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Hellish Nell


CharlieCluster7

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I know there was a topic on this already from 2006 but does anyone know any other prophecies made by Duncan?

"Helen MacFarlane was born in Callander, Perthshire on 25 November 1897, the daughter of a slater. At school, to the distress of her mother (a member of the Presbyterian church), she alarmed her fellow pupils with her dire prophecies and hysterical behaviour. In 1916 she married Henry Duncan, a cabinet maker and wounded war veteran, who was supportive of her supposed supernatural talents. In 1926 she developed from clairvoyant to medium by offering séances in which she claimed to summon the spirits of recently deceased persons by emitting ectoplasm from her mouth. A mother of six, she also worked part-time in a bleach factory.

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Helen_Duncan

Edited by Still Waters
Reduced amount of copied text - please avoid copy and pasting entire web pages or articles.
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why you delete the good parts?

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well delete that first part and put on the stuff about the HMS Barham.

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PM the mod and tell him to do it.

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No, I do what I want

Yeah Make the Mod do it, SkepticalB. We all know you have the POWER OF GRAYSKULL!

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A lot of the stories surrounding Helen Duncan are based on hearsay and like chinese whispers stories can become very exaggerated.

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A lot of the stories surrounding Helen Duncan are based on hearsay

But didn't she get her start as a clairvoyant, rather than as a medium? Which makes me wonder why she made the switch?

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But didn't she get her start as a clairvoyant, rather than as a medium? Which makes me wonder why she made the switch?

She probably realised it was more profitable. However, I don't really see the difference between a medium and clairevoyant. I don't doubt that people probably witnessed things but over time things get overexaggerated just like chinese whispers.

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Because you can't get paid to predict the future (in general), but you can readily find suckers willing to pay to speak to their departed loved ones. Especially during her time period.

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Because you can't get paid to predict the future (in general), but you can readily find suckers willing to pay to speak to their departed loved ones. Especially during her time period.

People have always paid gypsies to read fortunes at fetes and summer fayres but I suspect she tried to disassociate herself from that kind of performance, thinking that the parlour mediumship was more respectable.

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She was a prognosticator rather than you run-of-the-mill fortune teller. No money in that.

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  • 2 months later...

Because you were taking up too much space just copying/pasting when your link leads to the same information

Duncan was not psychic. She picked up on the sinking of the ship from others:

"There was no shroud of secrecy; The Times of London carried news of the disaster on the Monday. The loss of HMS Barham, torpedoed off the coast of Egypt on 25 November 1941, was indeed kept quiet for a while, but letters of condolence were sent out to families of the 861 dead, asking them to keep the secret until the official announcement. So, allowing for perhaps 10 people in each family, there were about 9,000 people who knew of the sinking; if each of them told only one other person, there were 20,000 people in the country aware of the sinking, and so on - hardly a closely guarded secret. In short, news of the sinking spread like wildfire; Duncan simply picked up the gossip and decided to turn it into profit."

Her ectoplasm was made from cheesecloth.

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