by Bruno Gemelli– Victoria Helen McCrae Duncan (Callander 25/11/1897 – Edinburgh, 6/12/1956), as a child she was called “Hellish Nell” (Nell, diminutive of Hellen, the infernal). For many she was a Scottish psychic, for others a witch. She was the last woman tried and jailed for witchcraft in England. The British Prime Minister of the time, Winston Churchill, was her devotee because the medium publicly announced the disaster, kept very secret by the British authorities, of the sinking by a German U-boat of the great battleship HMS Barham, in which they were 861 sailors perished on 25 November 1941.
Duncan’s vision occurred a few days later, during a séance she said that the ghost of one of the sailors from the sunken ship had communicated it to her. The British Navy was so shocked by the revelation that it feared that the Duncan was a German spy. Helen Duncan was tried under the Witchcraft Act, dated 1735. Churchill himself intervened to contest the use of this archaic law against the medium he so esteemed, but Duncan was still convicted and spent nine months in prison. It was later discovered that when Duncan had made the sensational revelation of the sinking of HMS Barham, the British Navy had already informed the families of the dead sailors but had asked them to keep the news of the sinking confidential, so as not to inform the Germans of the extent of the blow inflicted on Her Majesty’s Navy. There were a few thousand civilians who knew about the tragedy, and it is very likely that Duncan heard the news from them and then passed it off as a paranormal revelation.
The brigand operating in Calabria
Churchill was right to define that law as “outdated nonsense”. On the subject of witchcraft there was a Calabrian precedent many decades earlier. It was that of Maria Oliverio, known as Ciccilla (1841 – 1879), who was accused of witchcraft. She was an Italian brigand, part of the gang of Pietro Monaco, her husband, between May 1862 and February 1864, operating in Calabria in the aftermath of the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy by Vittorio Emanuele II. In March 1862, despite having not previously committed any crime and for no apparent reason, she was arrested, together with her sister Teresa, by Major Pietro Fumel. She was imprisoned in the prisons of the Convent of San Domenico (today only the basement and a section of the wall remain) in Celico, to ensure that her husband Pietro Monaco turned himself in (as Maria said in the testimony at the trial); or, as seems more likely, to blackmail her husband in order to kill some pro-Bourbon bandits (Leonardo Bonaro, who met José Borjes on 5 October 1861, and the gang leader Pietro Santo Piluso called Tabacchera).
The latter were killed immediately before the release of the two sisters. Ciccilla remained in prison for two months. She released from prison, then twenty years old, she killed her sister for slander, with 48 blows of the axe. She joined her husband’s band of bandits.
The slew of crimes
She was accused of countless crimes: kidnappings, violent and armed robberies (called robbery), thefts, fires, murders, killing of pets. There were 32 charges against her, all listed in the trial against her which was held in Catanzaro in February 1864 the day after her arrest. Of all the crimes she only confessed to the murder of her sister, while for all the others she said she was forced to do so. Her life was told for the first time in Peppino Curcio’s book “Ciccilla” (Pellegrini, 2010). She was subsequently told in the novel “Italiana”, written by Giuseppe Catozzella (Mondadori, 2021).
