Doris Stokes
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Doris Stokes (born: Jan 6th 1920, Grantham, United Kingdom) was a renouned and celebrated British Clairaudient, whose memoirs, public demonstrations of mediumship, and television appearances helped to raise the profile of Spiritualism and promoted a resurgence of interest in psychic phenomena in the late twentieth century.
According to her memoirs, she started seeing spirits and hearing disembodied voices in childhood, abilities she was to develop once she joined a local Spiritualist Church. She began demonstrating mediumship with peculiar accuarcy, which she later demonstrated in many television appearances and public readings.
Although repeatedly challenged as a fraud using methods from cold-reading to eavesdropping to glean information from her sitters, Stokes, unusually, was known to defend herself with messages of peculiar accuracy and detail and underwent several investigations to determine the source of her knowledge about sitters. In 1978, she undertook a series of tests on US television, which were a notable success, and increased her public profile as well as that of Spiritualism, much to the condemnation of the Church of England, which objected to meduimship as an offense to God, as indicated in several Biblical texts which forbid using the services of what are now called psychics.
At the end of her last memoir, completed before she underwent surgery to remove a brain tumour, she reports a disembodied voice telling her 'Your life on earth is over, your life in spirit has begun.' She died shortly afterwards during surgery in 1987.
Bibliography
- Voices: a Doris Stokes Collection, Doris Stokes
- A Host of Voices: The Second Doris Stokes Collection, Doris Stokes
- A Tribute to Doris Stokes, edited by Linda Dearsley
External Links
- www.snu.org.uk/index2.htm
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