We’ve spoken about the history of witches in the western world before, but this story caught my attention because of its ties to Scotland. Many of us are aware of the beginning of Macbeth, the Shakespeare play, where three witches begin the story with the infamous incantation, “Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and caldron bubble…” Scotland has had a long association with witches, and Shakespeare knew that the new King James was Scottish; he knew his audience. But one real-life Scottish witch is peculiar for her supposed ability to read people’s minds and discover secrets that no one knew.
As late as 1735, Britain passed something called the Witchcraft Act. It made it a crime for anyone to either practice witchcraft or to claim the powers of a witch. Now, while that seems odd or harsh, the law was actually fairly forward-thinking. You see, rather than punish witches with death or allow for vigilante groups to go on witch hunts, the Witchcraft Act imposed a penalty of imprisonment. And, rather than be based on the idea that witches are real, the “new” law worked off the supposition that witches were charlatans, people who preyed on the weak-minded or the desperate. Think of it as more of a consumer protection law rather than a desire to punish based on any kind of religious belief. And, it was under this new act that a woman named Helen Duncan was arrested.
Helen lived in Edinburgh, a town that has a long history for being somewhat spooky, especially the Old Town part with its narrow closes and wynds. It seems that Helen had been conducting sessions in her home where she would contact the spirits of the dead. During a period of war in Britain, many people who lost loved ones in the conflict came to Helen, and she would speak to the dead and communicate the messages she received back to the grieving relatives. Some people today would say that she was a medium or someone performing what we might call parlor tricks. On one hand, this seems to be somewhat comforting to the relatives of the deceased and possibly harmless.
But then, Helen reached out to some people who had relatives onboard a certain British warship. While Edinburgh isn’t on the water per se, it uses the nearby port of Leith and has a long history of providing sailors for Britain and for merchant ships. And it seems that Helen told several people that their relatives had died because of the sinking of a British warship named the HMS Barham. Now, no one in the government had said that the ship had been sunk. As you can imagine, these relatives were horrified. They bombarded the government with inquiries regarding the safety of their loved ones onboard. A minor scandal arose. British officials were caught with no good option. If they reassured the families of the sailors that all was well, but then it turned out that the ship had indeed been sunk, then they would look either incompetent or dishonest. If they admitted that the ship went down, then they might be revealing war news that might embarrass the government and then questions would arise about why the government was keeping the deaths a secret.
It was a lose-lose. What do to?
The government decided to blame the messenger. Citing the new Witchcraft Act, the government ordered the arrest of Helen Duncan. The newspapers of the day printed details of Helen’s trial, and the public proclaimed her a hero for telling the relatives the truth when the government wouldn’t. Eventually, however, Helen was convicted under the provisions of the law and sentenced to jail. It was determined that she had heard a war-time rumor of the sinking of the ship and had parlayed that into a way to make money from the relatives of the sailors. And, also eventually, the public outrage about the scandal and seeming coverup died down.
But Helen Duncan would be the last person convicted in Britain of being a witch…in 1944.
The Rest of the Story 