Psychic Detectives
By Mindy Mejia
August 2, 2023
On April 11, 1963, a six-year-old boy named Wim Slee went missing from Voorburg, an inland town in the south of the Netherlands. Immediately, authorities began searching the area. Police dogs traced a scent to a spot on the bank of the Vliet canal, an ancient waterway originally dug by the Romans that ran through the entire town, but no evidence of the boy was found. Five days later, with no other leads, Wim’s uncle spoke to a man named Gerard Croiset1.
Croiset was no detective. Originally trained as a watchmaker, he considered himself a psychic healer and claimed he could sense information about a person by holding their personal objects. Croiset was abroad at the time Wim Slee disappeared, but told Wim’s uncle over the phone that the boy had drowned. He said the body would surface in a few days near a bridge, sluice, or somewhere similar, near the spot of the accident. A few days after this phone call, Croiset traveled to Voorburg and brought police to the same spot on the canal bank the dogs had previously tracked. He showed them a hand drawn map of the area and said he was experiencing strong emotions there. Croiset claimed the boy would surface on Tuesday near a bridge eight hundred yards downstream.
The following Tuesday, Wim Slee’s body was found near the bridge2.
Growing up in the American Midwest in the eighties and nineties, I never heard of Gerard Croiset. I scoffed at TV ads for Miss Cleo and mocked Winona Ryder for running up a thousand-dollar bill to a phone psychic in Reality Bites. (Would goofing around with your best friend at The Gap really have been the worse choice, Lelaina?) By and large, psychics seemed like shifty people running easy cons. I visited a psychic only once, during my freshman year at the University of Iowa, where the woman told me all the things an eighteen-year-old girl away from home for the first time wanted to hear. The way ahead is difficult, but you are strong and will find a way through. You’ll discover yourself along the way. Yes, <insert romantic interest> loves you. It was a therapy session at the most, fifteen minutes of generic, paid encouragement. I left feeling simultaneously comforted and ripped off.
Twenty years later, I listened to a true crime podcast episode about psychic detectives and was introduced to Gerard Croiset3. As a thriller writer I’d penned all sorts of crime-solving characters by that point—a sheriff, a speech therapist, and a forensic accountant. I didn’t believe in psychics enough to think one could solve an entire case on their own, but I wondered about the possibility of pairing a psychic with another character who approached the world in the exact opposite manner, someone rational and evidence-based. That’s how the two main characters of my new book, To Catch a Storm, began. But in order to write Jonah Kendrick, my haunted psychic detective, I had to take a deep dive into the history of parapsychology.
Joseph Rhodes Buchanan, an American professor of psychology and medical science, began studying the phenomenon of psychic detection in the mid-1800s. He believed all substances gave off emanations and that the human body, in particular, emitted a “nerve aura.” He performed experiments attempting to prove the existence of psychometry or “soul-measuring”, beginning a long line of academics, enthusiasts, and believers attempting to fit a fundamentally unscientific concept into scientific terms. The evidence is anecdotal at best, but as humans, we will always be drawn to story over statistics, and the stories are compelling. Here’s a sampling in the years following Buchanan’s work.
In 1865, Abraham Lincoln dreamed he was walking through the White House and heard the sounds of muffled sobbing. He found a corpse laid out in the East Room and asked an attending soldier, “Who is dead?” The soldier replied, “The President. He was killed by an assassin.” Lincoln woke up and couldn’t get the dream out of his head. Annoyed, he shared the dream with a good friend. Ten days later, while attending the theater, he was assassinated4.
One of the most well recorded instances of mass premonition occurred in April 1912, when the RMS Titanic set sail on her one and only voyage. W.T. Stead, a journalist who’d written several articles about shipwrecks and safety measures, visited two psychics while the Titanic was being built. The first warned there was danger at sea and not to travel during April 1912. The second told him he would go on a trip to America, something he had no intention of doing, yet he later booked a ticket anyway. Many other travelers canceled their trips after having bad feelings about the ship and premonitions of disaster. A London businessman named J. Connon Middleton dreamed two nights in a row about a wrecked Titanic and canceled his passage.
When the Titanic left port and sailed past the Isle of Wight, people stood along the coast to watch and cheer. One woman, Mrs. Jack Marshall, screamed and grabbed her husband’s arm, telling him the boat was going to sink. “Do something,” she pleaded. “Are you so blind that you are going to let them drown?” Four days later the Titanic sunk, and over 1,500 people—including W.T. Stead—drowned in the Atlantic4.
Do people have premonitions about disasters that don’t happen? Do they dream about their own deaths and live for another forty years? Of course, and the number of failed predictions are exponentially greater than the ones that do come true. A critic of Gerard Croiset’s noted that his rate of success, over the course of his entire career, was no better than chance. But we don’t pay attention to the failures, because they aren’t nearly as good of a story.
Language is key. We don’t believe in psychics, but we accept psychic abilities that infiltrate our lives by other, less divisive names: premonition, intuition, dream states. The Ancient Greeks were among the first to believe we could receive extrasensory knowledge through dreams. They divided dreams into two types: oneiros and enhypnion. Enhypnion were run-of-the-mill dreams, the daily compost chugging through most people’s subconscious, nothing worth remembering. The others, oneiros, were different. Oneiros had divine origins and were meant to be investigated5.
Confession: I’ve had an oneiros dream. Like a lot of fiction writers, my dreams are usually bonkers fun-house rides, whirlwinds of images and impossible situations, but one night I dreamed I was holding a baby. That was it. That was the whole thing. The entire night—or what felt like it—I stood in a dark room trying to hold on to a squirming kid without dropping him. He kept throwing his weight around, slipping and sliding. I was terrified he was going to fall. Just before I woke up, he propped himself on my chest, looked straight at me, and grinned.
The instant I woke, I knew I would meet that baby. It didn’t feel like any dream I’d ever had. I was in my early twenties at the time and took a panic pregnancy test. Negative. None of my friends were pregnant either. A few weeks later my sister came home from Texas for a visit and she and her spouse announced the news—they were expecting their first child. “It’s a boy,” I told her. She said it was too early to know, but no one could convince me otherwise. Six months later, on September 11, 2001, when thousands of people tragically died, my nephew was born.
I’ve never had another psychic experience and don’t expect I will again. Moments like that aren’t repeatable, which is the fundamental incompatibility of science and intuition. Scientific knowledge is built on experiments with replicable results. A laboratory’s findings aren’t accepted until they can be confirmed by more labs, reducing the possibility of faulty input or error. But how do you replicate a dream? When the universe hands you something utterly unique, you can’t demand seconds.
This is the fundamental question beneath To Catch a Storm. How do we evaluate knowledge? What do we accept as truth and why? It’s the driving conflict between Eve Roth and Jonah Kendrick throughout the book. As a physicist, Eve cannot accept a psychic’s knowledge as any form of truth. As a psychic, Jonah doesn’t have the tools to translate his oneiros into hard evidence. In a normal world, the two of them wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room with each other. But Eve’s husband is missing, and his disappearance could provide the key to solving another missing person’s case that has haunted Jonah for months. The physicist and the psychic must learn how to expand their paradigms to include each other if they want to find the answers they both desperately need.
Does it end well? Only a psychic could say.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Croiset
2. https://cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/1981/10/22165428/p19.pdfrim
3. https://wineandcrimepodcast.com/show_episodes/ep50-crimes-solved-by-psychics/
4. Psychic Powers. Time-Life Books, 1992.
5. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/619377/summary