When the belief wish is hard to drown...

Polly Toynbee - 1 November 1988

The Press, 5 December 1987

Doris Stokes, the medium superstar, was a fraud, says a British author, Ian Wilson, in his book, “The After Death Experience.”

Polly Toynbee, of the “Guardian,” asks if it mattered to her fans.

Is there life after death? It is a question that is guaranteed to sell books until kingdom come (or not). Indeed, when Ian Wilson wrote his book investigating reincarnation claims, his then publishers said they would double his advance if he found any truth in the stories.

It is the question that has dominated the history of mankind, caused and still causes more wars and bloodshed than any other. The fading of organised religion in the West seems to have made little difference to people’s belief in the hereafter. They turn instead to any number of other strange and quirky fads. The advance of science and reason has made small impact on their gullibility and credulity.

In England, the late Doris Stokes, mass media medium, has been the latest to cash in handsomely. Ian Wilson has addressed an International Conference of the Society for Psychical Research to reveal to them the findings of his forthcoming book. He has proved conclusively that Doris Stokes was a fraud, and a fraud who knew very well what she was up to. She died just as the book was going to press, so she could not, alas, be challenged with this incontrovertible proof.

But it would probably have made scant difference to her popularity. Society members listened politely, accepted the evidence that she cheated, but many continued to believe she may have been genuine. Sadly, some said, mediums often cheat but that is no proof that they may not be genuinely psychic too…

Tan Wilson took one of Doris Stokes’s sell-out London Palladium performances and went to interview those for whom she had produced messages from the other side. One of the most startling came for Dawn, a young woman whose recently dead husband, Graham, was calling her. Dawn was delighted. Doris relayed a miraculous message: he had died after a fall from scaffolding, shortly after the birth of their first baby. Via Doris he “told” Dawn that she had been right to allow the hospital to switch off his ventilator. Dawn was deeply moved.

When Ian Wilson went to interview her later, Dawn revealed to him that she had in fact telephoned Doris Stokes when her husband was on a ventilator, to ask her advice about having it turned off. Then, out of the blue, a week before the Palladium performance, Dawn received a call from Doris Stokes offering her free front row tickets for the performance. Even after the show it never occurred to her that the message from her husband was anything but genuine. The wish to believe drowns every vestige of scepticism.

It turned out that all the other people in the audience that night who had received startlingly accurate information about their loved ones were all known to Doris Stokes already, and had also received free tickets, near a microphone.

This may not come as a shock to sceptics. But it is most remarkable that this fraud was practised so lucratively for so long. Stokes became an international superstar, filling the Sydney Opera House many times over, selling millions of books in many languages, was interviewed time and again without being subjected to this simplest of investigations. The media conspired willingly because she was such a good story. She was no more credible or difficult to unmask than the hosts of Victorian mediums emanating cheese cloth from their nostrils while ghostly tambourines dangled from the ceiling. And there will no doubt be plenty more Doris Stokes hastening to plug this gap in the market she has now left vacant.

Does it matter? Only the most cynical or patronising would say that it doesn’t. Preying on the bereaved is a nasty business. Who knows what damage these “messages” might do. It certainly makes coming to terms with death almost impossible and large numbers of Doris Stokes’s fans became near addicts, in the desperate hope of holding on to their dead with sugary little reassurances.

In America now, Shirley MacLaine is having a colossal success with reincarnation following her best-selling book on the subject. Suddenly, the United States is brimming with born-again Cleopatras and Napoleons. In Britain, several hypnotists have caused a great stir by claiming that under hypnosis that they have made people relive past lives.

Arnall Bloxham has been the most famous of these, producing extraordinary tape recordings of people recounting in considerable detail and with astounding historical accuracy, past lives, using accents and obsolete words that they could not, apparently, have acquired in any ordinary way.

Ian Wilson examines the evidence for some of Bloxham’s most notable cases. Jane Evans, aged 30, produced six previous lives. Among them was Livonia, a Roman wife in the fourth century. She recalled in detail watching the young emperor Constantine being trained in the use of weapons by his military tutor. There was much accurate history and factual detail. Jane Evans herself claimed to know nothing about history. What’s more, although her account fitted with the known historical facts, it dealt with an unknown part of Constantine’s early youth, none of which actually appeared in official histories.

By an extraordinary chance, a man interested in the Bloxham tapes happened upon an obscure long out-of-print historical novel in a secondhand book shop. Livonia’s whole story appeared there in detail. Some of the dialogue and the minute details appeared exactly as in the words used by Jane Evans.

When the author of the novel was asked about his sources, he said he had made it all up. Jane Evans had regurgitated the whole novel as her own past life. Investigation of her other “lives” revealed that there had, for instance, been a radio play about one character, a Jewish woman massacred in York in the middle ages.

So much for these hypnotic reincarnation experiences. Noone suggests that there was anything fradulent [sic] about these bizarre imaginings under hypnosis. While they had nothing to reveal about reincarnation, they did reveal a phenomenon that has been all but ignored on account of the “reincarnation” claims.

Those people were able to recall in the most incredible detail the stories, the very words of books they read so long ago that they had genuinely forgotten everything about them. Others have spoken languages only dimly heard as small children. This odd capacity, called cryptomnesia, reveals something astounding about the possibilities of the human brain but the nonsense about reincarnation has obscured it as a subject for serious research.

Ian Wilson is an excellent debunker. But he is highly selective. He has his own particular brand of bunk. He wrote a world-wide best seller about the Turin shroud, declaring it genuine. He is, it emerges a Roman Catholic. He debunks in accordance with his own particular faith. Christians don’t like mediums, magic or reincarnation. They do, though, like Heaven, Hell and God. The belief of others about the hereafter is called superstition, while their own belief is called religion.

He devotes the second half of his book to the experiences of those who have “died” and returned to tell the tale, one of the wonders of modern medicine. He recounts anecdotes where people whose hearts have stopped recall finding themselves out of their bodies, floating above them, looking down on the efforts of those who are trying to resuscitate their corpses.

Even stranger, he tells, wide-eyed, of the extraordinary number of people who have had almost identical experiences of travelling down a dark tunnel to find bright light, God, and their dead loved ones at the other end. They talk of bliss and heaven and absolute happiness and certainty.

Sometimes God is there, helping them to review their lives critically. Sometimes, they are greeted by dead relatives dressed in familiar clothes. One, a woman finds her mother living in exactly the prefab she had always yearned for during her life. One man recalls with horror finding himself in hell.

This tantalizing glimpse, however, is all we get. Perhaps these experiences tell us that dying is not necessarily frightening. Or perhaps it tells us that these people were never really dead anyway. Which plainly must be the case. Dead means dead and no backsies.

For those who have puzzled over the problem of heaven no useful questions are answered. None of the hard ones like what age are the dead? The age they died (is heaven one big geriatric ward7), or in their prime? If they are in their prime, what of babies who have never had one? Are all your dead relatives there or only the ones you like? Or do you suddenly like everyone, in which case who on earth are “you”.

What of those with several spouses? If you meet quite recognisably familiar old friends, have they been purged of evil, in which case they would be very unfamiliar indeed? If they have all merged into one cosmic good, how will we tell them apart?

This book may well be another best-seller, promising its readers a happy death. (Only one out of many went to hell.) But it does go to show that no sooner have we seen off one kind of bunkum, than another surfaces to take its place. In a new scientific era, the Victorians produced mediums surrounded by a lot of pseudoscientific psychic nonsense—notably the interminable experiments in ESP which mysteriously never reproduced in lab conditions. In our era of great medical advance, we have produced a new psychic nonsense in the form of these after death experiences from the ventilator.

These beliefs are not susceptible to proof. Doris Stoke’s fans will continue to cling to the messages she brought them from beyond. Reincarnated Elizabethan pirates will continue to swashbuckle through their fantasy lives. The churches talk grandly of the leap of faith, which non-believers are inclined to regard as an invitation to leave reason and common sense outside the door, like leaving your shoes outside the mosque.

The book that told the astounding story of the Bermuda Triangle (mystically disappearing ships) made its author a fortune. The book that followed soon after, effectively debunking it, with an explanation for every mystery, was remaindered. Where there’s a market there’s a way and the appetite for true tales from beyond the grave seem as keen as it was in the Middle Ages.