spirit, listen medium. Subsequently, they divide opinion. Some people think that these pure in Children can't BB lying and therefore they are actually contacting spirits. Others think it's just kids mucking now, but of course they taken seriously enough, though they are the religion that they found spiritualism, you know travels across the Atlantic and and into Europe and Britain decades later, one of the Fox sisters confess to a large audience that none of it was ever real, the fig those knocking sound the 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

is an international movement. People said they communicated with the dead by levitating writing messages on chalkboards, and then there was Helen Duncan specialty materialization, where the debt would appear. What tended to happen is that the curtain, it would open and that there would be some kind of white form would appear now. This is often said to be actor plasm. This rather strange flowing sinuous substance, which came out of the mediums 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 as actor plasm. Some people said that it would, it would typically pour out of the mouth sometimes of the nose of the medium. It was a sort of its own stuff. Some people called it a kind of sticky plasma,

it was glowing. It's like a kind of a system with some people said it was a. It was the stuff of life. You know it was a. It was a biological substance, but he was plastic and it flowed and that the spirits when they Helen Duncan managed to channel impact of were invisible and that somehow that the stuff would close the Spirit so that they could be see are you to beat somebody once who said he would bring to Helena could say on? Some is awfully convinced, but he said that the act upon hasn't, 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 fizz call organizations asked her to come to London, they wanted to study her

and they were willing to pay her for her time. The scientists have a mild medium because they feel that this is a non typed. I mention of physics, but if I knew that they can reproduce the phenomenon of the sales in the low power tree, Somebody will get a Nobel Prize in nineteen thirty one Helen agreed to be tested at the London, Spiritualist Association and then by the national Laboratory of psychical research this is rather grand title for what was really just a one man show and that one man was a psychical research called Harry Price and Harry prices for other curious figure, because he's he's very sceptical of most of the evidence. But I think some 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 medium ship, but because he can't that actually, what is 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 Ecto Plasm and enlarge 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 sciences. The the dominant trick really is regurgitation, so the swallowing of cheesecloth some other kind of gauzy cloth of laboratory paper, blotting paper egg white, sometimes all mixed together, swallowed and somehow regurgitate, but isn't this more innocent? If that's the right word kind of trick, which is

just to manipulate ones, image in a dark room so that you've got these dark curtains around the cabinet and it it, it can be demonstrated that if you were wearing light clothing, we your draped in some kind of white material just by adjusting the width of these curtains. But you know one can look, large or thin in sometimes by crouching, down small or tall, and that there, in very dark room, especially when people are in raw vegetable. This can look quite good. I think it's it's a it's. A full most stage trickery. It's an illusion that will make you look smaller, make you look because sometimes Helen Duncan just has bits of cloth that she, shingles around. Like I met somebody once like. Besides, you said, he could see cheese just hanging on a coat hanger. She also cut pictures out of magazines. She also has rubber gloves that she blows up

What would she brought the gloves for to put a hand out, so that seemed like a hand was reaching out from the Beyond Harry Price, went public about the cheesecloth. He published a report, old regurgitation and the Dunkin mediumship newspapers all over picked up the story. Supporters came forward to defend one man said he seen spirit said on people's knees and eat apples and drink water. He said they took off. Boots and more them around? He wanted to know how recur stated, cheese cloth could have done that. I mean you you really must have wanted to believe this stuff 'cause. If I saw just a blown up rubber glove and a piece cheese cause that I mean I would just have my eyes open for all of this stuff yeah. Well, some people are, but other people are

the darkroom. When they've gone along there expecting to see spirits of the dead. It is quite extraordinary how innocence I mean we used to the idea of seeing is believing, but Really believing is seeing you can reverse that Terry pray, this report, ultimately served as good publicity. Putting her on the map everyone wanted to see a Helen Duncan seance for themselves and she was happy to charge them for admission, she was street. Has sales were interrupted? A number of times in this cheesecloth was seized. So in thirty nine in Wales that there was was a seance where a man was who was a believer went to see the spirit of his brother, but was dissatisfied or what you jump Tom grabbed a cloth Helen Duncan punched him, but he managed to get the

cloth away and so that there was actually some of this physical evidence actually taken from sensors, which really said pretty unequivocally that what people were watching was a trick that I survived and is archived in the university library in Cambridge, where Malcolm skill lives for some years ago, when I did actually order this box up in the archive a nope did up, and there is actually this cloth and the whole story contained within it, and when the Ark This wasn't looking. I did actually pull this piece of cloth at and just throw it in the air and it just, it was like parachute silk, they just bought the air and it just sort of slightly shimmered down and just for a second I gotta go names of what that might look like in a dark room in the right kind of intense atmosphere, and it just was just was- a momentary insight, and then I was immediately reprimanded for throwing the manuscripts around the room, as they said at the time.

But she always said well, you know this was this was some sometimes I had to do this, because people's expectations are so great and I couldn't always summon the energy in the power and the actor plasm in order to give people what they wanted. So I kind of had to because I didn't want to disappoint my loyal fall. This happened more than once at another seance, a woman cab did Helen 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 to be women's underwear, the police were called and Helen was arrested for fraud

so she was already a controversial figure by one thousand. Nine hundred and forty one 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, Doing what she's saying and then this will reach is ahead in the run up to the Normandy landings in the early part of nineteen. Forty four when she gives another seance at Witcher Naval Leftenant, is very, very unhappy. So this tenant goes to her goes to one of our sensors 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 and that they died. In fact, he's got no aren't and his sister is alive and well, but actually that spiritual communications come back

both is relative, so that when he knows that it's really is nonsense. So he reports- this is in January. One thousand nine hundred and forty four and he puts is the local police, an undercover policeman go to a subsequent sounds 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. The Helen Duncan Ease

using two to produce these so called spirit forms. One of her followers helpers managed 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 get a fine and a slap on the wrist. That's what happened last time, but this time Helen was charged with something unusual. The use of very old acts, the witchcraft act of one thousand, seven hundred and thirty five. Now this was an act which was introduced in order to end the period of witch hunting of the 16th and 17th centuries, but

in terms of the seven thousand and thirty five, which was like particularly section four, are that it is illegal to attempt or pretend to conjure the spirits of the dead Ellen's. Defense attorney claimed to have three hundred witnesses prepared to testify that she was abs, Salute Lee, genuine the trial, is really rather extraordinary event. It is a course to lab. We got to imagine that by this point in time that that Britain is really tired of the war, and it's there isn't much far. There isn't much entertainment, its drab and colorless environment in London, so to have something's kind of exciting and bizarre, as this attracts an awful lot of public attention. So a lot of people queue up trying to get in to the central criminal court, the old Bailey and the press have a field day with Churchill was very annoyed and didn't understand

why this was happening. More bombs were being dropped on London. He wanted to know why the court was wasting time on what he called obsolete, tomfoolery church. Please 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. Damn need water in London at this absolutely pivotal moment in world war, two, the prosecutor, an MI five officer and barrister Name John MOD. He read from dairy prices report and showed prices photographs for the seance. Is 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 want 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 is 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 awake, make sure she did spell anymore military secrets just in case she actually did know things. She served her time and more to never perform another seance. But of course she did head in nineteen, fifty six one of her saying answers was rated. The lights were suddenly flipped on and Helen fainted,

but they decide that actually she's too old to prosecute, and by that point is by December one thousand nine hundred and fifty six. She is bedridden and really uh, uh, she's really dying and then she dies 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 Alan Duncan is you know in commenting on her innocence, coming from the Spirit World's preaching messages of love and so on. I'm there vindicating her self, in spirit, in a way that could never actually He probably be done on earth and and dumb you know ever since Alan Duncan was convicted. There have been those who would seek to clear her name. I must have been about twelve, and my mom in the store.

And the national Enquirer that turn that back in the magazine, I don't know there was a picture of my grandmother, but my mom picked it up. She bought it and she said if you ever wanna know what happened to your grandma it's right here. I've still got that article. This is Margaret Han. She was eighteen 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 a probably one of the biggest skeptics around and he he ended up sitting with a grandmother because his first wife passed away and she materialize he could see her. He could talk to her. You could touch her and that's actually how my dad met my mom was by going to chances with with my

mother. She was genuine no doubt my mind and, ah you know an innocent woman was put into jail. They just fascinated me that the one thousand seven hundred and thirty five at Witchcraft ACT should be brought in in nineteen. Forty four to prosecute a case when the witchcraft, like really wasn't applicable. Graham Hewitt, is a former lawyer working with Helen's, granddaughter to get a pardon for Helen. Eight went first to the scottish parliament and they said this is an english case and said they couldn't get him. Moved. 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

That's. 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 you reset her legacy. Yes, in some ways at the moment, she's a mantra for the pause, 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 they said they were going to review the file because it was public interest. Well, I said my understanding is it's closed till two thousand and forty six And they said that's correct, and I said why, and I for reasons of national security. I told it I told no man, I said I doubt that my grandmother is a threat to

national security. She's been dead, for you know some 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 photograph that's all I see is cheesecloth and sleight of hand, but I also know that people get help where they can and she offered her leaf at time when a lot of people really needed it. I also once meter old lady, whose father had been killed in the first World WAR, and she said to me you know, I think it's shoes should rather props annoyed by what I was saying, but suggesting that haven't done committed mean a fraud, but she said to me: well, my father was killed in the first World WAR and that when we at MRS Duncan. Our father came back to us and before then the family is being broken, and now the fam

he was remade and of course you know somebody telling that kind of story that emotional weights rather hard, argue with the emotion, even if you know uh, perhaps don't believe that her father really did return to her. But that's that's why there's such a rather difficult story to tell because of course, for her what the meaning of the same for she went to was really can't be argued with I mean that's, it really did help their family in criminal is produced by Lawrenceport. Maybe Wilson, send me audio mix by Rob Byers carefully know is our intern Julie Alexander makes a

original illustrations free episode of criminal. You can see them at the this criminal dot com or we've also got pictures of Helen Dunk and her seances were on Facebook and twitter at criminal. Show. Crew well is recorded in the studios of North Carolina public radio. W Unc were proud. Member of Ray go Topia from Prxa Collection, the best podcasts around special thanks to add Cirque for providing their ad serving platform to radio topia, I'm Phoebe judge. This is criminal radio to.

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