Helen Duncan became famous or infamous (depending on your perspective) as the last person in England to be tried under the eighteenth century Witchcraft Act. Not, one might suppose as a hangover, say in the dawning age of secularism in the mid-nineteenth century say but, in fact, in 1944. The offense was the pretended conjuring of spirits (in a paid performance) at a séance in Portsmouth but why this act and not the Vagrancy Act, usually deployed for these purposes? Was it because Duncan was privy to secrets she might only know by psychic means - the destruction of a British battleship in the Mediterranean for example - at a time of heightened security in the lead up to the D-Day Landings? She certainly became a martyr for the Spiritualist cause - and the aftermath of the case, imprisonment; and, a subsequent botched arrest may have shifted the landscape towards reform, the act's abolition and the seeing of pretended conjuring of spirits as simply falling within the o...