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Croiset the Clairvoyant - Jack Harrison Pollack

The Hammer Assailant

On December 5, 1946, about 5:45 P.M., an attractive blonde girl of twenty-one was attacked on a quiet country road in the small town of Wierden, about twenty miles from Croiset’s former home in Enschede. The girl was riding home on her bicycle, and carrying in one arm a cardboard box containing a sugar cake which she was taking to her family for the celebration of Dutch "Christmas Eve" that night. The evening of December 5, known as "Sinterklaas," is a night of family gifts and festivity and probably the origin of the St. Nicholas idea.

Suddenly a man leapt out and attacked her with a hammer. In the ensuing struggle, the dazed girl succeeded in wresting the hammer away from him. Noticing the light of another approaching bicycle, the culprit fled in the dark, leaving the hammer behind.

In the hope of securing some clue on his identity, the hammer was displayed in a grocery shop window in Wierden. But no one was able to identify it and police investigation turned up no leads.

Several weeks later it was decided to engage a paragnost.  The choice was Gerard Croiset. At first, the sensitive said that the hammer produced confusing pictures to him. He attributed this to the fact that the hammer had been touched by so many different hands. But after he was told that the hammer had been used in a case of attempted murder and was asked whether he could reveal any information about the offender, he achieved better "contact."

After again feeling the hammer Croiset said, "I see a man of about thirty. He is tall and dark in appearance . . . but the hammer does not belong to him."

Croiset went on to explain that the assailant often entered one of a group of three cottages. In this cottage (about which he mentioned several pertinent details), he "saw" a man about fifty-five years old who owned the hammer. Finally, Croiset described the grocery shop where the hammer had hung, and also the shopkeeper. (-Although this description didn't concern the immediate investigation, it was nevertheless parapsychologically correct. For example, Croiset rightly mentioned that the storekeeper suffered from bronchitis.)

Six months later, on June 2, 1947, a twenty-eight-year-old man, who fitted Croiset's description of the culprit, was arrested on another morals charge in a neighbouring town.

During his trial, he confessed that he had also been guilty of the December 5 attack on the Wierden girl and that he had borrowed the hammer from the fifty-five-year-old man who lived in the cottage described by Croiset.

The mayor of Wierden concluded his report to the Parapsychology Institute in these words: "Mr..Croiset was able to provide information which was of value to the police."