Ectoplasm

Remembering the Medium Helen Duncan

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Helen Duncan, an ordinary Scottish housewife, is reputed to have been one of the greatest materialization mediums that ever lived. She didn’t just speak to the dead: she welcomed them back to the séance room, wreathed in ectoplasm that emanated from her body. In this talk, Malcolm Gaskill looks back on Mrs Duncan’s legacy, particularly his experience of researching her life over a decade ago. Despite her conviction for fraud in 1944, this medium, like her spiritual guests, remains a vivid presence in the annals of Spiritualism and in Gaskill’s historical consciousness.


Malcolm Gaskill is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. An expert in the history of witchcraft and seventeenth-century mentalities, he is the author of many essays and articles, and of four books, mostly recently Witchcraft: a Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010). In 2001 he published Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (4th Estate), a biography of Helen Duncan.