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Croiset the Clairvoyant - Jack Harrison Pollack

CASE 2-  I Witness a Croiset Case

Holland is a land brimming with water. An old saying goes, "God made the world but the Dutch made the Netherlands."

Indeed they did, with their miraculous snatching of nearly half of the marshy, lowlands nation from the sea through a network of 5000 miles of canals and dikes into which their enemy, water, was pumped.

Ironically, the result, though a boon to Holland, has been a perennial hazard to its young children.

On Saturday evening May 21, 1960, I was sitting in the cozy, old-fashioned living room of Gerard Croiset in Utrecht.  Professor Tenhaeff, the professor's devoted assistant, Miss Louwerens, and I were discussing his puzzling powers with the paragnost. But I never expected to see the beginning of an amazing demonstration of them in a few minutes.

At ten-thirty the telephone rang. The call was from Eindhoven, an industrial city fifty miles away, home of the giant Philips electrical-appliance factories. The caller, Mr. Schoenmaker, was asking Croiset's help in locating a four-year-old boy, Toontje Thooner, who had been missing for twenty-four hours. Thus far, the Dutch police had turned up no clues.

Until that moment, our host had known nothing about the case.

Croiset beckoned Professor Tenhaeff, Miss Louwerens, and myself into the next room. There, he switched on his tape recorder attached to his telephone and began asking brief, animated questions in Dutch.

"Is the playground where the child was last seen in a new suburb? [Yes.)
When you leave it at the left, is there some open ground? (Yes.)
When you follow the border of this open ground, do you reach a canal? (Yes.)
Is this canal 200 to 500 meters from the playground?" (Yes.)

Croiset paused, and then inquired, "Are you a member of the child's family?"

"No. I'm a neighbour," was the reply.

"'Well," sighed the sensitive, "I can then tell you that the outlook isn't good. Search the area I described right away. But I'm afraid I have a clear picture. I'm sorry, but in about three days, the child's body will be found in the canal I mentioned, close to a bridge and near a bucket of zinc."

This strange (to me but not to the others) conversation was over. The clairvoyant slumped in his chair, depressed and exhausted. Realizing that he was emotionally spent, we bade him good night. Frankly, I left Croiset's home in a mood of considerable skepticism.

But three days later I checked up. Unhappily enough, the police of Eindhoven had just found the child's body next to one of the piers of the bridge over the canal near a bucket of zinc-exactly as Croiset had predicted.

Busy Gerard Croiset didn’t hear the outcome of this case until ten days later and then he heard it only by accident from an Eindhoven visitor. Mr. Schoenmaker had neglected to notify him, or even to reply to Professor Tenhaeffs two Ietters requesting full particulars. So two weeks later, a Parapsychology Institute assistant, V. Ophoff, drove to Eindhoven with Croiset. There, the testimony of Mr. B. Schoenmaker and P. Bartholozzi, another neighbour who had searched for the missing child, was tape-recorded.

These witnesses apologized for not replying by mail because both felt they couldn't write well enough tor the learned Professor Tenhaeff!