Doris Stokes

Doris May Fisher Stokes (6 January 1920 – 8 May 1987), born Doris Sutton, was a British spiritualist and professional medium. Her public performances, television appearances and memoirs made her a household name in Britain.

During her lifetime, she was a controversial figure, with some believing her to possess psychic abilities. Investigations published after her death demonstrated that she routinely planted unwitting accomplices in her audience.

Stokes was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. In her memoirs she claimed that she started seeing spirits and hearing disembodied voices in childhood, and developed these abilities further once she joined a local spiritualist church. She was recognised as a practising clairaudient medium by the Spiritualists' National Union in 1949.

During a crisis of confidence in 1962, she gave up her work as a medium and retrained as a psychiatric nurse, but had 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.

Stokes first came to public attention 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. She was especially believable 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". In 1980, her first autobiographical volume, Voices in My Ear: The Autobiography of a Medium was published, pulling her further into the public eye in the UK. More than two million copies of her books were sold. Positive testimonials continued to come forward into the 2000s, including ones from Eamonn Holmes and Dale Winton.

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