Notorious medium Helen Duncan, known as ‘Hellish Nell’ in her Scottish hometown, has gone down in history for being imprisoned after she was charged under the 1735 Witchcraft Act in 1944.
Duncan, described as a large coarse woman even by her admirers, was a controversial ‘materialising medium’, meaning sitters at her seances would see ghostly forms of their deceased loved ones emerge from the darkness, formed from the spiritual substance known as ectoplasm which emanated from various orifices of the medium’s entranced body.
Her mediumistic performances attracted the attention of spiritualists, scientists and of course the authorities.[i] Before her Old Bailey trial towards the end of the Second World War, she visited Todmorden on two occasions and one of the sitters wrote up an uncritical account for the Todmorden News and Advertiser which gives us a glimpse into the peculiar lost world of materialising mediums and those who put their faith in them.
Since its origins in the USA in the nineteenth century, Spiritualism spread rapidly to the UK and was especially popular in the north. The first spiritualist church in England was founded in Keighley in 1853.[ii] By the mid-thirties there were around 2,000 Spiritualist churches in the country with around 250,000 members.[iii] Calderdale was no exception, and in 1934, Todmorden spiritualists were excited to have one of Britain’s best-known mediumistic stars come to visit them.
If your love is as big as yourselves then I should like to have it
Helen Duncan’s first Todmorden séance took place on Friday 17 December 1934 at 33 Wellington Road.[iv] An audience of 18 people gathered to witness the spectacle and a ‘cabinet’ was created by using a dark cloth to partition off part of the room. Inside this area, hidden from the view of the audience, was a chair for the medium to sit on and a small table with a vase of flowers on it. The room was weakly lit by three dim red lights, giving the space an eerie glow. According to the sitter who wrote up the séance, these were ‘ideal’ test conditions.
Helen would have been in her mid-thirties at this time. She was extremely large with jet black hair and a powerful stare, and was at the height of her powers. Before entering the séance room, Helen was stripped and searched by ‘two competent ladies’ and dressed in a black robe which had been examined by those present.[v] These measures were taken to ensure there was no trickery involved and that no fake ectoplasm was hidden about her person. How careful or intimate these searches were, we are not told.
Helen entered the séance room and proceeded to her cabinet and the curtain was drawn. This was supposedly to allow the medium to gather her psychic energy and enter a trance state. With Helen hidden, the gathered spiritualists invoked ‘the name and the spirit of the Master’. A few minutes later, a spirit form emerged into the rose-tinted gloom. This was Albert, Duncan’s ‘spirit control’ who acted as a ghostly master of ceremonies. Albert had been a man of Scottish extraction who had emigrated to Australia and drowned in 1913. In contrast to Helen Duncan’s heavy Glaswegian accent, Albert spoke, we are told, in precise BBC English and would offer rather ambiguous wisdom to the sitters such as ‘If your love is as big as yourselves then I should like to have it.’[vi] On this occasion in Todmorden, Albert materialised and said, ‘How beautiful to hear the words of the Master’ and would introduce the spirits before retiring into the darkness.
Although no one in the Todmorden sitting had a camera, several of Helen Duncan’s spiritualist manifestations were caught on film, as seen at the top of this article.
The first Todmordian spirit to manifest itself was that of a well-known local woman who had died several months ago. We’re told that a dozen people present recognised the spirit and even the deceased woman’s daughter testified that it was her mother. Several more spirits appeared in quick succession, all of them recognised as family or friends by those present. One of these beat its hands on its chest to demonstrate that it was solid. Another, rather bizarrely, invited one of the sitters to put his finger in its mouth, which he did. He commented that the ghost’s mouth was wet, warm… and toothless.
A ghost of a little girl appeared and said her name was ‘Sunshine’. The spirit of an elderly lady, one of the sitter’s grandmother, came out of the cabinet and complained that she had no slippers before dematerialising in front of the curtain.
Next came one of Helen Duncan’s regular characters, the spirit of a mischievous little Glaswegian girl called Peggy who provided light relief amidst the intense emotion of sitters meeting up with their departed loved ones. Peggy distracted the audience with comic chatter and jokes about one gentleman’s baldness before singing ‘O Danny Boy’ and ‘Bicycle Made for Two’. When a sitter attempted to join in with one of the songs, the cheeky wee ghost stopped and said: ‘I’m singing this song not you!’
Ectoplasm Stinks
Peggy departed back to the spirit world and the more po-faced control spirit Albert returned for the next part of the séance: an ectoplasmic demonstration. There was no real agreement among Spiritualists and the various scientists who studied seances and mediums about what exactly ectoplasm was. It was a substance that was supposed to be both physical and spiritual, and it emerged from various orifices of entranced mediums. It would billow, shimmer and shine as it twirled around and formed into a spirit. There was something reproductive in the production of ectoplasm. The medium would often utter orgasmic moans or groan as if suffering labour pains. The sitters attending the séance might be told to sit with their legs uncrossed to allow ‘reproductive matter’ to flow from them to assist the medium.
On this occasion, ghostly hands parted the curtains of the cabinet to reveal Helen Duncan in her trance and the sitters witnessed ectoplasm emanating from the medium and forming into a voice box. From reports of some of Duncan’s other seances, we have an idea of what this ghost’s ectoplasmic voice box looked like. Some describe it as like a ‘large white potato’, while others described it as a large pair of disembodied lips. Another still said it was a square box on a rod of ectoplasm, while cynics said it looked like Helen Duncan’s fist under some luminous cloth. We are not told from whence Mrs Duncan produced the ectoplasm in Todmorden. One thing would have been clear to the sitters, though. Ectoplasm stinks.
The séance lasted a little under two hours, and in the words of the sitter who wrote the report for the local paper: ‘All the sitters who recognised their friends and relations who had returned from the other side of life, testified to the genuineness of the materialisations.’[vii]
Hellish Nell Returns to Tod
Helen Duncan returned to Todmorden to give another demonstration in June 1935.[viii] This time the séance was held in Eagle Street Spiritualist Church, and again was a success, with the newspaper correspondent writing: ‘What joy was given to those whose friends materialised before their eyes!’
Again, Albert was master of proceedings. In his posh voice he berated the ‘appalling grammar’ of the entranced medium. Several spirits appeared over the session and most were recognised by the sitters except for one ghost who couldn’t be identified by the relevant sitter as she had forgotten her glasses! And as always, Peggy, the charming little Scottish girl with the cheeky sense of humour, made an appearance and made everyone laugh before spilling some water from a vase of flowers and making Albert cross.
Looking at the photos of the materialisations produced by Helen Duncan, it’s hard to see how people were taken in by them. The painted doll faces look grotesque atop their coat hanger shoulders and white net gowns to be sure. But in the séance itself, with the heightened sense of expectation, the very dim red light and with luminous paint applied to the spirits, they must have been more convincing than under the harsh and unforgiving flash bulb.
As for the ectoplasm, influential psychic investigator Harry Price, for whom Duncan had held a demonstration of her powers in his London laboratory, suspected it was regurgitated surgical gauze, as he found when he analysed a sample. When Duncan was given blue dye to swallow before a demonstration, no ectoplasm was manifested. In fact, Price said: ‘I was impressed with the brazen affrontery that prompted the Duncans to come to my Laboratory… I was impressed with the amazing credulity of the Spiritualists who had sat with the Duncans for six solid months.’
Duncan had been exposed as a fraud on a number of occasions before her two visits to Todmorden. One of these exposures was the result of Harry Price’s experiments, which he wrote about in his tastefully titled book Regurgitation and the Duncan Mediumship in 1931.[ix]
In 1932, maids employed by Duncan admitted the medium had dummies and various masks for use in seances. One of them also told how she had been made to wash long lengths of stained, slimy muslin that stank of urine.
In 1933, a year before she visited Todmorden for the first time, a trap was set for her at a séance in Edinburgh. During the séance in question, some noted that most spirits looked and smelled like Duncan with some white cloth draped over her. One of the sitters groped a male apparition to discover it had two large female breasts.
When naughty little Peggy appeared, the trap was sprung. Someone turned on a bright light while an accomplice grabbed at Peggy. In the light it could be seen that the little girl Peggy was actually Duncan on her knees waving a white doll around. Poor Peggy was subjected to a farcical tug-o-war between the sitter and Duncan before being stuffed up Duncan’s dress. In her fury, Duncan waved a chair around in the air yelling ‘I’ll brain you, you bloody buggar!’[x]
These events were widely reported, yet Duncan remained popular. Her fans reasoned that she was only human and may have resorted to fraud on those occasions, but at other times her performances were genuine because they had seen their loved ones with their own eyes.
Epilogue
Duncan’s mediumship continued through the 1930s and 1940s until disaster struck. At a séance in Portsmouth in 1944, Helen materialised a spirit of a petty officer from the warship HMS Barham. The only problem was, although this ship had indeed been lost, the government had not yet released this information to the public. This was too much for the authorities, and Duncan was tried under the 1735 witchcraft act and sent to prison, serving 172 days.
In fact, it was a sitter who mentioned the Barham, not Duncan, though that did not save her. Why Duncan was nobbled with the archaic Witchcraft Act is unclear and rather murky. What is clear, is that she made an impression on the people of Todmorden when she was at the height of her dubious powers.
This is an excerpt from Weird Calderdale: Strange and Horrible Local History – buy it here.
[i] Malcolm Gaskill, Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (London: Harper Collins, 2001)
[ii] Ibid p.53
[iii] Ibid p.110
[iv] Todmorden News and Advertiser 14 December 1934
[v] Ibid
[vi] Gaskill p.82
[vii] Todmorden News and Advertiser 14 December 1934
[viii] Todmorden News and Advertiser 7 June 1935
[ix] Ibid p.139
[x] Ibid pp.155-156
Paul Weatherhead 