Helen Duncan

Mm-hmm

... on the other side, supposedly by the name of Helen Duncan.

Yes.

Is that correct?

... of, of the newspaper.

Yeah.

And on the front page was this story concerning the prosecution of this medium, Helen Duncan.

Now, the interesting thing about this paper from 1944 is that it was in pristine, brand-new-

Now it was just fraud instead of being guilty of sorcery.

The last person tried under the Witchcraft Act was Helen Duncan.

Any guesses when? 1944.

Yes, during World War II.

But Hitler didn't come, and even the British government seemed to feel threatened by the power of magic.

Shortly after Gerald's Cone of Power ritual, a spiritualist called Helen Duncan was actually prosecuted for her occult activities.

Duncan had rattled twitchy naval officers and attracted the attention of the authorities in 1944, when she held seances in Portsmouth and began answering questions about people's relatives who had been killed in action.

She had been too good at her prophecies and had alarmed the security forces.

The legal witch had moved from supernatural criminal toward false or prohibited claimant to supernatural ability, and that 18th century change remained legally relevant for almost an unbelievable length of time.

During the Second World War, the Scottish physical medium Helen Duncan became entangled with the same statute more than two centuries after its passage.

Duncan had built a career around seances in which she claimed to materialize spirits.

In 1944, after authorities investigated her activities in wartime Portsmouth, she was prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 for conspiring to pretend that she could exercise forms of conjuration.

Price was also a member of the Magic Circle, an organization of stage magicians, the Ghost Club, arguably the oldest paranormal research organization in the world, and the founder of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, which he founded as a rival to the SPR.

Some of Price's most famous cases include his investigation of the medium Helen Duncan and a black magic experiment atop Mount Brachen in Germany, in which an attempt was made to transform a goat into a young man.

Price claimed that he participated in the experiment, known as the Blocksburg Tryst, only to prove the fallacy of transcendental magic.

Price also investigated Jeff the Talking Mongoose in the 1930s.