The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The True Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II [Hardcover]

Nina Shandler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2006

On March 23, 1944, as the Allied Forces were preparing for D-Day, Helen Duncan--"Nell" to her six children and four grandchildren and "Hellish Nell" to her detractors--stood in the dock of Britain's highest criminal court accused of:witchcraft! At the time of her arrest, Helen Duncan was Britain's most controversial psychic, a celebrity medium with a notorious reputation. During her seances, she channeled spirits who spoke from the world beyond, and on a few occasions, her "spirit" seemed to know too much: Helen's seances were accurately revealing top-secret British ship movements. Intelligence authorities wanted "Hellish Nell" silenced. Using diaries, personal papers, interviews, and declassified documents, Nina Shandler resurrects this strange episode and explores the unanswered questions surrounding the trial: Did "Hellish Nell" channel spirits of the dead who gave away wartime secrets? Was she a calculating charlatan or the innocent target of obsessive wartime secrecy? Why did the Director of Public Prosecutions try her as a witch, and not a spy? Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, The Strange Case of Hellish Nell is a true crime tale laced with psychic phenomena and wartime intrigue.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In April 1944 as Allied forces were prepping for D-Day, the British press made headlines about a Scottish mother of six who was being tried under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Obese and lower-class, Helen Duncan apparently had a gift of second sight that was exploited by her idle husband, who taught her to be a proper medium and sent her act on the road. In addition to communing with the dead, the famed spiritualist had a knack for divulging ship movements and losses, and Portsmouth Chief Constable Arthur West, ordered to protect Britain's premier naval port during wartime, was duly alarmed. But how do you silence a medium without giving away the fact that she had accurately forecast military secrets? West nabbed her as a fake who defrauded innocent victims. Despite an excellent defense, Duncan got nine months and served six; after the war she happily embraced her powers even though she had sworn to retire. Unfortunately, family therapist Shandler (Ophelia's Mom) displays a penchant for overheated, amateurish prose (the red ink from Churchill's note to the home secretary "dripped with disdain") and conjures a tedious tale from an intriguing subject. Photos. (Oct.)
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Review

"A compelling read." -- Metapsychology Online, 2/27/07

"A fascinating work that reads like an interesting but offbeat piece of fiction." -- January Magazine, 12/20/06

"A riveting and cinematic tale." -- Boston Sunday Globe, 9/3/2006

"A thoughtful and often entertaining look at an unusual chapter in World War II history." -- Law & Politics Book Review, February 2007

"Fascinating...Shandler's book exhumes the issues and makes the character of Helen Duncan a worthy study." -- Winston-Salem Journal, 11/12/2006

"Shandler tells this tale...with the clipped pace, humor and suspense of a war movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock." -- Santa Fe New Mexican, 9/24/2006

"The book is a page-turner with a spooky theme." -- Northern Virginia Magazine, October 2006

"Unlike other history tomes, this book flies by like a spitfire in a dogfight...Well worth the [read]." -- (Bookgasm.com, 10/25/2006)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (September 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306814382
• ISBN-13: 978-0306814389
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,035,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Seance on a Wet Afternoon, November 14, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The True Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II (Hardcover)

Nina Shandler digs deep and performs feats of research that not even Helen Dunca's previous biographer, talented Malcolm Gaskill could pull off. She is indefatigable and has interviewed all sorts of people who still remember the extraordinary and redoubtable creature that was Helen Duncan, the last woman to be tried in England for witchcraft. Tried *and* found guilty!

Duncan was a woman of impressive girth, and from a lowly social station, so she was triply a freak, Shandler argues, to the middle-class ladies and gentlemen who were her patrons. Mediums and illicit sexuality had long been intertwined in the popular imagination, but what people wondered about Duncan was not her sexual capability, but how many places there were on her vast body to conceal the suspected tools of mediumship, the fake ectoplasm, the rolls of butter muslin, the megaphone, the human hand dipped in wax and cast into the air. Doctors were always on hand to strip her nude and to examine every crevice of her body before she was strapped into her special "seance suit." Thus there's something of "THE ELEPHANT MAN" to Nina Shandler's understanding of Helen Duncan, the extreme physical degradation undergone grimly by both "freaks." No wonder then that, when World War II came around, she began to cause an ectraordinary, and still completely misunderstood, form of grief to the Admiralty and to the secret war effort in general.

In a seance she revealed to a couple that, even though they were still getting mail from their sailor son aboard the HMS Barham, the ship had been sunk in the Mediterranean some months previously. Christmas cards were forged from the sons, just to preserve the illusion that the Navy was in top form in the Med. Helen Duncan's revelations have never been satisfactorily explained. Did she have access to secret information? If so, why reveal it in such a dramatic and bound to be talked about way? Was she in fact guilty of treason?

Shandler struggles from time to time with the necessity of making her material "cinematic." Thus, based on a contemporary report that pop music was audible through the thin walls of the courthouse during Duncan's trial, Shandler will extrapolate from that and write calmly that everyone heard "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition." (Her footnote will blithely explain that "PTL" was indeed a top pop number of the day and might very well have been the number in question.) It's not scholarship at all, it's guesswork. She re-creates whole conversations and scenes in this way, like a novelist. She's not bad as a novelist, but her vaunted footnotes just make you giggle with their glib explanations for what amounts to wholesale invention. All in the service of revealing what was in the mind, at all times, of all her principal characters and most of the minor ones. Nevertheless she has written an impressive, convincing, and provocative addition to the literature of the paranormal. Simon Winchester himself has written nothing better.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Really Happened in England, November 21, 2006

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The True Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II (Hardcover)

A book that if it hadn't led to a prison sentence would go down as comedy.

It is early 1944. Helen Duncan is being tried for WITCHCRAFT! Yes, Witchcraft and in 1944. The law, you see, put into effect in 1735 is still in effect.

Oh well! This only proved the second of her mother's prophecies - 'You'll be tried as a witch.'

Not only was she tried, she was convicted and put in jail.

Come on, you gotta be kidding.

Nope - tried, convicted, jailed.

Nell was a spiritualist. She contacted a dead Spirit named Albert. On May 24, 1941 Albert speaking through her said, 'A great British battleship has just sunk.' At that time the Navy itself wasn't aware that the Bismark had just sunk HMS Hood. Neither did the German Navy know as the Bismark was keeping radio silence.

Later in November 1941 the battleship HMS Barham was sunk by a U-boat in the Med. later that November Helen reported that a ghost-like creature appeared, wearing a sailor's cap that read HMS Barham. The creature hovered around a young woman and said, 'Sorry Sweetheart, my ship sank in the Mediterranean. I've crossed over to the other side.' Meanwhile, the Royal Navy began a cover up including forged Christmas cards from the dead crewmen to prevent the Germans from finding out that the Barham was sunk.

These two incidents led the authorities to fear that Helen would talk about other things like the D-Day landings, so they tried her and put her in jail.

The report of the trial was classified 'CLOSED UNTIL 2046.' A good way to keep things secret. But this is England, land of freedom, fair judges and all that. Still it's true, and fascinating reading.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a fun read, a truly bizarre tale, December 30, 2006

By 

Jack Rosenblum (Deerfield, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Strange Case of Hellish Nell: The True Story of Helen Duncan and the Witch Trial of World War II (Hardcover)

For those of you who, like myself, enjoy bizarre stories, "The Strange Case of Hellish Nell" will be your cup of tea. In the style of the non-fiction novel popularized by Truman Capote in "In Cold Blood" and Norman Mailer in "The Executioner's Song", the book traces the extraordinary life of Helen Duncan, highlighting her 1944 trial for "witchcraft", all of this documented by voluminous footnotes, and adds what Shandler calls "constructed" dialogue and states of mind that flesh out and enliven the documented record.

One of the ironic details of the story is that while the driving force behind the criminal prosecution was the fear that her channeled spirit Albert would reveal war secrets surrounding the imminent Normandy landings, the statute under which she was indicted actually accused her of being a fraudulent medium. So the government labored to prove she was a charlatan and phony while secretly fearing she was just legitimate enough to apprehend and reveal real secrets. If she were truly guilty of being a fraud, she would be technically guilty but no real threat to government secrecy. On the other hand, if she were innocent, she might be acquitted of the charges but would represent quite a real security risk. This cognitive dissonance adds humor and complexity to the "strange case".

One interesting sidelight is that even though Duncan was convicted, the preponderance of testimony under oath tended to establish that far from being a fraud, she could actually channel deceased spirits. The book thus adds a bit of second-hand evidence to the life-after-life debate.

My one reservation is that the tone went back and forth between broad comedy and pathos. Many of the dramatis personae are portrayed as stock comic characters, but Helen Duncan was physically and emotinally abused and incarcerated for six months, which are hardly laughing matters. So, is this a comedy or a tragedy? Maybe, like life, it's both.

But overall, this is a fun read and a stranger than fiction truly bizarre tale.