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Duncan began her career in the mid-1920s, summoning spirits in dimly lit rooms across Britain — preying on desperate families of the recently deceased. Spiritualism, she found, thrived on disaster and desperation, and as the Second World War raged on, Duncan’s business was booming.While performing a séance in her hometown of Portsmouth, Duncan went “beyond her usual vagaries” — assuming the persona of a spirit and orally producing ectoplasm, which was really a swallowed mixture of cheesecloth, paper, egg white and toilet paper — and claimed to have summoned the spirit of a sailor who’d allegedly gone down with the battleship HMS Barham, according to one History Hit report.The rub? The sinking of the HMS Barham was kept in strict confidence, with only the relatives of the casualties learning of the ship’s fate. In fact, it was not until Jan. 27, 1942, that the public would learn of the its sinking.Duncan was subsequently brought to trial at the Old Bailey in London and became the last person to be prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 — which deemed “magic, witchcraft and fortune-telling …[as] fraudulent, and the practitioners marked as con artists and vagrants.” The act itself had not been used for more than a century.
Was she burned at the stake?
Duncan began her career in the mid-1920s, summoning spirits in dimly lit rooms across Britain — preying on desperate families of the recently deceased. Spiritualism, she found, thrived on disaster and desperation, and as the Second World War raged on, Duncan’s business was booming.While performing a séance in her hometown of Portsmouth, Duncan went “beyond her usual vagaries” — assuming the persona of a spirit and orally producing ectoplasm, which was really a swallowed mixture of cheesecloth, paper, egg white and toilet paper — and claimed to have summoned the spirit of a sailor who’d allegedly gone down with the battleship HMS Barham, according to one History Hit report.The rub? The sinking of the HMS Barham was kept in strict confidence, with only the relatives of the casualties learning of the ship’s fate. In fact, it was not until Jan. 27, 1942, that the public would learn of the its sinking.Duncan was subsequently brought to trial at the Old Bailey in London and became the last person to be prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 — which deemed “magic, witchcraft and fortune-telling …[as] fraudulent, and the practitioners marked as con artists and vagrants.” The act itself had not been used for more than a century.
Was she burned at the stake?
statistics: Posted by Rebcop — 4:19 AM - 1 day ago — Replies 6 — Views 77