Doris Stokes

Doris May Fisher Stokes (January 6, 1920 - May 8, 1987), born Doris Sutton, was a British spiritualist. Her memoirs, public performances, and television appearances helped to raise the profile of spiritualism and promoted a resurgence of interest in psychic phenomena in the 1980s

Stokes was born in Grantham, Britain. 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

She 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, with the tickets selling out in two hours.In 1980, her first, ironically ghost-written, autobiographical volume, Voices In My Ear: The Autobiography of a Medium was published, pulling her further into the public eye in the UK. Over two million copies of her books were sold

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 on 1987-05-08. At the end of her last memoir, published after her death but completed before her final operation, she reported a disembodied voice telling her "Your life on Earth is over, your life in spirit has begun.

(Source: Wikipedia)