ABSTRACT
In April 1944, a middle-aged Scotswoman called Helen Duncan was convicted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act and sentenced to ten months in Holloway Prison, London (Gaskill 2001). Winston Churchill was reported as indignant that so much time and money had been spent on ‘all this obsolete tomfoolery’. Helen Duncan was a well-known psychic and such conjurers of ectoplasm and conversers with the dead were more normally prosecuted under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, providing a concrete link between the practices of spiritualism and the poverty and distress that provided its fertile ground. Spiritualism flourished in the context of other occult beliefs. The First World War of 1914–1918 had dealt death arbitrarily and on a massive scale. It had disrupted the flow of generations and the form of family life, and was speedily followed by further economic disaster. The popular followers of Helen Duncan were facing hardship and social transformation in equal and large measure, and somehow the limits of this world were all too apparent. Yet perhaps surprisingly, spiritualism was not a manifestation of ‘tradition’ or a hangover from the past, but a new quest for meaning in the context of rapid industrialization, large-scale war and the major advances of Victorian and early twentieth-century science. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a group of eminent Victorians. Seances, then popular, were occasions when sleights of hands, trickery and fraud were all in play, but the audience, for all their credulity, were always asked to see and hear for themselves; not only to experience strange events, but to witness their proof. Ghost hunters and other sceptics set about proving the opposite, but science and spiritualism – far from being simple opposites – were conjoined investigators.
