Witches, Part 2 of 3: The Last Witch Trial in England

Helen Duncan, who knew too much.

When you hear “witch trial,” you probably picture 17th century Puritan zealots in funny hats torturing women for hexing crops and shagging Satan. Goat-humping, broomstick orgies, succubi, incubi a horny, hell-fearing mess. All soaked in religious panic and sexual repression.

Witch trials usually meant keeping (almost always) women in disgusting conditions for months, starving them, keeping them from their families, and periodically humiliating them by making them strip naked and examining every inch of their bodies for "witch-marks". These marks were meant to be made by the devil scraping his claws across the witch's skin, but in reality the inquisitors were convinced by any freckle, skin tag, mole, or patch of dry skin. You can imagine after being kept in a manky dungeon and groped and gawped at by lecherous old bastards playing priest and executioner, most women were happy to end it all with a confession.

T.H. Matteson, Examination of a Witch, 1853

Thankfully that was all long ago - only it wasn't. There are still parts of the world today, where  people are tortured, exiled, and killed for “witchcraft” in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, India, Papua New Guinea, and even Saudi Arabia. Most of the accused are women, often poor, elderly, widowed, or disabled — easy targets. Accusations come when crops fail, a child gets sick, or a neighbour wants revenge. It’s not magic they fear. It’s women who are alone, inconvenient, or different. 

It might seem like the last witch trial in the West ended a long, long time ago, possibly with the Puritans, but it was nearer than you might think.

England’s last witch trial wasn’t in the 1600s. It was 1944.

And it wasn’t about spells. It was about secrets. About war. About a woman knowing something she shouldn’t.

Helen the Medium

Helen Duncan was a spiritual medium from Glasgow. Loud. Funny. Working-class. She had six kids and to feed them, she made a living holding séances — dark rooms, twitchy curtains, spirit voices, and “ectoplasm” that looked suspiciously like cheesecloth. To the authorities, she was a crank. To her clients — widows, mothers, the grief-stricken — she was hope. A bridge to the dead: sons and husbands killed fighting the Nazis.

Helen producing “ectoplasm”

Three years before her arrest, Helen claimed during a séance that the ghost of a sailor told her HMS Barham had been sunk. He was right — but no one was supposed to know. The sinking was classified. The government had kept it quiet to protect morale. Yet somehow, Helen — with her spirits and second sight — blurted it out.

MI5 took notice. Not because they thought she was psychic, but because they thought she had a source.

Helen Duncan and her ghosts had become a problem.

By January 1944, with D-Day looming, Helen was in Portsmouth — home of the Royal Navy — holding another séance. Another risk. Another chance for secrets to slip through the veil. Helen needed to be kept quiet.

You can silence a spy quietly. But a loud Scottish medium with an audience? That takes something louder. Helen wasn’t some shadowy figure to vanish with a whisper. She had followers. She had credibility.

At that séance, under the eye of a plainclothes officer, Helen was arrested. But to charge her with fraud — she was too well-known, too believed. So, they reached back into history for something ancient.

 They charged her with witchcraft.

 Not metaphorically. Literally.

 The Witchcraft Act of 1735

The Witchcraft Act of 1735 was nearly two centuries old. It didn’t ban real witchcraft — Parliament no longer believed in it. It banned pretending to conjure spirits or tell fortunes. The act held the broad definition of bad magic, now ‘any kind of Witchcraft, Sorcery, Inchantment, or Conjuration, or undertake to tell Fortunes, or pretend, from his or her Skill or Knowledge in any occult or crafty Science’ and the false nature of magical practices, ‘any Pretences to such Arts or Powers as are before mentioned, whereby ignorant Persons are frequently deluded and defrauded’.

Witchcraft Act

The last person legally executed for witchcraft in the British Isles was Janet Horne, a Scottish woman burned in 1727. After that, the law changed — witchcraft was no longer a capital crime. Instead, it meant a year in prison per offence. Still absurd, just less deadly.

The last known trial before Helen’s was in 1878, when Jane Rebecca Yorke was fined in London for pretending to summon spirits. No prison time. Barely a mention in the papers. Even then, the law was a joke.

By 1944, authorities had other tools — the Vagrancy Act, ordinary fraud charges. But those were dull. Helen Duncan had done something unforgivable: she revealed a naval secret before the military had announced it.

Fraud wouldn't shut her up. It wouldn’t make an example. But calling her a witch? That might.

The Witchcraft Act was legally convenient, politically neat, and symbolically savage.

The Trial

Helen’s trial was a pantomime of control. The judge was hostile. Her defence was blocked from calling key witnesses. No proof of espionage. No threat to national security. Just whispered voices, cheesecloth ectoplasm, and official panic.

Behind it all, the low hum of the war machine saying: shut her up.

She was sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison.

Holloway prison

What the State Fears

Witches don’t scare governments because they cast spells.

They scare governments because they speak out of turn. Because they’re unpredictable. Loud. Poor. Unlicensed. Usually women. And unafraid.

Helen Duncan wasn’t dangerous because she was a fraud. She was dangerous because she might not have been. Because she said something true that no one had told her — and in a tightly controlled world, truth is meant to flow top-down, never sideways, and certainly not through a woman like her.

 The Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951. But the impulse that convicted her — that fear of unapproved knowledge — is still very much alive.

The Idea of the Witch

Witches aren’t just history. They’re archetypes. Shortcuts for fear.

The witch is the woman who won’t play along — and because of that, she becomes a threat.

Shakespeare knew it. In Macbeth, the witches don’t cause the violence. They foresee it. That’s what makes them terrifying — not power, but insight.

Virginia Woolf knew it too. In A Room of One’s Own, she imagines Shakespeare’s sister — just as gifted, but silenced, ridiculed, destroyed. A witch trial in all but name.

Helen Duncan stood in a long line of women punished for being loud, different, intuitive, too much.

 She was the last witch put on trial in England.

But she wasn’t the last witch.