Englishwoman Doris Stokes was a medium – by which I don’t mean her dress size was between small and large. She claimed she spoke to people “on the other side,” to use the euphemistic jargon of the darkened drawing room. She was a sort of cosmic Telecom operator, only I suspect her charges were a good deal higher than 99c a minute plus GST.
I use the past tense because Doris herself has moved on into the spirit world with which she had so long claimed to communicate. Nothing has been heard from her since she died, which I think is pretty contemptuous of her fellow media (the plural of medium(.
Doris became world famous and made a lot of money travelling around linking people up with restless ghosts, using what often sounded like an old country-town party-line system. You could never be quite sure who would answer the call or whether some celestial storm had brought the line down.
Doris Stokes was a professional name. She was born Marilyn Dashing in London but her first manager pointed out that if she wanted to make money bringing messages back from the other side to suckers on Earth, most of the clients would be ordinary and wouldn’t trust anyone who looked and sounded smart or had intellectual pretensions. So Doris changed her name, burned her grammar school diploma, threw away her tight skirts and blouses and bought half a dozen cardies and several strings of paste pearls.
… I remember some years ago when Doris was in New Zealand promoting a book, a radio interviewer asked her if anyone on the other side had described in detail for her what heaven was really like. Doris shocked me to the very soul by verbally painting a setting and ambience almost exactly identical to an inner suburb of Christchurch on a fine Sunday morning. I was gripped by a deep spiritual crisis, wondering if trying to be a good bloke was worth it after all.
Originally published in NZ Skeptic 19, March 1991.