MEDIUM SENT TO GAOL

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 May 1944, Page 6

MEDIUM SENT TO GAOL

WITCHCPtAFT ACT CONVICTION LONDON, April 4. Helen Duncan, the most soughtafter spiritualistic medium in Britain, whose seances led to her prosecution under the Witchcraft Act, was sentenced at the Old Bailey yesterday to nine months’ imprisonment. She had been charged with conspiring to commit an unlawful act—pretending to recall the spirits of deceased persons in some visible tangible form. Her trial was remarkable for the intense interest created and for demonstrations in court by many people who believe implicitly in her as a medium. The Recorder, passing sentence emphasised that there was nothing in the prosecutilon directed against spiritualism as ,such. Those who might believe in genuine manifestation of a spiritual kind would welcome the expulsion of a fraud from it;; observances. PREVIOUSLY EXPOSED ' ’ Although twice previously exposed —once in Court proceedings—Duncan’s career of 20 years as a “materialisation medium” brought her thousands of convinced disciples and thousands of pounds. She is reported to have shown the first signs of powers as a medium in childhood, but. in her early twenties began to organise her gifts on a money-mak-ing basis. Her first seances brought lhe debut of a spirit-guide, “Albert,” the chief “figure” in the evidence of defence witnesses, who told of attending hundreds of seances with Duncan. “Albert” emigrated to Sydney, where he died in 1909. In 1930 London spiritualists invited Duncan to give a series of seances for £lO a week. It was as a result of these meetings that 'Duncan was invited by the National Laboratory of Psychical Research to give seances under test conditions. The laboratory issued a bulletin, summing up the “manifestations” evoked by Duncan's clever fraud and disclosing that the “ectoplasm” she produced was common cheese-cloth. The theory that Duncan, who weighs 20 stone, was capable of regurgitating masses of such material swallowed before the seance to simulate misty iorrns runs through the l aboratory ’s report. Publication of this report did not mterierence with Duncan’s career. Iler income from seances is estimated at £3,000 a year over the. last seven years. At the Master Temple, Portsmouth, the scene of the seance which ledffier with three others to the Old Bailey, she received £ll2 for six days’ work.