Croiset, Gérard

Croiset, Gérard (1909–1980)

Gérard Croiset was born in Laren, the Netherlands, on March 10, 1909. His parents were in show business and often neglected him as a child. His father Hyman was a prominent actor and his mother was a wardrobe mistress. His parents were never officially married, and separated when Gérard was eight, leaving him to move through a series of orphanages and foster homes.

Gérard had visions from the age of six. During his early years, he was frequently punished by his elders when he spoke of them. He dropped out of school when he was thirteen and took a variety of unskilled jobs, none of which he held for very long. He finally got a job at one of the grocery stores in the Albert Heyn chain. He kept this job for several years.

At age twenty-five, Gérard married Gerda ter Morsche, an Enschede carpenter’s daughter. The following year he opened a grocery store with money loaned by his in-laws. Unfortunately it didn’t last long, and Gérard went bankrupt very quickly. About that time he came into contact with some local Spiritualists and was finally able to work on developing his clairvoyant talents. These developed quickly and his reputation as a psychometrist and psychic blossomed. He was instrumental in locating lost children and animals. He found that he also had an inherent healing ability. With the start of World War II, he was able to do healings for injured soldiers. There were a number of scenes from the war, which he saw clairvoyantly before the actual outbreak of hostilities. He predicted the war at least four years before it began.

During the war, Gérard spent time in a concentration camp but was released in 1943. He aided the Dutch resistance with his clairvoyant powers but was arrested again by the Gestapo in October of 1943.

After the war, in December 1945, Gérard attended a lecture on parapsychology given by Professor Willem Tenhaeff. The two men spoke together after the lecture and Tenhaeff went on to run tests on Gérard. Gérard accompanied the professor to the University of Utrecht, where he was subjected to the Rorschach personality test, the Murray Thematic Apperception test, the Pfister-Heisz color pyramid test, the Luscher color selection test, and the Szondi test. The chair test produced the most startling results. Professor Tenhaeff reported, “In early 1946 I made many psychoscopic tests with him. I realized fairly soon that he was very gifted. The more I tested him, the more I became persuaded that Croiset was a remarkable subject for parapsychological research.” Tenhaeff introduced Gérard to the Dutch Society for Psychical Research. The society’s members admired his abilities and looked upon him as a talented artist with rare paranormal gifts. Soon nearly all of Holland adopted this view of Gérard Croiset.

The Croiset cases have been meticulously documented over the years. He worked with the police, with private individuals, and with institutions, tracing lost people and objects, tracking down thieves and murderers, and solving numerous puzzles and problems both in his own country and in many other countries. Parapsychologists all over the world tested him and all reached the same conclusions. Gérard specialized in cases dealing with young children, especially when they were missing. He dealt with many of the cases over the telephone. He accepted no payment for any of the things he did, though he did accept donations to his healing clinic. At the clinic, it was not unusual for him to deal with more than one hundred cases per day. Much like Edgar Cayce, Gérard Croiset could sense the condition of a patient, identify what was wrong and how to correct it. Unlike Cayce he did not have to go into trance to do so. Gérard Croiset died on July 20, 1980. His son Gérard Croiset, Jr. took over the clinic.

Gérard Jr., second oldest of five children, seemed to have inherited his father’s talents. From Holland, he directed South Carolina police in a search for two missing girls. He drew a detailed map of the area where he saw them to be, at a place called Folly Beach, near Charleston. The bodies of the girls were found there, in shallow graves in the sand.

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