Gerard Croiset's Clairvoyance Was Well Documented in 1960's Newspaper Articles

 At the link here you can read a very long excerpt from a recent book by Tricia J. Robertson, an excerpt documenting the case of Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset. We read this:

"Croiset was sometimes called upon by the Dutch police to determine the whereabouts of a missing person whether they were presumed alive or dead, or to gain information about them. Croiset was also utilised by the Dutch police over many years to solve cases of theft and murder by using his amazing abilities."

We read that Croiset was a Dutch grocer who never charged money for his services. In the excerpt from Robertson's book, we read of what sounds like a case of the most astonishing clairvoyance from Croiset. It is a 1959 case involving a professor with a missing daughter. We are told that the professor arranged a telephone conversation with Croiset, who provided details that proved to be exactly correct. 

Robertson's account sounds very convincing, but there are a couple of problems with the account as she has written it. First, Robertson fails to give us the name of the professor with the missing daughter (the professor's name was Walter Sandelius). Second, she fails to give links to any source from around 1959 reporting the account she has given. It is just such things that help to build high confidence in accounts of the paranormal. 

I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it is to always track down the earliest versions of any report of the paranormal, and to look for things such as exact dates, the exact names of the witnesses, the exact source that made the earliest report, and so forth.  For example, a dated newspaper account giving exact names, dates and quotes from witnesses has a much higher value as evidence than some book written 60 years later saying that such and such happened 60 years ago to some person, without naming who the person was.  

Luckily there is a way to overcome the problems in Robertson's narrative. Using the Chronicling America web site that allows you to search old newspaper accounts, we can search for the name of Gerard Croiset. Using that technique, I found contemporary newspaper articles referring to the exact case Robertson discusses. 

The first such article I found was a February 26, 1961 article in the Evening Star. My first job ever was delivering this newspaper when I was a boy, and I know that around 1961 the Evening Star was one of the two most respected newspapers in Washington, D.C., the other being the Washington Post. Below is the 1961 newspaper article that appeared on this case involving Gerard Croiset, an article you can read using the link here:

The account is found in the bottom corner of the page, and it carries over to the next page, shown below, which you can read using this link:

Here is the part of the article that matches Robertson's account. The reporter Jack Harrison Pollack says he double-checked the account. 

"Croiset is also consulted in many missing-person

cases some of them thousands of miles from

Utrecht. One I was able to double-check in the U.S.

On October 18, 1959, Carol, the 24-year-old

daughter of Dr. Walter Sandelius, a political-science

professor at the University of Kansas, disappeared

from a hospital in Topeka where she had been a

patient. Police were unable to find her.

'After a month and a half I was ready to try

anything,' recalls Sandelius, a former Rhodes

scholar. 'In the course of my reading I had learned

about Tenhaeff. On December 11, I phoned him in

Utrecht, and he set up a three-way conversation

with Croiset.'

Croiset first asked, 'Is there a river near the

hospital where your daughter had been?'

'Yes,' answered her father, 'the Kansas River

runs close by.'

'I see her running over a large lawn and then

crossing a viaduct,' said Croiset. 'She’s now at a 

place where there are shops and a large body of

water with many small boats. She was driven there

in a truck and a big, red car.'

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

'I’m not sure,' Croiset answered, 'but you’ll

hear something definite in six days.'

Six days later, as he was coming downstairs in

the morning to place another call to Dr. Tenhaeff

and Croiset, Sandelins was astonished to find his

daughter sitting on the sofa!

He told me recently that his daughter’s story

corroborated Croiset’s amazing vision: She had left

the hospital, running across the front lawn, and had

crossed the river at a viaduct. Making her way to

a highway, she hitched a ride with two soldiers from

the Topeka Air Base. Later she was picked up by an

elderly couple in a truck. At the time her father was

speaking to Croiset, she was at a carnival in Corpus

Christi, Texas, bordering on the Gulf of Mexico

where there are many speedboats.

“I had long suspected there was something to

extrasensory perception,'  says Dr. Sandelins.

'But now I'm sure of it.' "

So now the two problems with Robertson's account are resolved. We have the name of the professor with the missing daughter (Walter Sandelius). And we have an account written about a year after the described events, one in which the Evening Star reporter says that he double-checked (presumably by interviewing Sandelius, who he quotes). As evidence, this is not as good as a report giving all of the relevant details, which was written very soon after the events described (such as only a few days later). But it is something much better as evidence than Robertson's account the way she wrote that account. 

In the same newspaper account above we have this astonishing account regarding Croiset's clarivoyance:

"Dr. Tenhaeff in 1947 devised what he calls the

'chair experiment' for Croiset. The test has been
successfully conducted over 350 times by Dr. Tenhaeff 

and scientists in other European countries
under rigid controls. Tenhaeff, or his assistant Nicky Louwerens, select at random a chair number from a seating plan for
a meeting a week to ten days away. Croiset is told
the number. Then he describes the person who
will sit in the chair, in some cases before the person
himself even decides to attend the meeting!

Once Tenhaeff picked Chair 18 for a meeting in
Rotterdam. Croiset said, 'I see nothing.' Tenhaeff
was perplexed. Until then, Croiset had achieved
near-perfect results. Tenhaeff tried another, Chair
3. Croiset smiled: 'This is the wife of a neurologist.
Recently her face was scarred in an auto accident
in Italy.' 

On the night of the meeting it snowed in Rotterdam. Of 30 who were to be there, one person couldn’t attend. The empty chair? Number 18.

In Chair 3 sat the lady who had a scar on her face.
'Why, yes,' she said. 'I was in an accident in
Italy two months ago. But how did you know?' "

The Evening Star reporter (Jack Harrison Pollack) says he did his due diligence in checking out the reality of Croiset's clairvoyance. He mentions spending six weeks in Croiset's home city of Utrecht in the Netherlands. The reporter states this:

"I was able to check the documents in case after case transcripts, dated and signed by witnesses, letters and statements from police. All attest to Croiset’s accurate vision."

Gerard Croiset

At the beginning of the same February 26, 1961 Evening Star news story, we have another account of Croiset's clairvoyance, which you can see using the link here (or the first image above).  We read this account (in which the "paragnost" is used to mean a clairvoyant):

"An early success is this case I checked in the Parapsychology Institute and Dutch police files.On December 5, 1946, a pretty, blond, 21-year-old girl was returning home at 5:45 p.m. along a quiet country road near Wierden, Holland. Suddenly, a man leaped out from behind a stone storehouse, and assaulted her, hitting her on the neck and arms with a hammer. Before he disappeared into the dark, she was able to wrench the hammer away from him.

Police contacted Dr. Tenhaeff, who came to the
station, bringing Gerard Croiset, one of his team of
paragnosts. Because the girl was in the hospital,
Croiset didn’t see her. Instead he picked up the
hammer, his large hand squeezing the handle as
police watched skeptically. Croiset concentrated.

'He is tall and dark, about 30 years old, and has
a somewhat deformed left ear,' said the paragnost.
'But this hammer doesn’t belong to him. Its owner
was a man of about 55 whom the criminal visits
often at a small white cottage near here. It is
one of a group of three cottages, alt the same.' 

The deformed left ear was a key clue. Several
months later the police picked up a tall, dark 29-
year-old man on another morals charge. His badly

scarred and swollen left ear led to questioning about
the first attack. Finally, he admitted assaulting the
girl with the hammer. He said he had borrowed it
from a friend, who, the police discovered, lived in a
white cottage on the edge of town, with two others
just like it on either side."

Notice the exact match of the details. Croiset had not merely correctly identified the assailant as a man of about 30 with a deformed left ear. Croiset had also correctly stated that the man had got the hammer from a man living in a white cottage that was the second of a group of three white cottages close to each other. 

We read this in the article: 

"Dr. Tenhaeff's files bulge with such cases. Each
is documented with a recording or stenographic
transcript of the prediction, and with statements
confirming its accuracy from witnesses and police.

The Evening Star newspaper article quoted above was Part 2 of a two-part series by the same author. You can read Part 1 of the series using the link here, which takes you the story the Evening Star published on February 19, 1961. 

On the first of these two pages, the page here, the reporter (Jack Harrison Pollack) tells an astonishing story. He says he was in the living room of Gerard Croiset,  with Dr. W. H. C. Tenhaeff, when a call came from 50 miles away, with someone in Eindhoven reporting that a 4-year-old child had been missing for 24 hours. Croiset said "in about three days the child's body will be found in the canal close to the bridge." The reporter left feeling skeptical. But he says this:

"Three days later, I checked up.  The police of Eindhoven had just found the child’s body next to one of the piers of the bridge over the canal -- exactly as Croiset had predicted." 

The reporter says that at the Parapsychology Institute, "thousands of cases of ESP have been uncovered and documented." At the page here we read these claims: