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Croiset the Clairvoyant - Jack Harrison Pollack

CASE l-The Kansas Professor's Missing Daughter

On October 18, 1959, Carol, the tall, attractive twenty-four-year-old daughter of Professor and Mrs. Walter E. Sandelius, 1120 Mississippi Street, Lawrence, Kansas, disappeared from a hospital in Topeka, Kansas, where she had been a patient after a nervous breakdown. Local and state police were unable to find her.

Her father, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas, where he had taught for forty years, including twelve as head of his department, is not the type of man to do anything rash. A former Rhodes scholar with degrees from Oxford University in England, and Brookings Institute in Washington, he has also been chairman of the Governor's Commission on Revision of the Kansas Constitution.

'Naturally, my wife and I were terribly worried when the police couldn't find Carol," Dr. Sandelius told me when I double-checked this case back in the United States. . "Carol's photograph was sent all over Kansas and in surrounding states. We got the usual reports from people who thought they saw Carol in this or that town. I drove several hundred miles checking all the leads but could find no clues. Carol seemed to have disappeared without the slightest trace.

"After a month and a half, my wife and I were ready to try anything. In the course of my readings, I had learned about Professor Tenhaeff and Mr. Croiset and how they had helped law-enforcement agencies in Holland locate missing persons. I thought it was worth a try. What had we to lose?"

So on the afternoon of December 11, the Kansas professor telephoned the Utrecht professor 4875 miles away.

"Does Mr. Croiset ever solve cases like that of our missing daughter over the telephone?" inquired Professor Sandelius.

"Sometimes," replied Professor Tenhaeff in his fluent English. "Can you call back tomorrow afternoon at three P.M. your time, which is ten P.M. our time. I will arrange to have Croiset here at the Parapsychology Institute."

The following day, a three-way conversation with the Utrecht professor acting as an interpreter between the Kansas professor and Croiset, lasted twenty-two minutes.

"Is there a river near the hospital where your daughter had been?" was the clairvoyant's first question.

"Yes," answered the missing girl's father. "The Kansas River runs close by."

"I see your daughter running over a large lawn and then crossing a viaduct," said Croiset. "Now I see her at a place where there are stores, and near them, a large body of water with landing stages and many small boats. I see her riding there in a truck and in a big red car."

"Is she still alive?" asked her father anxiously.

"Yes, don't worry," Croiset assured him. "You will hear something definite at the end of six days. But please send me by airmail a photograph of your daughter and some road maps of Kansas and other close-by states."

Six days later on December 17, Professor Sandelius came downstairs at eight A.M. to place another call, as pre-arranged, to Professor Tenhaeff and Croiset. As he started to pick up the telephone, he looked toward the living room and was astounded to see Carol sitting on the sofa!

"It was the best Christmas present my wife and I could have had," recalls the Kansas educator. "I immediately phoned Utrecht to report the good news. I wanted Professor Tenhaeff and Mr. Croiset to be the first to know outside the family."

Carol's later report to her parents of her wanderings corroborated Croiset's amazing vision: believing that if she could leave the hospital it would hasten her recovery, Carol had run across the hospital's front lawn and crossed the river at a viaduct. After reaching the Kansas Turnpike which skirts Topeka, she hitched a ride in a big red car with two soldiers from the Topeka Air Base. When she told them that she was running away from home, they dropped her in southern Kansas.

Shortly afterwards, she was picked up by an elderly couple going south. They worked with a carnival visiting small towns with their "iron lung" act. Carol gave them a fictitious name and merely said that she was leaving home. She traveled with this friendly couple, helping them demonstrate their iron lung in different towns.

On the afternoon that her father was speaking to Croiset, she was at a carnival in Corpus Christi, Texas, bordering on the Gulf of Mexico. Many speed boats are docked there two blocks from the business district. When the carnival couple was about to leave Corpus Christi, they suggested to Carol, "Would you like to spend Christmas with your family?"

Carol said yes, she would. They gave her money for bus fare. She arrived in Lawrence early in the morning of December 17, in, time to fulfill Croiset's promise that her family would "hear something definite at the end of six days."

"Mr. Croiset's clairvoyance was demonstrated by his accurate prediction," summarizes Professor Sandelius. "Of course, he didn't mention Corpus Christi by name, but he did describe it. My feeling is that after he had seen the picture of Carol, touched our letter and examined the maps, in all probability he would have had additional impressions. But, of course, our daughter's return at the end of six days, as Mr. Croiset had said, made that unnecessary. I had long suspected there was something to extrasensory perception, But now I'm sure of it."