It sounds like something out of a low-budget horror flick. A woman sits in a darkened room in Portsmouth, 1944. She’s covered in "ectoplasm"—which, let's be honest, was usually just cheesecloth or butter muslin—and she starts channeling the spirits of the dead. Suddenly, she reveals a state secret that the British government is desperate to keep quiet. Most people think witch trials ended in the 1700s with some old laws and a bit of superstition. They’re wrong. Britain’s last witch, Helen Duncan, was actually sent to prison during World War II using a law from the era of King George II.
She wasn't burned at the stake. There were no gallows. But the 1944 trial of Helen Duncan remains one of the weirdest legal episodes in British history.
Was she a genuine psychic? Probably not. Most researchers and historians who’ve looked at the evidence see a very clever, perhaps slightly desperate, performer. But the government didn't arrest her because they thought she was magic. They arrested her because she was right. And in the middle of a war, being right about the wrong thing is a dangerous game to play.
Why the Admiralty Panicked over a Séance
The whole saga of Britain’s last witch really kicked off because of a shipwreck. In November 1941, the HMS Barham was sunk by a German U-boat in the Mediterranean. It was a disaster. Over 800 men died. To keep morale from bottoming out, the Admiralty decided to keep the sinking a secret. They didn't even tell the families of the victims for months.
Then Helen Duncan held a séance.
During a sitting in Portsmouth, she allegedly manifested the spirit of a dead sailor wearing an HMS Barham hat tally. The "spirit" told his mother he was dead and that the ship had gone down. Word spread. Fast. The authorities were absolutely livid. How did a medium in a back-parlor know about a classified naval disaster?
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Some say she was psychic. Others, like the skeptics at the Society for Psychical Research, figured she just had a big mouth and listened to naval gossip in a port town. Portsmouth was a hive of sailors and rumors. It’s not a stretch to think she overheard someone talking in a pub. But to the MI5 agents watching the coast, it didn't matter how she knew. It just mattered that she was leaking information.
The Witchcraft Act of 1735: A Legal Loophole
When the police finally raided one of her séances in January 1944, they were in a bit of a bind. They couldn't exactly charge her with "knowing a secret," and they didn't want to use the Official Secrets Act because that would basically confirm that everything she said was true.
So they went old school. Really old school.
They dug up the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Now, this law didn't actually say that witches were real. It did the opposite. It was designed to punish people who pretended to have magical powers to defraud the public. By using this, the prosecution could argue that Helen Duncan was a fraud without having to debate whether she was a security risk. It was a masterstroke of legal pettiness.
The trial lasted seven days. It was a circus.
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Duncan’s followers flocked to the Old Bailey. They offered to hold a séance in the courtroom to prove her powers were real. The judge, understandably, said no. He wasn't interested in seeing cheesecloth fly across the room. She was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison. Even Winston Churchill was annoyed. He reportedly sent a memo to the Home Secretary calling the whole thing "obsolete tomfoolery."
The Ectoplasm and the Evidence
If you look at the photos of Helen Duncan’s "manifestations," they’re... underwhelming. To a modern eye, it’s clearly fabric. Harry Price, a famous ghost hunter of the time, caught her using a secondary "spirit" made of a paper mask and a sheet.
She would swallow large amounts of cheesecloth and then regurgitate it during the séance to simulate ectoplasm. It’s gross. It’s physically demanding. Honestly, it’s almost more impressive than actually being psychic. But the people who went to see her didn't care about the logistics.
These were people who had lost sons, husbands, and fathers to a brutal war. They were grieving. They wanted a bridge to the other side, and Duncan gave it to them. That’s why the label of Britain’s last witch sticks so hard; she represents a moment where the state’s need for secrecy crashed head-first into the public's need for spiritual comfort.
The Repeal and the Legacy
Duncan was released in late 1944, but she didn't stop. She was arrested again in 1956 during another séance raid. She died shortly after. Her supporters claim the shock of the raid—interrupting a medium in a "trance"—is what killed her. Doctors might suggest it was more likely her long-term health issues and the stress of a second police encounter.
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In 1951, the Witchcraft Act was finally repealed and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. This was a huge win for the Spiritualist movement, which is still active across the UK today. They’ve spent decades campaigning for a posthumous pardon for Duncan, but the British government has consistently refused.
The official line is that she wasn't convicted of being a witch; she was convicted of being a con artist.
What We Can Learn from the Case
If you're looking into the history of paranormal Britain or the legalities of the occult, the Duncan case is the gold standard for how not to handle a public relations crisis.
- State Secrecy vs. Public Belief: The government often makes things worse by overreacting. If they had ignored Duncan, she would have remained a local curiosity. By arresting her, they turned her into a martyr.
- The Power of Grief: Most paranormal "booms" happen during or after major wars. People are looking for answers that traditional religion or science can't provide.
- Legal Archaisms: The Duncan trial serves as a reminder that old laws never truly die; they just wait for a convenient moment to be reused by the state.
How to Explore This History Yourself
If you want to dig deeper into the story of Britain’s last witch, don’t just take the "ghost hunter" accounts at face value. You need to look at the primary sources.
- Check the National Archives: Many of the Home Office files regarding the 1944 trial were kept secret for decades. They are now available for public viewing and show exactly how worried the Admiralty was about the D-Day landings.
- Visit the Old Bailey: While you won't see any ectoplasm today, the location of the trial remains one of the most significant legal landmarks in London.
- Read Harry Price’s reports: His book Leaves from a Psychical Researcher’s Case-Book gives a very different, more skeptical view of Duncan’s methods compared to spiritualist biographies.
- Analyze the 1735 Act: Understanding the shift from "killing witches" to "punishing frauds" is crucial for understanding why British law treats the paranormal the way it does.
Helen Duncan might not have been a witch in the way Shakespeare wrote them, but her impact on British law and the paranormal community was massive. She remains a symbol of a time when the British government was so paranoid about the war that they'd resort to medieval tactics to keep a secret. Whether she was a fraud or a victim depends entirely on who you ask, but her status as the last person to be jailed under the Witchcraft Act is a permanent fixture in the weird history of the United Kingdom.