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Croiset the Clairvoyant - Jack Harrison Pollack

Skipper Overboard

Gerard Croiset occasionally contributes his thoughts about his cases to a small journal published in Amsterdam.  He calls them "Croiset's Ramblings" (or perhaps that is the Dutch translation of it). Certainly it is not "rambling" in the usual loose or aimless sense of the word. Rather, it reveals his remarkably objective attitude toward his paranormal powers which Professor Tenhaeff helped him to attain.  Croiset is constantly analysing "why" and "when" his extraordinary images appear to him. Landmarks, whether he has ever seen them or not, are easily identified by him and widen his field of perception, he says. Inductors [bridges] can also be helpful in many cases.

Typical of his use of concrete objects is the case of the skipper of a ship on the Waal river near the small town of Waardenburg.

It was raining hard and the skipper was on deck, clad in his yellow oilskins and heavy boots. Suddenly he saw his small daughter fall overboard. He plunged into the water, caught her quickly and, fortunately, was able to fling her to safety onto the deck. But the weight of his clothing made it impossible for him to keep afloat himself, and he was drowned.

Relatives of the skipper in Culemborg telephoned Croiset the next day, though he was then busy working on another drowning tragedy. Despite the clairvoyant's preoccupation with this other case, during the telephone call he had clear impressions of a silo and a piece of concrete with a ring.

Three days later, Croiset met the river police at Sleeuwijk, a village near Gorinchem. An intensive though unsuccessful search for the skipper had been made in the meantime. Now the investigation was directed by Croiset traveling down the river in the police boat. When the paragnost thought that he had come upon the spot of the silo and the ring during his first impression, he bade them stop. But he had only a slight emotion and said, "I get some contact here, but please go on." A little further ahead, he asked the police to stop at a cleared area. Again he experienced a twinge of emotion and remarked thoughtfully, "I was wrong. But, tell me, did you find a body right here before?"

An astonished river policeman answered, "Yes, about a month ago." The puzzled policeman then added, "Did you know, Mr. Croiset, that where you just received a contact near that block of cement with the ring, last year a man was drowned there and we have never found his body. How can you tell about things which happened so long ago?"

"Time plays no part when the paragnost Croiset is at work," loftily replied Gerard Croiset. "It is the intensity of the emotion that is important."

The river searching party soon arrived at the spot which the Utrecht clairvoyant had originally described over the phone. "It was as if I was filled with an energy that made me twice as fat as usual," Croiset later explained. "I had a pressure in my head which made me feel different. As a paragnost, this is not strange to me. But one must learn to control oneself. I needed that certainty in this case, because I had to know where in that big river I could point and say, 'There you will find the body of the skipper."'

The paragnost's impressions now came more strongly on the river with the searching party. But he warned police that the skipper's body would not be found quickly, because the heavy oilskins and boots had been caught on some obstruction under the water, possibly a tree branch. However, he indicated the precise spot where the body would be found in the future. Now he was sure in his own mind about it, despite the currents constantly eddying around the body.

So it was. Three days later, the body of the skipper was found exactly where Gerard Croiset had indicated with such confidence.