Paranormal record / 1941
Portsmouth. November 1941. In a room above a druggist's shop on Copnor Road, the medium Helen Duncan held a séance. A figure appeared. A sailor, with a cap band that read H.M.S. Barham. Several people present recognised him. The ship, he said, had been sunk in the Mediterranean. The loss had not yet been announced. Two years later, a naval lieutenant came to watch. On 19 January 1944 a white figure appeared under a dim red lamp, and a policeman seized it. What followed was a trial at the Old Bailey under the Witchcraft Act 1735, and a case that still divides believers and sceptics.
Helen Duncan was a materialisation medium. Her sitters believed she produced ectoplasm and the forms of the dead from a curtained cabinet. Her record was already contested. In 1931 the London Spiritualist Alliance and the investigator Harry Price examined her. Price said the material he handled "felt exactly like my summer-weight undervest." In Edinburgh in 1933, a sitter grabbed the spirit "Peggy" and found a stockinette undervest.