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SCOTLAND. In one of the few Halloween events that has any real relevance, the grand-daughter of famous materialisation medium Helen Duncan lead a ceremony on 29 October that honoured 81 individuals from Prestonpans, close to Edinburgh, who were accused of witchcraft and put to death in the 16th and 17th centuries.

They all received absolute pardons from the Baron of Prestoungrange in 2004. But Helen Duncan, whose 20th-century prosecution and imprisonment under The Witchcraft Act of 1737 caused a sensation in wartime Britain, and led to a campaign to clear her name, has not been pardoned. The then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, rejected the request two years ago.

Mary Martin (above, at the commemorative garden), the medium’s 72-year-old grand-daughter, told the Edinburgh Evening News that Mrs Duncan should never have been tried under the ancient law:

“She was arrested and tried for witchcraft, but she wasn’t a witch. It was farcical. She was a Spiritualist and at the time they were getting tried for vagrancy. If that had happened she would have got a fine.”

She was charged with “pretending to raise the spirits of the dead”. Although she lived in Scotland, Mrs Duncan could not be pardoned by the Baron because she was tried in Portsmouth, England. Campaigners, including Mary Martin, are now trying to clear her name through the European Courts.

Any decision on a pardon would have to take account of the findings of some investigators, notably Harry Price, who concluded after studying the “ectoplasmic” manifestations (pictured left), that she was fraudulently regurgitating material.

But most Spiritualists regard her prosecution and imprisonment as a gross injustice, citing remarkable evidence and phenomena that could not have been produced in the way Price alleged. They believe the action was motivated by concerns that secret information was being revealed at her seances.

In Portsmouth, for example, the spirit of a sailor who had served on HMS Barham is said to have materialised and told the sitters that the ship had been torpedoed. This proved to be correct but at the time it had not been revealed by the War Office that the battleship had gone down on 25 November with the loss of 841 lives, which censored the information until 27 January 1942. It was also reported that spirit communications through her revealed that HMS Hood had suffered a similar fate.

Some argue that the prosecution against her was instigated by the Navy in order to prevent any mention of the secret site of the impending D-Day landings and the equally top-secret Enigma operation to break German codes.

Whatever the fears, a total of 44 witnesses, including a JP and leading journalists, spoke in her defence. The court, however, refused to allow Helen Duncan to demonstrate her mediumistic abilities and she was sent to Holloway prison.

“I still remember it,” her grand-daughter told The Edinburgh Evening News. “My brother and I were at school at the time and it was awful, we got called names like demon child.”

After the high profile case, the Witchcraft Act was repealed and replaced with The Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951. But a Helen Duncan séance was again raided by police in 1956 while she was in trance.

Mrs Martin explained to the newspaper that when police officers grabbed her entranced grandmother it caused the ectoplasm she was producing to recoil back into her body, causing severe burns. She died some days later.

“It’s still upsetting thinking about it. The whole family were devastated. When she came home she seemed to have lost all her will to live, she was never the same again. I am so proud of her – she did nothing wrong. I loved that lady and I still miss her after all these years.”

The newspaper provided its readers with a fair resume of Helen Duncan’s mediumistic career, but it erred in claimed that Sir Winston Churchill was one of her clients. It is true that, when he heard about the prosecution, he demanded an explanation for why a piece of obsolete legislation was being used for a prosecution during wartime.

But the prime minister did not attend seances with her, nor did he visit her in Holloway Prison, as claimed by the Edinburgh newspaper and various websites, including the BBC’s.

Roy Pugh (far right) with the Absolute Pardon, pictured with descendants of those who were executed as witches, and (left) a re-enactment of the persecution of Prestonpans' witches.

Between 1563 and 1727, claims Scottish historian Roy Pugh, as many as 4,500 Scots – 80 per cent of them women – were lawfully convicted of witchcraft and executed. Which means, he adds, that during that 164-year period, an average of more than two innocent individuals were being convicted of a capital crime every month.

He describes this period as a “mini-holocaust”. It should be noted, however, that other historians believe his figure is far too high and that a more accurate estimate would be in the region of 1,000 alleged Scottish witches who were put to death. Even so, that’s 1,000 too many. The victims were all prosecuted under Scotland’s Witchcraft Act of 1563 which defined witchcraft as “conjuration or sorcery” and a witch as someone considered to have supernatural powers granted by Satan in exchange for his or her soul.

No doubt some of those accused would today be called psychics or mediums. Others appear to have been herbalists. However, many – probably the vast majority – were innocent people who were being unjustly accused without any evidence. It was enough to claim that you felt an evil spirit or heard spirit voices in the presence of the accused, for them to be charged. The fact that they owned a black cat, lived alone and brewed home-made remedies was considered to be corroborating evidence.

Terrible tortures were inflicted to elicit confessions, and then the “witch” was burned at the stake … along with the cat, if there was one. This dreadful period of persecution came largely to an end with the introduction of Scotland’s Witchcraft Act of 1735. It banned the execution of a person for witchcraft – the last such death was in 1727 – but criminalised the act of pretending to be a witch, so prosecutions continued into the 20th century.

Though it all happened many years ago, the descendants of those accused are delighted that they have now been cleared.

This came about because the Barons Court, which had existed since 1189 – predating the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 by several decades – had the de jure legal authority to issue the pardons. However, it had to be done before 28 November 2004, when Baron Prestoungrange’s ancient feudal power of pardoning was to be stripped by legislation that ended Scotland’s feudal system.

So, on 27 July 2004, a grant of Absolute Pardon was issued to correct the “gross miscarriage of justice”, pointing out that those who suffered were condemned on the basis of “spectral evidence” – “that is to say, the ‘voices’ or actions of ‘spirits’ given as ‘evidence’ of the ‘guilt’ of the accused. This, in turn, gave rise to a situation of waging private vendettas by accusing one’s enemies of witchcraft.”

The Baron Courts decided that, at the very least, all should have received a “not proven” verdict and they were therefore wrongfully convicted and executed.

They and their cats received an Absolute Pardon. Furthermore, it was ruled that the tragic events, and the subsequent pardons, be commemorated in murals; by a historical account of the alleged crimes and punishments, and a re-enactment each year, at Halloween, “as a living reminder of this earlier process of justice in Scotland”. The first ceremony took place on 31 October 2004.

Interestingly, the local authorities in Salem, Massachusetts, US, have been in touch with Prestonpans, and are considering granting pardons to the 20 who were executed and 150 who were imprisoned during its infamous 1692 witchcraft trials. The mayor has indicated that the 315th anniversary of the witchcraft hysteria in the city, in 2007, would be a suitable time to grant the pardons.

Meanwhile, the fight goes on to remove the “witch” stigma that Helen Duncan had to live with towards the end of her life.

Posted on Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Category: Mediumship

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