5 - Clairvoyance, Cops, And Dowsing Rods

The body of 17-year-old Van Allen, Jr., of Jackson, Mississippi, had been lost for eight days when, on the night of April 11, 1964, Mrs. James F. "Billy" Runnels had her dream.

Mrs. Runnels and her husband had joined the searchers on that day, and had returned, weary and in despair that the body of the youth would never be recovered. He had drowned in the Pearl, a treacherous river known to be full of sink holes and whirlpools that had sucked many humans and animals down to a watery death. More than one victim's body had never been recovered. Regrettably, it appeared as though that would be the case with the body of the unfortunate teen-ager.

Then, as she lay drifting off into sleep, Mrs. Runnels suddenly "saw" and immediately recognized a particular curve of river three miles south of the city water works dam. There, caught on a log in midstream, Mrs. Runnels saw Van's body, clad in blue swim trunks.

Mrs. Runnels sat up in bed and told her dream to her husband. She waved down his protests that searchers had already passed that spot a dozen times without seeing a thing. The dream had seemed so real, that Mrs. Runnels insisted they put out their boat in the morning and investigate.

The next morning, accompanied by a young neighbor, Wyatt Bridges, the Runnels launched their boat in the midst of a driving rainstorm. Then, as they rounded the river bend which she had seen in her dream, Mrs. Runnels caught a flash of blue near a log. As they neared the log in midstream, they saw the body of Van Allen, Jr., just as it had appeared in Mrs. Runnels' dream.

"I have never experienced this sort of thing before," Mrs. Runnels later told newsmen. "The whole thing, the dream and then finding the boy's body, gave me an eerie and queer feeling."

Eerie though such an experience may be to the percipient, a clairvoyant dream is by no means uncommon. Factually substantiated reports abound confirming clairvoyant dreams that have led to the discovery of a missing child, the location of a lost object of value, or the recovery of a corpse. There seems little room for doubt that dreams may sometimes be clairvoyant and precognitive.

In early March of 1964, Dennis Hargus, a nine-year-old boy from Mesa, Arizona, was lost in the mountains near Prescott, Arizona. He had wandered away from breakfast at the YMCA camp near Groom Creek, and when it occurred to the boy that he might be lost, he remembered how his parents had always stressed that if he should one day find himself in such a predicament he should stop and think, and not panic.

Dennis made his way to the top of Maverick Mountain, "So I could look down and see where I was." He fashioned a crude brush shelter next to a large log, crawled in, and pulled his sweatshirt over his head, because: "I was afraid of the dark."

If Dennis had been older, he might perhaps have become frightened to the point of panic, by the dropping temperature. That night it chilled to 12º. Dennis' parents, the counselors at the YMCA camp, and volunteer searchers reluctantly called a halt to the search until morning. Rugged terrain made searching after dark an impossibility.

Virgil Maxwell, a retired rancher, shut off the news on the radio and shook his head sadly. He was aware of what a night's exposure could do to the lost boy, and he was worried. If only there was something that he could do to help little Dennis.

Still thinking of the lost boy, Virgil Maxwell prepared for bed and, after several restless minutes, fell asleep. During the night, the retired rancher had a vivid dream of the lost boy. He saw that he was on Maverick Mountain and recognized the general area. In his dream, the boy was caught on a white picket fence and could not get loose.

Early the next morning, Maxwell saddled his horse and headed directly for the spot which he had seen in his dream. He called out the boy's name, and Dennis answered: "Who is it?"

The rancher carried Dennis down the mountain to his waiting family. The boy's trouser legs were frozen stiff and colored with frost - symbolized, perhaps, by the "white picket fence" in Maxwell's dream.

"I dreamed right where he was," Maxwell told the boy's grateful parents.

The way in which sleep or a trance-like state opens the door to the subconscious of man, wherein lies the power and knowledge of the transcendent self, has been observed many tunes.

In 1849, the famous mathematician, Augustus de Morgan, wrote of his first experience with what came to be known as "traveling clairvoyance." The early mesmerists (hypnotists) carried out a great many experiments during which the subject would be asked to "go somewhere" mentally and to describe what he saw. Some truly astonishing reports come out of these early experiments. It is regrettable that such tests were not encouraged by the scientific establishment.

In the particular experiment of which De Morgan wrote, the mathematician told of dining at a friend's house which was about a mile from his own. De Morgan's wife was not present, having remained at home to treat a young epileptic girl with mesmeric therapy. When De Morgan returned to his home, his wife greeted him with the words: "We have been after you." While in a hypnotic trance the girl - whose clairvoyant abilities had been demonstrated on numerous other occasions - had been instructed to "follow Mr. De Morgan."

When the girl's mother had heard the name of the street on which the mathematician could be located, she told Mrs. De Morgan, "She'll never find her way there. She's never been so far away from Camden Town."

In a moment, the girl announced that she stood before the house. Mrs. De Morgan told her that she should knock at the door and go in. The hypnotized clairvoyant answered by saying that she could not knock at the door until she had entered the gate. Mrs. De Morgan was puzzled at this, and it was only upon Mr. De Morgan's return that the mystery was explained. Having never been to this particular friend's house, Mrs. De Morgan was not aware of the fact that the house stood in a garden and that the front door was reached only after one had entered at the garden gate. But the hypnotist bade her subject to simulate entering the house and continue in her pursuit of Mr. De Morgan.

The girl said that she was inside the house and could hear voices upstairs. She "walked" up the stairs and gave a detailed description of the people assembled, the furniture, objects, pictures in the room, and the colors of the drapes and curtains. De Morgan, admittedly awed by the clairvoyantly gained information, verified that each detail was precise and exact. He was even more astonished when the girl repeated the conversations she had overheard and described the dinner menu.

The Netherlands' Gerard Croiset is one of the most gifted clairvoyants in the world today. Perhaps the most remarkable of the many experiments that have been conducted with Croiset is a seemingly endless series of chair tests.

Devised for Croiset nineteen years ago by Professor Tenhaeff of the Dutch Society for Psychical Research, the test was first accomplished by the clairvoyant in October of 1947. From the very outset the results were startling; Croiset has since repeated the experiment several hundred times before scientists in five European nations.

The test itself is conducted quite simply. Croiset is taken to a theater, an auditorium, or a meeting house, where a chair number is selected completely at random by a disinterested third party. Croiset then predicts, anywhere from one hour to twenty-six days, who will sit in the chair. The descriptions given by the paragnost (as such sensitives are called in Holland) are never vague and generalized but quite exact and astonishingly detailed. Often, not only is the individual's appearance described but also characteristics of his personality and even certain emotional difficulties which the subject may be experiencing at the time. Sometimes Croiset sees the subject's past and is able to predict things about the person's future.

Another brilliant Dutch clairvoyant, Peter Hurkos, manifested latent powers after he had suffered a fractured skull in June, 1943. After the Second World War, Hurkos began to devote most of his time to psychic crime detection.

In one of his first cases as a psychic sleuth working with police, Hurkos had only to hold the coat of a dead man to be able to describe the man's murderer in detail that included the assailant's eye glasses, mustache, and wooden leg. When police admitted that they already had such a man in custody, Hurkos told them where the man had hidden the murder weapon.

In June 1964, Croiset was consulted in the murder case of the three Mississippi civil-rights workers, James Chancy, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Via trans-Atlantic telephone wire, Croiset accurately described the area where the three young men's bodies would be found and correctly implicated the local law enforcement officers as participants in the slayings. Although the FBI later made no formal acknowledgment of the clairvoyant's aid in the case, according to writer Jack Harrison Pollack, the law enforcement officers actively sought information from the Utrecht sensitive.

Clairvoyants have been co-operating with law enforcement agencies for years, but usually, as it is meticulously pointed out, in an "unofficial" capacity, the Dutch police being among the very few official agencies who openly consult clairvoyants for assistance in crime detection. In the United States, England, Canada, in spite of some astonishing results achieved with the help of psychics, the official policy is to discuss such important co-operation only in "off the record" interviews and unofficial statements. Even the most skeptical, however, must acknowledge that cases like the following rise above the level of sheer guesswork and make a strong case in favor of spontaneous "psi" phenomena.

When Charles King shot his partner, Edward Hayward, in the Alberta woods on a moonlit night in September, 1904, the greedy prospector made absolutely certain that there were no witnesses to his vicious betrayal. Being a practical materialist, Charles King could not possibly have guessed that a witness to the murder existed more than six thousand miles from the scene of the crime. Back in England, the victim's brother, George Hayward, had, in a dream, "seen" the murder committed as vividly as if he had been an on-the-spot witness.

When word of his brother's murder reached England, George Hayward reported his dream and it provided the necessary lead for officials to arrest Charles King. George Hayward went to Canada to attend the trial, but his testimony was not admitted into court records. Everyone connected with the investigation remarked, however, that the dream had been a remarkable coincidence.

In 1930, another remarkable "coincidence" occurred when Professor Gladstone, a mentalist, paused in the course of his act in a theater in Beechy, Saskatchewan, pointed to a man in the audience and said: "Your friend Scotty McLaughlin has been murdered."

His pointing forefinger next found Constable Carey of the Royal Mounted Police seated amidst the wide-eyed audience and told him: "And you are the man who will find his body. I will be with you when you do."

The next morning, the mentalist directed the officer to the murdered man's farm, described the death scene in detail, and led investigators to the spot in a field where the victim's corpse had been buried.

A number of law enforcement officers have discovered themselves to possess clairvoyant powers. Patrolman Don Sabel of Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan, is an officer with an uncanny knack for solving crimes before they have been officially reported.

One fall evening in 1960, Patrolman Sabel and his partner, Robert Sass, picked up the alert of a holdup. According to the squawk box in their patrol car, Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Lambardi had been accosted in their home and robbed of a considerable amount of cash and jewelry. In their shock and excitement, the couple was unable to give an accurate description of the bandit.

"Can't blame the folks," Patrolman Sass sighed, "but they haven't made our job any easier by not being able to describe the thief. It may take quite a while to grab this character."

"Turn the car around!" Sabel suddenly shouted, a note of urgency in his voice.

Patrolman Sass blinked, did as his partner had asked. It was a warm evening for Michigan in autumn, and the streets were filled with men and women strolling and window shopping. Sass was unable to notice anything unusual that may have accounted for his fellow officer's sudden excitement.

"Here," Patrolman Sabel nodded his head. "Stop here. Without another word, the officer was on the street. He approached a man who was about to enter a restaurant and ordered him to halt. On his person, the man carried $500 in cash and a woman's wrist watch. Startled, he confessed at once to having committed the Lambardi holdup.

About two months later, Patrolman Sabel had another one of his "hunches" when he brought two men in for questioning. The nervous men felt as though they had stepped into some kind of "twilight zone" as the cop with all the answers began to grill them. It was crazy! It was weird! But the patrolman knew everything they had done that night.

Just as Patrolman Sabel was completing his interrogation, Mr. and Mrs. John Herberling phoned the station house to report that they had returned from an evening out and discovered that their home had been burglarized. The police chief was able to inform the astonished Herberlings that Patrolman Sabel had already arrested the culprits and had just obtained their confessions.

Clairvoyant dreams and "hunches," although never accepted officially into police records, are usually given some respectful attention and, if they prove to be accurate, are at least granted the pseudo-dignity of being termed "a coincidence." A "professional" clairvoyant, however, may run a certain risk when he offers his services to the police.

The celebrated Edgar Cayce, an incredibly gifted clairvoyant, who used his talents primarily in the diagnosis of diseases, was once consulted in a murder case. Cayce, while in trance, recreated the scene in minute detail and identified the murdered girl's sister as her slayer. When law enforcement officers followed up the lead, they were astonished to find themselves with a confessed murderer on their hands. Cayce's satisfaction in aiding the police was soon dimmed when an officer appeared with a warrant for his arrest. The police chief had reasoned that the only way that the psychic could have known so much about the murder was to have somehow been an accomplice.

Only rapid-fire talk of "psi" and the testimony of several corroborating witnesses allowed the befuddled police chief to retreat to his customary bailiwick. A similar incident occurred to a young Norwegian psychic named Ingeborg Dahl. The young woman had demonstrated remarkable ability with predictive and clairvoyant automatic writing and had been encouraged by some close friends to develop her "psi" talents. Others, however, felt that Ingeborg's predictions were pure luck and coincidence and that she had no genuine psychic abilities at all. These skeptics were shocked at the girl's "bad taste" when she declared that she foresaw her own father's death by drowning.

In the summer of 1934, the elderly retired judge was seized with cramps while swimming at Hanko, and Ingeborg Dahl's prediction came true. But the daughter had not foreseen the bizarre turn of events that followed her father's death. The same skeptics who had once laughed off her predictions as coincidences, then charged her with the murder of her father. According to their allegations, she had drowned her father in an attempt to prove her prophetic powers.

For a time, the trial of Ingeborg Dahl greatly resembled that of a medieval witch hunt. Representatives from the Norwegian Society for Psychical Research were denied the right to offer expert testimony in order not to offend the scientific establishment. Fortunately for Ingeborg Dahl, the prosecution was unable to develop enough solid evidence to support a murder charge. After an extended trial, it was decided that Judge Dahl's own presentiment of death may have produced a kind of hypnotic suggestion that led to his drowning.

Perhaps one clairvoyant had such hazards in mind when he recently told me: "People must be very cautious when they go about developing their powers of clairvoyancy. True that these powers lie latent within all and can be encouraged, but I really feel that one should not consciously cultivate such talents. If God wishes an individual to be clairvoyant, this ability will develop in spite of the individual. Possessing this gift can be a trial, however. Our society just isn't ready for it yet."

Powerful emotions like fear and dread, coupled with the pain of injury or death - all seem to be important aids to the clairvoyant in receiving extrasensory impressions of the missing, the murdered, and the victims of misdeeds. When these powerful elements are removed, the clairvoyant is often unable to make any positive "connection" with the case in question. It has been noted, for instance, that when a psychometrist has been given an object belonging to an insane person, the sensitive's impressions reflect the same jumbled thinking as the subject. Missing persons suffering from amnesia are also difficult to make "contact" with, because in such cases the "fear signals" are not being broadcast.

Remarkable use of psychics has been made by police agencies around the world. Whether or not this fact is made mention of in official reports is perhaps immaterial, as long as the talents of these gifted people are being utilized. One would hope, though, that some day soon, "psi" phenomena will have its official day in court and be acknowledged as the magnificent mental tool it has so often proved to be.

Another "unofficial" ESP ability that the common man has utilized for centuries is that of dowsing for water with the forked stick. Few manifestations of "psi" have been more hotly debated than that of dowsing. On the one hand is the pronunciamento of the scientific establishment, which declares that locating water by means of a forked stick is utter nonsense. On the other side of the argument are those men and women who go about locating water with their forked maple twigs, completely impervious to the ridicule visited upon them by the skeptics. They could not care less whether or not a laboratory technician believes that water cannot be located in such a manner. All they know is that it works and that they have been finding water in just that way or years.

Novelist Kenneth Roberts stated in his book, Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod, "Not all the derision of all the geologists in the world can in any way alter the unfailing accuracy of the dowsing rod in Henry Gross's hands. Not all the cries of 'hokum,' 'curious superstition,' 'fanciful delusion,' 'hoax,' 'witchery,' 'pseudo-science,' can destroy or even lessen the value of Henry's dowsing ..."

I have included dowsing in the general realm of clairvoyance, because, to me, the twig in the hand must serve as a stimulant to the greater knowledge of the transcendent self in much the same manner as the photograph of a missing child serves to establish psychic rapport for the clairvoyant power of the psychometrist.

The modus operandi of the dowser seldom varies. He grasps the ends of a twig firmly (I have been told that peach, apple, and maple seem to work best) with palms upward. As he starts his search for water, he carries the butt of the stick pointed upward. When he nears water, he can feel the pull as the butt end begins to dip down-ward. When the dowser is over the water, the twig has been bent straight down, having turned through an arc of 180 degrees. A stick of brittle wood will break under the grip of a dowser as the butt moves downward. Pliable twigs will twist themselves down despite an effort to hold them straight.

For nearly twenty years, the town officials of Swampscott, Massachusetts, sought a lost water supply, until, in the summer of 1963, after modern methods of detection had failed, they applied the ancient technique of dowsing with immediate success.

Swampscott's administrative buildings are housed in the former mansion of the late Elihu Thomson, co-founder of General Electric Company. Each summer, the residents of the town had been forced to ration their water supply. Old-timers said that Professor Thomson had located an independent supply of water, but no one could remember where it was. Ever since Swampscott had purchased the old mansion in 1944, the Department of Public Works had conducted a diligent search for the underground water supply. Nothing had worked - including a mine detector - and the townspeople were about ready to give up.

Then, half-jokingly, someone suggested dowsing. Superintendent of Public Works Paul A. Polisson was skeptical, but he decided that they had tried everything else. Fifteen minutes after Polisson and a group of men had set out with forked twigs in their hands, "Dutchy" Emery, a 56-year-old laborer, located the lost water supply.

Later, his companions testified that the stick had moved downward with such force that it had scraped skin off Emery's thumb.

A back hoe operator dug a hole nearly five feet deep at the spot where Emery's bending twig had indicated. In awe, the men stared at the pipe that had been unearthed. Polisson wrenched a cap off the pipe and dropped a weighted string into the opening. There was twenty-eight feet of pure spring water in the pipe, enough to get the lawns of Swampscott through the worst drought.

Nearly twenty years of digging and searching had accomplished nothing. In fifteen minutes, an amateur dowser with a determined twig and a scraped thumb had located a lost water supply. A scientific explanation? There is none. Not in acceptable scientific jargon. As in all "psi" phenomena, the answer lies in the subconscious power of the transcendent self. Henry Gross, the greatest practitioner of dowsing the world has ever known, located water on parched Bermuda by dowsing a map of the island spread on the floor of his home in Maine.

In 1953, UNESCO sponsored a committee of prominent European scientists in their study of radiesthesia (dowsing). Their carefully considered report was that "there can be no doubt that it is a fact."

The Academe des Sciences of Paris has commented:

"It is impossible to deny the existence of the power, although its nature cannot be determined."

Five Nobel Prize winners have endorsed dowsing, and so has the Institute of Technical Physics of the Dutch National Research Council.

Well-watered herds of cattle and prospering communities in the dry Southwest offer impressive testimony to the prowess of the dowser. Yet, because not everyone can do it in a controlled and repeatable experiment, dowsing is denied general scientific acceptance.