Doris May Fisher Stokes (6 January 1920 – 8 May 1987), née Sutton, was arguably the most famous Spiritualist
System of beliefs and practices intended to establish communication with the spirits of the dead. medium of the 1970s and ’80s, certainly in her native UK. Her public performances, television appearances, and memoirs made her a household name in Britain.[1][2][3] Some believed her to possess psychic abilities, but investigations published after her death demonstrated that she used fraudulent techniques, including cold reading, hot reading, and planting accomplices in her audience.[4]
Doris was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the only daughter of Samuel Sutton, engineer’s labourer, and his wife Jane, née Wesselby. In her memoirs she claimed as a child to have received visitations from “spirit children”, and witnessed the spirit of a neighbour killed in a house-fire walking alongside his charred body as it was carried from the scene of the tragedy.[1]
In 1944 Doris married John Fisher Stokes, a journeyman shoemaker, serving in the Parachute Regiment during the Second World War. Their son, born in August 1944, died aged five and a half months. Inconsolable, Doris and John began attending Spiritualist services, and she found herself passing on messages from the “spirit world” to fellow churchgoers; she soon began holding her own services at local Spiritualist churches, and in 1949 was officially recognised as a practising clairaudient medium by the Spiritualist Union.[1]
During a crisis of confidence in 1962, Doris abandoned her work as a medium and retrained as a psychiatric nurse.[5] But she was forced to retire five years later following an attack by a patient. She returned to her psychic work, and in 1975 became the resident medium at the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain.[1] She also tried her hand at psychic detective work with an “extravagant lack of success”, as in the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered thirteen young women between 1975 and 1980.[2]
Celebrity
Doris took her first steps towards celebrity in 1978 during a visit to Australia, when she appeared on The Don Lane Show. In the wave of interest that followed her appearance, she played to three capacity audiences at the Sydney Opera House. She was also the first medium to appear at the London Palladium; the tickets sold out in two hours.[6] She was especially credible because of her smiling, down-to-earth manner, which avoided the traditional trappings of the séance, and gave her performances almost “the ordinariness of a transatlantic telephone call”.[7]
Criticism and debunking
Doris was often accused of blasphemy by members of the public during her public appearances, which she countered by claiming that she was “neither Satanist nor psychic detective, that her work was done for God, and that her sole purpose was to reassure people of the continued existence of the ‘dead’ ”.[1]
A show she put on towards the end of her life, at the London Palladium in 1986, was attended by two journalists. Their intention was to obtain contact details for follow-up interviews from some of the audience members apparently selected at random, for whom Doris had produced “dramatically accurate readings”. They discovered that those supposedly randomly chosen members of the audience had all been invited and given free tickets, on the basis of information provided by their family members.[2]
Later life and death
Doris was plagued by ill health throughout most of her life, undergoing thirteen operations for cancer, including a mastectomy. In April 1987 she underwent surgery for a malignant brain tumour in the Wellington Hospital, north-west London, from which she never regained consciousness. She died in Lewisham, London, on 8 May 1987.[1]
Bibliography
- Voices in My Ear (1980)
- More Voices in My Ear (1981)
- Innocent Voices in My Ear (1983)
- Host of Voices (1984)
- Whispering Voices (1985)
- Voices of Love (1986)
- Joyful Voices (1987)
