Aged 72, Mary Martin is a great-grandmother, but she still remembers how her classmates labeled her "witch spawn" and "evil eye" -- because her grandmother was one of the last people jailed in Britain over witchcraft charges.
At the height of World War II, medium Helen Duncan was convicted under an 18th century anti-witchcraft law and jailed for nine months by authorities who accused her of compromising Britain's safety.
Now, more than 50 years after Duncan's death, Martin is campaigning to secure her a pardon.
"I was only 11 years old when the name-calling started," said Martin, who lives near Edinburgh, Scotland. "People said, `Your grandmother was a witch.'"
"But she was simply a woman with a gift and she never endangered anybody," she said.
Martin has written to the Home Office asking for a meeting with Home Secretary John Reid and has given interviews to the media to raise the campaign's profile. Several hundred people have signed a petition asking for a pardon.
The campaign has the support of experts on the 1692 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, where 20 people, including a number of girls, were convicted of witchcraft and executed. A full pardon for all of them only came in 2001.
Alison D'Amario of the Salem Witch Museum said there were parallels between Duncan's case and that of the young women in Salem.
"[Duncan] was very much the victim of a witch hunt," D'Amario said.
In the 1940s, Duncan was a well-known medium and her clients reportedly included Winston Churchill and King George VI.
But she ran into trouble after reportedly having told the parents of a missing sailor that their son had gone down on the HMS Barham, a ship whose 1941 loss had not been reported immediately to the public in hopes of keeping morale high.
Though it was much later, military authorities grew jittery as the war went on, particularly fearing that plans for the D-Day landings of Allied forces in northern France could be compromised. They accused Duncan of endangering public safety.
In January 1944, police broke into a seance in Portsmouth, southern England, to arrest her and she was charged with "pretending to be a witch" under a 1735 law.
"At the time of D-Day, there was a lot of paranoia around, just like there was in the 17th century," D'Amario said.
Duncan was convicted and jailed for nine months in London's Holloway prison. In 1951, Churchill's government repealed the 1735 law, but her conviction remained.
Duncan died in 1956.
Her case won attention last year when a prominent art festival in the Scottish town of Prestonpans, which is near where Duncan lived, mounted an exhibit featuring Duncan by artist Andrew Crummy.
Festival organizers then got involved in helping Martin try to clear her grandmother's name.
"There was a lot of interest," Crummy said. "People were very sympathetic towards Duncan's cause."
In 2004, Gordon Prestoungrange, holder of Prestonpans' baronial title, used feudal laws still in effect to pardon 81 other "witches" convicted under laws that dated to 1604, when King James I made witchcraft a capital offense.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
SPIRITUAL COUPLE: Martha Louise has said she can talk with angels, while her husband, Durek Verrett, claims that he communicates with a broad range of spirits Social media influencers, reality stars and TV personalities were among the guests as the Norwegian king’s eldest child, Princess Martha Louise, married a self-professed US shaman on Saturday in a wedding ceremony following three days of festivities. The 52-year-old Martha Louise and Durek Verrett, who claims to be a sixth-generation shaman from California, tied the knot in the picturesque small town of Geiranger, one of Norway’s major tourist attractions located on a fjord with stunning views. Following festivities that started on Thursday, the actual wedding ceremony took place in a large white tent set up on a lush lawn. Guests
Thailand has netted more than 1.3 million kilograms of highly destructive blackchin tilapia fish, the government said yesterday, as it battles to stamp out the invasive species. Shoals of blackchin tilapia, which can produce up to 500 young at a time, have been found in 19 provinces, damaging ecosystems in rivers, swamps and canals by preying on small fish, shrimp and snail larvae. As well as the ecological impact, the government is worried about the effect on the kingdom’s crucial fish-farming industry. Fishing authorities caught 1,332,000kg of blackchin tilapia from February to Wednesday last week, said Nattacha Boonchaiinsawat, vice president of a parliamentary
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS