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Doris May Fisher Stokes (6 January 1920 – 8 May 1987), born Doris Sutton, was a British spiritualist, professional Mediumship, and author. Her public performances, television appearances, and memoirs made her a household name in Britain. While some believed her to possess psychic abilities, investigations published after her death demonstrated that she used fraudulent techniques including cold reading, hot reading, and planting accomplices in her audience.
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 was condemned by the Church of England and other Christian denominations, which objected to spirit communication as an offence to God. She countered that her work was done for God, and in accordance with the Bible's injunction to "test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world" (1 John 4.:1).
Stokes's health was poor throughout her life. Her thirteen or so cancer operations included a mastectomy, and the April 1987 removal of a brain tumour, after which she did not regain consciousness. She died in Lewisham, London on 8 May 1987. Described variously as "an individual of great personal warmth", "the Gracie Fields of the psychic world" and "a ruthless moneymaking confidence artist", she continued to give free consultations or "sittings" until a month before her death, when she left only £15,291.
He attended one of Stokes's London Palladium performances in November 1986, when she claimed to contact the dead relatives of four consecutive audience members, with a sequence of convincing and poignant details. However, when the participants were questioned after the performance, it turned out that each of them had been invited by Stokes. The manager of the Palladium explained that Stokes routinely booked the front three rows of the theatre for her own use.
Those "contacted" included a young woman called Dawn. She was given a message supposedly from her husband, who had died less than a month earlier, telling her that he supported her decision to turn off his life support machine. However, when hospital nurses had asked her whether she would like to speak to anybody about this decision, she had asked to speak to Doris Stokes. Stokes had spoken to Dawn by telephone, offering commiseration and asking to be updated with the results of the tests that would determine whether Dawn's husband lived or died.
In 1987, Dawn described a number of personal details which Stokes had given unprompted to her mother on the phone. While Dawn found these convincing, Wilson suggests that Stokes obtained them from Dawn's aunt, a prominent local spiritualist.
Another participant was Marilyn Stenning, whose daughter Kerry had recently died in a car accident. She received a personal phone call from Stokes, offering her front-row seats for the Palladium performance. Other participants included "camp followers", who regularly attended the shows and repeatedly received messages from the same people. During the second half of the performance, members of the audience were chosen apparently at random. Wilson described this post-interval performance as "much less convincing ... relying on intelligent guesswork and 'fishing.
In her book, Voices in my Ear, Stokes claimed that she had solved two murder cases in England. However, Detective Chief Superintendent Wilfrid Brooks of the Lancashire Constabulary stated that Stokes made no contribution whatsoever to the detection of either murderer.
Whilst in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, she also claimed that local murder victim Vic Weiss had contacted her with details of his murder. Former magician and high-profile sceptic, James Randi, contacted the Los Angeles Police Department, who informed him that all of the information supplied by Stokes had been available to the media at the time. Stokes was unable to provide any new information to the police and the case remains unsolved.
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