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Croiset the Clairvoyant - Jack Harrison Pollack

The Brick in the Jewelers Window

Zwolle, colorful capital of the northeast Polder province of Overijssel, is a booming modern city of 56,000 which dates back to 1230, where in a monastery, Thomas a Kempis wrote his famous The Imitation of Christ which, next to the Bible, is the world's most widely translated book.

In early 1949 a thief, who didn't practice the precepts of this fifteenth-century religious classic, broke into a Zwolle jewelry store by smashing the window with a brick.

Several weeks later in the Zwolle courthouse, before the robber had been captured, Gerard Croiset was handed this brick as an inductor.

"Can you tell the police anything about the burglar who threw this brick?" asked Professor Tenhaeff who supervised the experiment.

Touching the brick delicately; Croiset instantly answered, "Yes, I see an eight-year-old orphan boy. He is very unhappy because the warden of the orphanage often beats him with a cane. I see the warden putting the boy across his knee and beating him this way. The boy hates the warden and is always fighting with him."

This was all that Croiset saw about the jewel thief in Zwolle.

Naturally, the police didn't consider this very useful information. Moreover, it seemed impossible for them to verify.

But several months later, when a man was arrested for a similar robbery elsewhere, he confessed to the Zwolle jewelry-store theft. Questioned at police headquarters, the suspect admitted that as a boy of eight he had, indeed, lived in an orphanage, and had frequently been caned by a harsh warden.

Thus, Croiset's image of the burglar's boyhood proved to be correct.

Why did he see this seemingly irrelevant episode in the robber's early life? As has been pointed out, when he was a boy, Croiset himself had been caned many times by a disciplining warden in an orphanage. Being very impressionable to every life experience, the image he received from the jewel thief’s early fife vividly evoked similar unpleasant memories in his own.

"My observations of Croiset over the years convince me that these associative relationships are no isolated occurrence.” says Professor Tenhaeff. But Croiset's parapsychological prober is the first to warn that these associative relationships can lead to occasional errors.