[3] In her memoirs she claimed that she started seeing spirits and hearing disembodied voices in childhood, and that she developed these abilities further once she joined a local spiritualist church after her son died in infancy.
[4] During a crisis of confidence in 1962, she gave up her work as a medium and retrained as a psychiatric nurse,[5] but had to retire five years later following an attack by a patient.
[6] She was especially believable because of her smiling, down-to-earth manner, which avoided the traditional trappings of the séance and gave her performances almost "the ordinariness of a transatlantic telephone call".
[7] In 1980, her first autobiographical volume, Voices in My Ear: The Autobiography of a Medium was published, pulling her further into the public eye in the UK.
[9] Stokes was condemned by the Church of England and other Christian denominations, which objected to spirit communication as an offence to God.
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.
[4] Described variously as "an individual of great personal warmth", "the Gracie Fields of the psychic world"[10] and "a ruthless moneymaking confidence artist",[11] she continued to give free consultations or "sittings" until a month before her death, when she left only £15,291.
[16] He attended one of Stokes's Palladium performances in November 1986, when she claimed to contact the dead relatives of four consecutive audience members, with a sequence of convincing and poignant details.
Other participants included "camp followers", who regularly attended the shows and repeatedly received messages from the same people.