Hellish Nell, the Last Witch of Scotland

To some, Helen Duncan is a powerful medium who bridges the realms of the living and the dead. To others, she's a dangerous con artist blending deception and stolen top-secret information to prey on the grieving and the gullible. Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at https://ziprecruiter.com/KILLERS Sources for this episode include: The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II by Nina ShandlerSix Feet Over: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary RoachRegurgitation and the Duncan Mediumship by Harry Price Keep up with Killer Stories! Instagram: @killerstoriespodTikTok: @killerstoriespodX: @killerstorieshq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Harvey Guillén?

  There's a moment in almost every true crime story where someone knows something they're not supposed to know. Sometimes it's a witness, other times it's a spouse, or a friend, or just the wrong person in the room when the right conversation happens. And sometimes, the danger isn't even what they know. It's that they say it out loud. Because knowing something isn't the issue. Saying it at the wrong time is. In today's story, the question isn't simply whether a woman could talk to the dead. It's whether she was a gifted medium, or a practiced con artist,

• 0:49Harvey Guillén?

  or someone who by chance or design kept getting it right. And whether those truths came from spirits, coincidence, or manipulation, what mattered most was that she said them out loud. I'm Harvey Guillén, and this is Killer Stories.

• 1:31Harvey Guillén?

  Today's story, well, the full story wasn't supposed to be told for another 20 years. Parts of it come from a British government file labeled "Closed Until 2046." But some stories have a way of coming to light, even if that means breaking through the strongest of barriers. And nobody knows that better than Helen Duncan, aka Hellish Nell.

• 1:58Harvey Guillén?

  In the 1930s and 40s, she was one of the most well-known spiritualist mediums around. As in, her job was to hold seances to commune with the dead. She claimed the dead would give her information from the beyond. And sometimes, it was information she wasn't supposed to have. Things the military considered "top secret", which would eventually put a big target right on Helen's back. But, before we get into how hellish nell raised hell during WWII, here's what you need to know about her. Helen is born in the Scottish Highlands in the 1890s. This is a place that loves itself some supernatural entities.

• 2:43Harvey Guillén?

  Fairies, changing babies left behind by naughty fairies, dogs that are also fairies. There are entire books dedicated to their rich folklore about fairies. So, it's not all that strange when young Helen starts to believe she has psychic powers. But she also earns a certain reputation. She's a rough-and-tumble kid. She dishes out bad news prophecies to kids on the playground. And her favorite place to play is the local haunted cemetery. She's basically that kid you don't want to babysit because they're going to casually mention some eight-foot man who lives in their closet. You know the kid I'm talking about. You know exactly the kid I'm talking about. Anyway, that's how she gets her nickname: hellish nell.

• 3:27Harvey Guillén?

  And people are actually calling her this as a little girl. But eventually, she finds a way to live up to her nickname and make it work for her at the same time, by turning her reputation into a lucrative business. By 1930, she's an up-and-coming medium hosting seances for money. Now, this is a true crime show, so here's the part where I should mention, the general consensus nowadays is that Helen was a con artist, and so were a lot of the old mediums. And yeah, they could put on an amazing show. There's not a huge difference between a medium and a magician, except the medium is pretending like she's not doing magic tricks. And she's taking people's money

• 4:10Harvey Guillén?

  and making them believe that they're talking to their dead loved ones. Now, we don't know for certain how she pulled off all of her tricks, so I'm gonna put you in the shoes of an audience member, okay? If you were attending one of Helen's séances, this is what it would look like. Outside the séance room, female audience members inspect Helen's naked body. This is to ensure she's not hiding any tricks up her sleeve, or, you know, elsewhere. After her special robes are examined, she throws them on, and it's time for the show. Helen enters a darkened room, pitch black, except for the light of a single red bulb. She takes a seat,

• 4:54Harvey Guillén?

  and a makeshift curtain drops, hiding her from the audience. They wait as Helen falls into a trance. It's always signaled by her loud snoring, like a chainsaw. Not hard to miss. And that's when she begins to secrete something called ectoplasm. It's like this shimmering, long, white veil. Supposedly, the ectoplasm is a spiritual energy in a tangible form, and only certain types of mediums, like Helen, can produce it. The ectoplasm creeps out from Helen's mouth, or sometimes her nose, and snakes its way down her body

• 5:36Harvey Guillén?

  until it peeks out from underneath the curtain. Then, it somehow gathers itself up into the shape of a man. This is what Helen calls Albert. He's her spirit guide. Albert is actually able to move about the room underneath this veil of ectoplasm. It acts kind of like a suit of armor, protecting a spirit venturing back into the world of the living. And Albert has a couple of jobs during a séance. First, he's there to get the party started. Albert likes to sing, tells jokes. He's kind of like a warmer comic, except he gets everybody pumped to talk to dead people.

• 6:22Harvey Guillén?

  And second, as Helen's guide, Albert helps find people in the spirit realm. When audience members ask to speak to a beloved aunt, or a parent, or a sibling, or even a pet, Albert ushers the spirit into the room. And somehow Helen can make it look like they're really there, in the flesh. Well, sort of. Like Albert, these spirits are always hidden under the ectoplasm. But the audience can make out hints of facial features. They can hear the spirits talk. And Helen's believers will swear that they are really and truly speaking with their

• 7:05Harvey Guillén?

  late mother, spouse, sibling, people they were extremely close to in real life. These audience members will attest the spirits look right, sound right, and know things only they could know. But is Helen just that good of a showperson? Or are her targets seeing what they want to see? The whole time this is happening, Helen's still behind the curtain. Well, at least that's what she wants you to think, that she's in her trance, merely acting as the conduit for all of these spirits. But we don't know for sure. Some say she's the one under the ectoplasm.

• 7:48Harvey Guillén?

  At the end of the séance, Helen wakes from her trance, seemingly with no memory of what went on, as she walks away with a fat stack of cold, hard cash. So Helen could put on a damn good show. And it's not even surprising that she has a lot of fans. But even in the 1930s, she's already got haters, who see Helen as a drifter, a con artist, selling illusions as the truth, and taking money from people in their most desperate hour, when they're broken, grieving, and will pay anything to talk to their loved

• 8:29Harvey Guillén?

  ones again, and who might be more gullible, or willing to believe the unbelievable, just to ease their broken hearts.

• 8:39Harvey Guillén?

  But usually, in a con artist's case, it's obvious what the con is. We know more or less how the thief pulls it off. Pyramid schemes, stealing fake identities, selling fake products. That all makes sense. With Helen, it's hard to prove exactly how she's conning people, even when the professionals get involved. In 1931, a prominent psychic investigator named Harry Price puts Helen through a bunch of tests. He wants to be the one to debunk her tricks. And she agrees to it because, one, money. And, two, if she can make Harry Price a believer,

• 9:22Harvey Guillén?

  she'll probably become the biggest medium in the world. The whole thing is supposed to be very scientific, but it involves stuff like putting Helen in a big onesie that covers her hands and feet, like a baby would wear. It's supposed to limit her mobility, but she's usually still able to run her séances. And when she can't, she has a pretty good excuse. Albert doesn't always show up when she wants him to. Hmm. Price's main focus is figuring out how she's producing the ectoplasm. Science says she can't conjure it from out of thin air, so she must be hiding it somewhere on her body when she begins a séance.

• 10:07Harvey Guillén?

  If Price can just find out where she hides it, her whole story falls apart. So Price takes his investigation to some pretty iffy levels. But to be fair, both Helen and her husband agree to go through with these tests. One day, Price hires a doctor to give Helen a full-body cavity search. He wants to make sure she isn't hiding it where the sun don't shine. But they don't find anything. So Price brings in an X-ray machine. Only, he doesn't tell her that's what it is. Helen takes one look at it and thinks they're going to use it for another body cavity search. So she does a 180 and runs out of the building while wearing the giant baby onesie.

• 10:54Harvey Guillén?

  In the end, Price writes a whole book about Helen and claims he has debunked her. He says it's just Helen doing the voice of Albert, the spirit guide. It's Helen creeping around under the ectoplasm pretending to be people's deceased relatives. Sometimes, she even brings masks to disguise herself. He concludes, "The ectoplasm is just a piece of cheesecloth anybody can buy at the store." As for where she hides the ectoplasm, he never finds out for sure. But he thinks she bundles it up and swallows it before each show.

• 11:34Harvey Guillén?

  Then, once she's behind the curtain, she vomits it out. Then she wears this coughed-up ectoplasm all night and swallows it again when the show's over, so nobody can see it. Price titles his book Rigoritation and the Duncan Mediumship. But after it comes out, he's hit with backlash. Turns out, people don't really care what he has to say about Helen's abilities. The book only makes her more popular. So she keeps running her séances and keeps taking people's money. But she doesn't stay out of trouble for long.

• 12:19Harvey Guillén?

  In 1933, Helen's arrested on fraud charges. One night, while she's putting on her show, her audience gets suspicious. For one thing, Helen's not wearing her standard séance robes, so they didn't get to inspect her clothing. For another, one of them can blatantly see Helen hiding behind a piece of furniture. She's working a piece of cloth like a puppet, pretending it's a little spirit named Piggy.

• 12:48Harvey Guillén?

  The group starts to get rowdy. They are not having it, and they demand she prove she is not hiding anything in her street clothes. To put it lightly, Helen doesn't like that suggestion. According to one witness, she throws a chair at a paying customer, and then she hits him with her shoe. Eventually, she does agree to disrobe, but only in front of the women. So, all the men file out, and Helen angrily throws her clothes off. And out falls a piece of cloth that looks just like Peggy, the little spirit guide.

• 13:28Harvey Guillén?

  It's probably the closest anybody comes to proving how Helen pulls off her con, and she thinks then by throwing another chair, and then taking her money and leaving. But the cops track her down and arrest her. It's not the end of the world for her. Mediums get arrested all the time, but their sentences are usually light. Helen faces either a $10 fine or one month in prison. She has the money, so she avoids going behind bars. This time. But so far, Helen's only ticked off members of the public. A few years later, she makes some very powerful enemies, who want to keep her silenced any way they can.

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• 15:15Harvey Guillén?

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• 16:00Harvey Guillén?

  In spite of everyone who says Helen Duncan is a con artist, she's still successful a few years later in 1941. In part, it's because World War II is in full swing. And if you're a medium, war is good for business. People are surrounded by death. The Nazis have just spent months dropping bombs all over Britain during the Blitz. It feels like nobody's safe. And the afterlife is a split second away. So something like a séance could provide some comfort. Because if you believe what the medium is showing you, then even death can keep you apart from the people you love.

• 16:44Harvey Guillén?

  One day in May of 1941, a Royal Naval Brigadier attends one of Helen's séances. That's when Albert, the spirit guide, announces he has a message for everyone. "A great battleship just sank," he says. "A British battleship." The brigadier hears this and immediately gets worried. He's a Helen supporter, so he believes Albert could be right, but he hasn't heard the news yet himself. So, the brigadier slips out mid-séance to find a telephone. He calls and asks an officer if there's been any news of a battleship going down. And the officer says, "No, he hasn't heard about anything remotely like that."

• 17:26Harvey Guillén?

  But the brigadier gets a call back that afternoon. He learns that actually, yes, the HMS Hood was sunk by Hitler's brand-new wondership, the Bismarck. Over 1,400 lives were lost.

• 17:43Harvey Guillén?

  There were only three survivors. And if their timeline is correct, then while Albert, the spirit guide, was making his announcement, those three survivors were still waiting to be rescued from the water. Now, the brigadier finds himself in a sticky situation. The higher-ups want to know, how the hell did he know about the HMS Hood before they did? That's the kind of information they like to keep close. You can't just spread that news around willy-nilly. And the brigadier says Helen Duncan, the medium, told him about the battleship. He says she's really good at what she does,

• 18:26Harvey Guillén?

  but she's also dangerous. Maybe Helen could have gotten her information from an inside source, or maybe she made a lucky guess on this one occasion. But that November, she does it again. Witnesses say that during Helen's seance, the spirit of a sailor appears in front of the room. He's wearing a hat, identifying him as the crew of the HMS Barham. The sailor speaks to a woman in the audience, his wife, and tells her he's sorry. His ship has gone down in the Mediterranean, and he didn't make it. The woman goes straight to the Navy

• 19:11Harvey Guillén?

  to confirm whether or not her husband's ship really sank. And allegedly, the officers tell her, of course not. They assure her that mediums and ghosts are not a good source of breaky news. And if something had gone wrong, she would be officially notified. That Christmas, she gets a card from her husband. So it seems like he's still alive. But he's not. Helen was right again. Here's what really happened to the ship. The Barm had been sunk by the Nazis that November, but that was top-secret info. Even the Nazis didn't know about it. Once they shot at the British ship, they turned and sped away.

• 19:56Harvey Guillén?

  They left so quickly that they thought they only did some light damage. They didn't realize the British ship ended up sinking because they didn't stick around long enough. So the British Navy is trying to keep news of the Barm covered up. That's why they forged those Christmas cards to the soldiers' families. They didn't want anyone to find out that they were one boat down in the Mediterranean. News of Helen's loose lips talking about sunken ships gets back to a guy named Arthur Charles West. He's the chief constable of Portsmouth, England, a vital port city during World War II. It's also where Helen travels all the time to perform séances.

• 20:39Harvey Guillén?

  A week-long run there can earn her over a hundred pounds. But Chief Constable West is no fan of spiritualism or of Helen Duncan. It's bad enough she's a con artist taking people's money. Now, he thinks there's been an intelligence leak and Helen's getting her info from somewhere she shouldn't be and sharing it with the public, which could put lives at risk. So West arranges for MI5 intelligence agents to infiltrate her séances. One of West's men reports back, "Yeah, boss, she just walks around in some gross barfed-up fabric. It's weird."

• 21:20Harvey Guillén?

  Maybe Helen knows she's being spied on, or maybe her well of information runs dry. She doesn't share any more military secrets from then on, but the agents keep tabs on her for years anyway, especially once they start planning D-Day.

• 21:38Harvey Guillén?

  In early 1944, the Allies are secretly prepping for D-Day, which would end up being a huge turning point in the war. But it's only going to work if very few people really know what's going on and everybody keeps their traps shut. These plans are the most top-secret of all top-secret secrets. And Wes starts getting paranoid that Helen's going to catch wind of the D-Day plans, however she gets her information. And then she's going to blab it to everybody and ruin history forever. I guess it's because Helen's always in Portsmouth, and that's where a bunch of ships are slowly gathering in preparation.

• 22:21Harvey Guillén?

  Whatever his deal is, he doesn't want to take any chances. So the next time Helen puts on her show in Portsmouth, she gets raided.

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• 23:35Harvey Guillén?

  In 1944, Helen Seans gets raided by police and intelligence officers. When they burst into the room and flick on the lights, one of them thinks he sees the ectoplasm suspended in midair. He tries to tackle it, but the ectoplasm seems to disappear. They assume Helen, or one of the attendees, grabbed it and hid it away. A detective orders the room to be searched. Nothing turns up. And the men are too polite to search the mostly female audience members, so they leave the raid without the ectoplasm. Meaning, they don't have any tangible evidence she was defrauding her customers, but they do have Helen in custody. Helen is dropped off at Holloway Prison.

• 24:19Harvey Guillén?

  It's this intimidating fortress with 20-foot walls, but she's like, "Whatever, let me pay my fine and I'll be on my way." Because usually, when a medium is arrested, it's a misdemeanor. Helen thinks she'll fork over a few pounds as a fine, like last time, but this time, some powerful people want to keep her quiet for as long as possible. Or, at least, until they can pull off D-Day. And they can't exactly be open about why they're really keeping her there. So they hit her with a really antiquated law that nobody's used in forever. It's called the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

• 25:03Harvey Guillén?

  They charge her with violating Section 4, which says it's illegal to do any kind of sorcery, enchantment, or conjuring spirits. Now, I know how Witchcraft Act sounds, but they aren't really calling Helen a witch. The law was meant to protect the public from those who pretend they have these powers for money. But the press does not care. They see the word "witch", and cartoon dollar signs appear over their eyes. Calling Helen a witch? Now that's going to sell more papers. So, they run with it. Helen's tried in 1944. Her old frenemy, Harry Price, shows up to watch.

• 25:46Harvey Guillén?

  He even hands over his notes to the prosecution, but he decides he doesn't want to testify, because his angina is acting up.

• 25:56Harvey Guillén?

  Should get that checked out. In the end, Helen's convicted and sentenced to nine months in prison. She's kept under lock and key while the Allies pull off D-Day. After that, Helen Schnell walks away with a new nickname: The Last Witch of Scotland. And she continues working as a medium almost to her dying day. The British government originally sealed Helen Duncan's file for 100 years. Over time, the rules changed. The documents were declassified. And somehow, that still didn't clear things up. There was never hard proof of where Helen hid her ectoplasm.

• 26:40Harvey Guillén?

  The barfing it up theory is still just the most plausible explanation. And Arthur Charles West never figured out how she got her hands on sensitive military information. If you ask Helen Duncan's family, she was the real deal. If you ask the skeptics, she was a con artist, like a lot of mediums back then, selling a convincing lie to grieving people. And if you ask the British government, they never had to pick a side. Because whether Helen was speaking to the dead or performing for the living, she kept brushing up against information that wasn't meant to travel.

• 27:21Harvey Guillén?

  And in a country at war, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time can make you more dangerous than being wrong. Helen Duncan wasn't convicted because anyone finally proved the trick. She was convicted because someone decided she couldn't be allowed to keep talking. Thanks for tuning in to Killer Stories, a Spotify podcast. New episodes release on Mondays. If you liked today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey Guillén. Stay safe out there.