Croiset, Gerard

Category: Other spiritually gifted people

 

Gerard Croiset (March 10, 1909 – July 20, 1980) was a gifted Dutch psychic, and also, via his work on diagnosis of illness – a healer.

But this classification is not really adequate to describe Croiset’s skills.  In America or Great Britain, Gerard Croiset might be called a clairvoyant, medium, mind reader, psychometrist or, in more advanced parapsychological circles, a telepathist, sensitive, or psychoscopist! In the Netherlands his mentor, Professor W. H. C. Tenhaeff, Director of the Parapsychology Institute at the University of Utrecht, called him a "paragnost," a word which he coined in 1932 from the Greek words para meaning "beyond" and gnosis meaning "knowledge."  In other words, there really was no word capable of describing all he could do.

Countless people, including the police, sought Croiset's assistance in securing information ‘beyond the five known senses'. 

Croiset diagnosing

Croiset assisted the police, not only in the Netherlands but in a half-dozen other countries, including the United States and England, in solving many baffling crimes. He helped hundreds of grateful parents by locating missing children, “the work which brought him the greatest satisfaction”.  He helped public officials to find lost documents and assisted scholars in identifying historical manuscripts and artefacts.

Sometimes he didn’t quite get it right.  At this point every cynic jumps up and down and shouts – 'see he’s a fraud'.  But he was never a fraud, he was a human being, who was fallible, doing something that very very few people are able to do, often in circumstances where all else had failed. 

At all times, Croiset attempted to put his gifts to work for the common good.  He repeated a number of times that if one was given a gift, one should only ever use it to help people and he did his level best to do just this. 

Diagnosing and healing children in a 'clinic session'

The work of the Institute

Wilhelm Carl Tenhaeff

Geraid Croiset was the best known and most gifted of forty-seven ‘paragnosts’ -twenty-six men and twenty-one women-who were studied intensively from around 1926 until Professor Tenhaeff’s death, at the Parapsychology Institute of the University of Utrecht.

By the 1960s, Croiset was being described as “the world's most tested clairvoyant”.  Not only was every case he helped with documented by Professor Tenhaeff, but from about 1946, Croiset was subjected to German, Swiss, and American psychological tests at the Parapsychology Institute.

The best source for information about his life comes not from Croiset himself, who largely avoided self-publicity, but from the work of Tenhaeff, who undertook detailed, thorough and carefully recorded observational work on Dutch mediums in general via the Parapsychology Institute.

Croiset in Adelaide Australia after being brought in to assist with a search, and
on this occasion he failed.  But it didn't happen often

The observations provided below are taken from the book Croiset the Clairvoyant by Jack Harrison Pollack.  Pollack translated the accounts of Croiset’s work from Parapsychology Institute tape recordings, the Dutch Journal of Parapsychology (Tijdschrift voor Parapsychologie), Dr. Tenhaeff's ‘scholarly books’ and from police records throughout Holland and other European nations.  Eight translators helped him ferret out this material from the Dutch, German, Italian, and Swedish languages.

 

 

 

At one time Croiset was a national figure in the Netherlands.  At the time Pollack’s book was released in April 1964 and right up to Croiset’s death in 1980, his abilities were such that he was asked to go all over the world to help the police in particular. 

Wikipedia, predictably, has decided to rewrite history on the basis that as they cannot believe that a Dutch psychic helped their police, it cannot have happened.  Thankfully however, it is all on record:

Wikipedia's entry on Croiset is particularly nasty in its unproven criticism of Croiset, as Croiset did a great deal of very good work, helping thousands.  Their entry is not only factually inaccurate, it dishonours his memory.  May they hang their heads in shame. Croiset can no longer speak for himself, but in Europe, Croiset’s achievements and good work are still recognised.  

What was he like?

Croiset the Clairvoyant - Jack Harrison Pollack [1964]

Croiset in later years

Holland is famous for its windmills, wooden shoes, tulips, cheeses, canals, Rembrandts, KLM airline, Holland-America steamships, and the boy who saved the country by putting his finger in the dike. But today the most sensational national resource in the Netherlands is Gerard Croiset.
This extraordinary fifty-six-year-old Dutchman with magnetic hazel blue eyes, chiseled artistic profile, and thick mop of halo-like auburn hair, is perhaps the world's most gifted clairvoyant. There is far more to this dynamic man than meets the eye, ear, nose, touch, or taste. He has a mysterious sixth sense, a hidden psychic power, a mind which "sees” (the unseen) through time and space-probably an amazing "lost power" which all of us may have had before we became ‘civilised’

Pollack described Croiset as ‘brash and brusque’, but at the same time warm and uninhibited.  Croiset spoke Dutch, German and English.  He didn't smoke, and drunk nothing stronger than wine.  He actually preferred milk.  He liked to wear casual clothes and was partial to sports shirts and loud ties. He suffered from terrible stomach pains – attributed to an ulcer – but he may have been gluten intolerant, like a lot of mediums.  Even when in company, “he often removed his shoes to relax”.

 

He was impulsively generous even toward those who least deserved it. When another Dutch clairvoyant who had never concealed his envy of Croiset was sick, Croiset quietly lent him money.  Croiset never belittled the gifts of any of the other paragnosts either.  However, when shown the photograph of a well-publicized sensitive who lacked Croiset’s ethical sense, he remarked, “He’s very gifted but not a good man here.”  And Croiset indicated his heart.

Croiset had an ability to laugh at his own antics.  He also freely admitted it when he was wrong – a trait Pollack describes as “perhaps Croiset's most endearing quality”.

He was described as ‘childish’, which is not a bad thing at all, especially in a sensitive.  Interestingly, Professor Tenhaeff found that nearly all of his paragnosts were childish.

“Like a child, Croiset has an appealing charm. He is anxious to please, responds readily to praise, and it is impossible to stay angry with him.”

Method

 

Most of Croiset’s abilities appear to have been inherited, but his methods of invoking his abilities are rather fascinating.  Croiset talked incessantly.  He talked about what he saw, but he appeared to use talking as a means of clearing his mind, so he could focus better.  In other words, it was a unique way of befuddling himself.  When he started talking, he started seeing.

Croiset also used a ‘bridge’.  Professor Tenhaeff called this an ‘inductor’, but despite the different terms, it was a bridge.  He used photographs, rings, gloves, letters,  pieces of clothing, bones, even on some strange occasions bricks and stones.  “The Dutch paragnost often instantly “knows” a person he has never met by simply holding something belonging to them”.

He carried out much of his investigative work via telephone.  In these cases he stopped talking, asking as few questions as possible.  His only remarks were to encourage the person to keep going and to show he was still on the other end of the line.  He preferred the telephone to meetings of people because the telephone eliminated ‘extraneous influences’ and reduced confusing or overlapping impressions.

When he was working, according to Professor Tenhaeff, Croiset was able to furnish four types of information after he had touched the bridge, a letter for example:

• A description of the person who wrote the letter or owned the ‘bridge’ -their voice, figure, physical defects, manner of dress fears, thoughts, and feelings.
• The ‘environmental facts’ about the person. In other words, he was able to see the person’s surroundings and the things that had happened to the person
• Incidents about other people with whom the person had come into contact-relatives, friends, and co-workers.
• Impersonal details about the person’s neighbourhood, home, workshop, or landscape.

Properly classified this is ‘exploring group perception’ at its best and most advanced. 

Willem Roelofs - Landweg bij Laren, Noord-Holland

His Early Life

We have provided a fairly detailed description of Croiset’s life, partly to counteract and correct the false information Wikipedia has provided, but also to give some indication of how a psychic’s life is moulded – in this case by horror after horror.

Croiset, during the time he was most active was married to a supportive lass called Gerda, had 5 much loved children, and lived in “an old, comfortably disheveled house at 21 Willem de Zwiigerstraat (William the Silent Street)”, near the Parapsychology Institute.  In other words he was neither rich, nor was he interested in money; and it is clear he adored his family.  Three of his children stayed with him and his wife, even after they became old enough to leave home.  In other words, he later had a wonderfully happy family life, but his early beginnings were anything but happy.

 

Croiset was born on March 10, 1909, in the small, picturesque artists' town of Laren in the province of North Holland. Gerard's Jewish parents were both in the theatre. His father, Hyman, a prominent actor, spent most of his time touring the Netherlands and Belgium playing leading roles in many Shakespeare and Ibsen productions. His mother was a wardrobe mistress.  His father, whom he both loved and hated, was a socialist and atheist.  An attractive man with a roving eye and a cavalier attitude towards family life, Papa Croiset would periodically desert Gerard's mother, with whom he had a common-law marriage, and later return to live with her.

As a child, Gerard had little or no home life. When he was eight years old, he was placed in a foster home where he was extremely unhappy. He lived with six different sets of foster parents. Because he moved from one foster home to another, he received only a skimpy elementary-school education and because none of them understood him, he was constantly in conflict with them and forever being punished. One cruel foster father disciplined Gerard by chaining his leg to a stake-in the floor.  Though he hungered for affection and understanding, he received little.

Gerard ended up a sickly undernourished child who suffered from rickets. Because of his frequent illnesses, he was alone a great deal and fell to ‘turning inwards’ as a means of escape.  And it is thus through cruelty, loneliness and fear, that Gerard taught himself how to be psychic.  Living in his own private world, he managed to escape the harshness of reality through his ‘fantasies’, although they were not fantasies, as from the accounts he had the gift of out of body travel.  He described people he had never met and spoke of cities he had never visited. He spent many afternoons playing with imaginary small friends  

Gerard was nearly drowned when he was eight years old, and it had a profound effect upon him.  Several months after he was rescued from this near drowning, Gerard heard that the man who had saved his life fell from a ladder and died.

But Gerard’s memories of his days in the orphanage are probably the unhappiest of his life. Because he baulked at orphanage regulations, he was in repeated conflict with the superintendent who brutally whipped him with a cane. The boy was also locked up in a small room. Hence, whenever an orphan was mistreated, he secured an unusually strong impression of it and was still over-emotional about orphans.

 

When Gerard was eleven, he was able to live with his mother again. Because her actor husband had deserted her for good, she now legally married another man. The Board of Guardians allowed her to take her son into her new home. But Gerard could not get along with his stepfather and ran away from home. At age thirteen, he went to live with a farmer, agreeing to work in the fields for his board, lodging, and clothes. But farmhand chores bored him and he tried to escape from them. Yet the farm atmosphere had a lasting positive influence upon him.

After leaving the farm, he was hired as a junior clerk in the office of a harbour master where he had to add long lists of figures. But he grew bored with this; his addition was so inaccurate that he was soon fired. The youth then worked as a shop assistant but displayed no talent for this job either. Wherever he worked, business invariably declined as his responsibilities increased. The young man was unable to keep any job for long.  When he was seventeen, he became a sales representative for a tea, coffee, and zwieback company, but he flopped at this, too. But at last, he landed a job in the Albert Heyn chain of grocery stores as a helper and managed to remain there for several years.

 

In 1934 when twenty-five, Croiset married Gerda ter Morsche, the daughter of an Enschede carpenter who had been his fiance for four years. A year later, their eldest son, Hyman, was born. Unable to support his wife and child, his in-laws encouraged him to open his own grocery store in Enschede and loaned him the money to get started. But he was a poor businessman, giving his stock away to impecunious customers. When he failed to pay his bills, he was besieged by creditors and soon went bankrupt - an event Croiset laughingly admits he was unable to foresee.  In 1935, he had a nervous breakdown.

Croiset's father died at forty-eight of a heart attack when Gerard was fifteen. In 1937, when he was twenty-six, his mother suddenly died of cancer.   But all these catastrophes and all this grief catapulted him back into himself and the inner life and he started to explore his psychic gifts more.  Between 1937 and 1940, he began to gain a reputation around Enschede as a "psychometris."

But then came the War.

War years

 

On a Sunday morning at five A.M., the Gestapo arrived at Croiset's home and arrested him. Along with many other Dutchmen (mostly Jews), he was prepared for shipment to Germany. During this transport, he witnessed the brutality of storm troopers to fellow prisoners.  In 1943, Croiset was freed from the German camp, and he returned to Enschede. He already had papers showing that he was married to a non-Jew. But now his friends falsified documents stating that his mother was not Jewish, hoping thereby to make the Nazis more lenient with him in the future.

On October 17, 1943, the Nazis-again arrested Croiset in an Enschede dragnet, this time not as a half Jew, but along with thousands of other men being shipped to Germany to work in factories.

Several months later, he was again released without explanation and was allowed to return to Enschede. His camp experiences deeply affected Gerard Croiset.   He never came to terms with the inhumanity of man to man that he witnessed in the war.

The Meeting with Professor Tenhaeff

 

But the one event that changed Gerard Croiset’s life occurred after the war on a December 1945 evening. Purely out of curiosity, he attended a lecture on parapsychology which Professor Tenhaeff gave for members of an adult education course in a folk high school in Enschede.
Croiset immediately realized that this was what he had been waiting for. Until then, he felt aimless and purposeless. But after listening to the inspiring lecturer, he suddenly realized that his newly discovered extrasensory powers gave his life a new meaning and direction.

And after that Croiset never looked back, working extraordinarily hard in the service of his fellow man with Professor Tenhaeff to help and guide him – and frankly look after him, as the father he never really had might have done.

Croiset died in Utrecht in 1980, aged 71

Below a photo of his daughter who inherited his skills "Nannie Veerman-Croiset uit Utrecht is paragnost, net als haar vader"

References

Professor Tenhaeff wrote a number of books on his work at the Institute, these include:

• Introduction to Parapsychology (1952 and 1964),
• Spiritualism (1936,1951, and 1965)
• War Predictions (1948),
• Parapsychological Phenomena and Reflections (1949),
• Mesmerists, Somnambulists and Healers by Prayer (1951),
• The Divining Rod Problem (1951),
• Precognition (1961), and
• Reflections on Using Paragnosts for Police and Other Practical Purposes (1957).

Observations

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• Croiset, Gerard - A suspicion that his stepmother had poisoned his late father
• Croiset, Gerard - A vision of a host of angels
• Croiset, Gerard - Alleviates the stomach pains of KLM president Albert Plesman
• Croiset, Gerard - Death in the woods of Arnhem
• Croiset, Gerard - Diagnoses the illness of Mr P, a hard-working stovemaker of Almelo
• Croiset, Gerard - Diagnoses the poisoning of Mr A V of Almelo’s son by insecticides
• Croiset, Gerard - Diagnosis of the illness of Mr F Wolle of Cologne, Germany whose doctor was baffled by his abdominal pains
• Croiset, Gerard - Dr J H Sebus, and the loss of a valuable rare copy of an early medical treatise
• Croiset, Gerard - Escapes the gestapo and aids the resistance
• Croiset, Gerard - Finding the body of Jurrien van Dijkhuizen, aged seven, who disappeared from his home in Nijkerk
• Croiset, Gerard - Finding the child from Slikkerveer, near a bridge still to be built
• Croiset, Gerard - Finding the drowned body of Antonius Johannes van Eeuwijk
• Croiset, Gerard - Finding the missing cow of the farmer from Wierdon
• Croiset, Gerard - Finding the missing pig and piglets owned by Farmer E U Stokreef, Enter in eastern Holland
• Croiset, Gerard - G Ter Laak of Oldenzaal helps Croiset with a difficult case of location finding
• Croiset, Gerard - I can see what is happening many kilometers away
• Croiset, Gerard - I'm sorry, but this man is no longer alive. I see clearly that he has hanged himself from a tree
• Croiset, Gerard - Larceny in Leiden, 'This man is a much bigger criminal'
• Croiset, Gerard - Locates 4 year old Toontje Thooner from Eindhoven, missing for twenty-four hours
• Croiset, Gerard - Locating Mrs K’s wandering thirteen-year-old son Jan
• Croiset, Gerard - Misleading conclusions caused by strong emotion
• Croiset, Gerard - Mr E J t V, of Hengelo and the prediction of a job with liquor-manufacturing firm De Zwarte Kip
• Croiset, Gerard - Mr W P C van Dijk of Leiden and the case of the missing passport
• Croiset, Gerard - Mr. C. J. de Jong from Joure in Friesland, finds his two lost hunting dogs
• Croiset, Gerard - Mr. S. G. Buine of Enschede and the case of the stolen pocket book
• Croiset, Gerard - Mrs. A. Land, of Museumplein 7, in Amsterdam sends missing Mr Xs picture and his toothbrush as a bridge
• Croiset, Gerard - Premonitions of World War II
• Croiset, Gerard - Raises doubts about the conviction of Dr. Sam Sheppard for his wife Marilyn’s murder
• Croiset, Gerard - The Brick in the Jeweler’s Window
• Croiset, Gerard - The child drowned by Fort de Bilt, Utrecht; a prediction his body would soon be found
• Croiset, Gerard - The Coffee Smugglers
• Croiset, Gerard - The disappearance of 18 year old Jan Steffen, from Golfstraat 8, in Antwerp
• Croiset, Gerard - The disappearance of eighteen-month-old Marijke Alfering
• Croiset, Gerard - The disappearance of Mr. and Mrs. A. van der Meiden’s daughter from Alberdingk Thymstraat 94, The Hague
• Croiset, Gerard - The Dishonest Employee
• Croiset, Gerard - The drowning of the skipper from a ship on the Waal river, Waardenburg
• Croiset, Gerard - The first reawakening of his psychic powers
• Croiset, Gerard - The Kansas Professor's Missing Daughter
• Croiset, Gerard - The late arrival of Mrs. B on the train from East Berlin
• Croiset, Gerard - The man being blackmailed by his girlfriend
• Croiset, Gerard - The missing patient from St. Joseph Stichting, Apeldoorn
• Croiset, Gerard - The prophecy of who would sit in a chair
• Croiset, Gerard - The prophecy of who would sit in a chair, with added details of their lives
• Croiset, Gerard - The prophecy of who wouldn’t sit in a chair
• Croiset, Gerard - The Skeleton of the German Rapist in Rotterdam
• Croiset, Gerard - The telepathic experience of Mr. van Busschbach, the state inspector of elementary schools in Amsterdam
• Croiset, Gerard - The Wallet of a Stranger
• Croiset, Gerard - The Wierden Hammer Assailant
• Croiset, Gerard - Traversing back nine years to solve a 1940 murder of two young Dutch children
• Croiset, Gerard - What is more important in life than to find a missing child?
• Croiset, Gerard - Working with the Reverend Father Grauw of the Our Lady of Peel Convent from Sevenum on the murder of a boy
• Croiset, Gerard - Your son, Mr. Onno Leebaert, will try to contact you in about four or five years