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Miss Cleo

American psychic and fraudster (1962-2016)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 2, 2026
Entity authorityQ6876352 ↗
Source-derived summary

Youree Dell Harris (August 12, 1962 – July 26, 2016) was an American television personality and actress best known for portraying Miss Cleo, a spokeswoman for the psychic pay-per-call-minute service Psychic Readers Network, in a series of television commercials that aired from 1997 to 2003. Harris used various aliases, including Ree Perris, Youree Cleomili, Youree Perris, Rae Dell Harris, Cleomili Perris Youree, and Cleomili Harris.

Early life

Youree Harris was born on August 12, 1962, at Los Angeles County Hospital to Alisa Teresa Hopis and David Harris, and raised in a Catholic Afro-Caribbean family. She attended, as a boarder, Ramona Convent Secondary School, a Catholic girls' school in Alhambra, California.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Dorothy Parvaz reported that University of Southern California found no records that Harris had enrolled for four classes in 1980, as reported by People magazine.

Career

Seattle

In 1996, Harris as "Ree Perris", wrote a play entitled For Women Only, playing a Jamaican woman named "Cleo", in Seattle.

In 1997, Harris as "Ree Perris", produced and performed two plays with the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center in Seattle, Summer Rhapsody and Supper Club Cafe.

Her last project, Supper Club Cafe in 1997, was not successful, and she "left town with a trail of debts and broken promises", according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Some of the cast of her productions claimed that they were never paid, and that Harris "told her cast members she had bone cancer" and "her medical costs would prevent her from paying people immediately", but she wrote each actor and crew member a letter telling him or her how much money she owed them.

Psychic Readers Network

In January 1993, Steven Feder and Peter Stolz (sometimes spelled: Stotz Stoltz Stolz) started Psychic Advisors Network, launched to compete with Psychic Friends Network using Philip Michael Thomas, Billy Dee Williams and Catherine Oxenberg.

Editorial summary

“Miss Cleo” enters the record as american psychic and fraudster (1962-2016). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Miss, Cleo and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1962, 2016, 1997, 2003—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1962-08-12. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Miss, Cleo and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Miss Cleo” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Miss, Cleo and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6876352. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 2016, 1997 and 2003.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Miss Cleo”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Miss Cleo primary sources, Miss Cleo archive and Miss research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Miss Cleo”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Miss Cleo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.