Spiritualists fight to pardon wartime witch

British spiritualist mediums have launched a campaign to pardon a woman convicted of witchcraft in the Second World War. Clare Garner listens to their argument that her only crime was to witness a tragedy.

Helen Duncan, a Scottish housewife and mother of six, was renowned for "raising the dead". Throughout the war years she travelled the country performing seances which put the bereaved in touch with their dead loved ones.

But hers was a talent for which she paid heavily. Her knowledge that a ship had sunk before the news had been made public led the War Office to conclude she was a security risk. In 1944 she was found guilty of "pretending to raise the spirits of the dead" under the 1735 Witchcraft Act.

Winston Churchill was infuriated by the case and penned a note to the then Home Secretary, demanding: "What has the cost of a trial to the State in which the Recorder was kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery?"

Mrs Duncan may be dead - but she is not going quietly. Her supporters have approached the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, demanding that their heroine be granted a posthumous pardon. They are confident that their efforts meet with Mrs Duncan's approval. Three weeks ago, at mediumship demonstration at a Spiritualist church in Castleford, she reportedly appeared and said she was raising her glass to toast the campaign.

The life and trial of Mrs Duncan has inspired two Hollywood film directors to come to Britain to discuss ways of dramatising the story. They arrive tomorrow and their working title is: "Helen's Pardon". More than 50,000 people have visited the special website set up for her and a fighting fund has been established. Channel 4 is considering a proposal for a documentary claiming that Churchill may have been in contact with Mrs Duncan.

In Mrs Duncan's seances, ectoplasm, a substance associated with the supernatural, would appear to come out of her mouth and take the form of the dead. At one meeting, at a private house in Portsmouth on the evening of 19 January 1944, she was arrested. The authorities feared she would link in to the D-Day plans and the Enigma operation at Bletchley.

Mrs Duncan's powers had come to their attention following a seance a couple of years earlier, at which a dead sailor had appeared. The sailor, on whose hat-band was written the name of a battleship, HMS Barham, told the gathering: "My ship is sunk." In fact, news of the sinking of HMS Barham was suppressed for two years for morale's sake - as Churchill recorded in his memoirs.

After a high-profile case at the Old Bailey, Mrs Duncan was sentenced to nine months at Holloway prison. She was the last person to be tried under the ancient act. When Churchill returned to power in 1951 he repealed the Witchraft Act. Michael Colmer, a campaigner, said: "Churchill was believed to have spiritualist leanings and once wrote of a planchette, a spiritualist tool similar to a Ouija board, which guided him when he was lost in South Africa after escaping from the Boers. He also supported the recognition of Spiritualism as a legal form of religion."

Another campaigner, James MacQuarrie, director of the British Society for Paranormal Studies,feels that the Spiritualist community owes Mrs Duncan a huge debt. "Because of the way this lady was treated, the Witchcraft Act was repealed and the Spiritualist church was recognised by statue. Everyone's clamouring for justice for things that happened in the war, so why shouldn't we?" He believes she was given an unfair trial. "The acid test as to whether she was telling the truth was that she offered to hold a seance in court, but she was refused."

Campaigners have tracked down several witnesses to the Mrs Duncan case, including the commander of the U-boat which sank HMS Barham. Hans Friedrich Freiherr Von Theisnhausan, now 82 and living in the United States, has put on record that he sank the ship at 4.30pm on 25 November 1941. "My wife tells me that her school had adopted the Barham and that suddenly letters written to the sailors aboard were neither answered or returned. It was not until she read Churchill's book that she knew what had happened."