Paul Adams by Ghosts;Gallows: True Stories of Crime;the Paranormal

Author:Ghosts;Gallows: True Stories of Crime;the Paranormal
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Body, Social Science, General, Mind & Spirit, Parapsychology, Criminology
ISBN: 9780752463391
Publisher: History Press Limited
Published: 2012-07-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THE POWER OF THE PSYCHIC DETECTIVE

GERARD CROISET, 1960s

If Uri Gellar was the psychic superstar of the 1970s, then it would be true to say that the Dutchman, Gerard Croiset, was easily his equal during the Swinging Sixties. The ‘wizard of Utrecht’ became a familiar figure in the public eye as newspapers, magazines and television programmes regularly documented his astonishing powers of clairvoyance and telepathy. It was not without foundation that he was also known as ‘the man who mystifies Europe’ and ‘the man with the X-ray mind’; and much of this popular reputation was due in no small way to his own particular application of his psychic talents to the field of murder and crime detection. Almost singlehandedly, Croiset established the figure of the psychic detective in Europe and lived the role to the full. As we will see, he was and remains, a pioneering figure in the history of twentieth-century paranormal research.

As with other mediums and sensitives such as Estelle Roberts, Gerard Croiset’s psychic abilities became apparent at a young age, but for him these childhood years were unhappy ones and culminated in a nervous breakdown when he was in his early twenties. Born Gerard Boekbinder on 10 March 1909 in the northern Dutch city of Laren, he was given up to foster parents at the age of eight by disinterested parents – his father, a philandering actor, was rarely at home while his mother was unable to cope with bringing up Croiset and his younger brother practically singlehanded. Around 1920, Croiset and his mother, who had divorced his father and remarried, effected a reconciliation but the young boy was uneasy around his new stepfather and ran away several times. At home, Croiset found solace in prayer, despite the fact that, although being Jewish, his mother was by choice an atheist and, being disinclined to allow any kind of religious instruction in the home, looked on her son’s acts of faith with contempt, thereby driving a wedge through what little relationship they had managed to rebuild.

During the early 1930s, after a series of ‘dead end’ jobs, Croiset married and started a career as a self-employed grocer in Enschede, close to the border with Germany, with money borrowed from his wife’s parents. The couple eventually raised a family of four children, three boys and a girl; Croiset was imprisoned twice by the occupying Nazis during the Second World War but was released and, during these periods of freedom, worked for the Dutch resistance. Throughout these difficult years, from the time he was a small child at school through to the end of the war years, psychic experiences and contacts with the twilight world of the unseen were also a part of Gerard Croiset’s difficult life.

An often repeated account of the beginning of Croiset’s psychic awareness concerns an incident during the 1930s, when the Dutchman visited the shop of a local watch repairer. As Croiset casually picked up a ruler that lay on a workbench, a series of images connected

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