Even Psychics Can Only Be Medium

Englishwoman Doris Stokes was a medium — by which I don't mean that 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 knitted cardies and several strings of paste pearls.

Doris, or Marilyn as she was then, knew she wanted to be a medium from the first moment she heard the rustle of a pound note being dropped into the jar on the hall table as a donation because she couldn't legally take a fee.

How do I know all this? Vibrations.

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.

Memories of Doris flooded back when I read in last Saturday's Herald the story of the young Auckland prostitute Leah Stephens, who has disappeared without a trace and left those who love her bewildered and grieving. Police suspect something awful has happened to her.

Her Aunt Rosalie paid money to a psychic to get some idea what had happened and was told Leah was still alive and "she [the psychic] could see water associated with her." The distressed aunt added: "One of these days when I can save up enough money I'll go to another and better psychic. That's what Ill do."

When you come to think about it, a psychic should have as good a chance of anyone of finding a missing prostitute because they're basically in the same business — in the sense that a psychic can deliver the truth about as often as a prostitute can provide true love at work.

The philosopher George Santayana once wrote: Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect. I've not much bothered about chastity before, but I do like the intellectual sort.

You sense I feel strongly about this? I can't understand why people aren't outraged by the ripping off of Aunt Rosalie. When quacks cash in on the desperation of people terminally ill, everyone gets angry. When psychics and fortune-tellers cash in on grief, everyone sits down and looks away.

According to the Summary Offences Act, it is illegal to pose as a medium with the intention to deceive, and the Fair Trading Act could probably be invoked as well. But the law wouldn't be needed if it wasn't for the thousands of people — mainly women in my experience — who should know better but who suspend their normal common sense and reuse to apply their rigorous intelligence when confronted by the occult. They play with this nonsense, refuse to discuss subjects like astrology and the so-called paranormal in the same questioning way they discuss others.

Actor Shirley MacLaine and other Americans made millions of dollars from the New Age nonsense that swept this country a couple of years ago. Remember the crystals? The crystal cranks are no doubt off on something else now.

Scientists may be flawed as people, just like the rest of us, and science may take us down cul-de-sacs from time to time, but when science and the occult clash, the occult always, I repeat, always loses. I challenge any who will do so, to write down these great enlightenments they've had from psychics and fortune-tellers and hear how absurd they sound when they read them back. Send them to me, if you dare.

Whenever I've said this before, the only reply I've ever had is the retort that I have a closed mind. But a closed mind is one that wraps itself around every hairy hypothesis, one whose imagination is satisfied with flat and prosaic images such as Doris Stokes's heaven, one that encourages phonies to take money from our grieving Aunt Rosalies.

Life is rich enough with real mysteries to engage the most marvellous imaginations without having to do business with cheap phonies.

Star Sunday, 2/9/90