His name did not leave the pages of American newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s. By touching any object, he could tell almost everything about its owner. Herkos became the most famous psychodetective and was nicknamed "the radar man".
Unlike most psychics, whose abilities manifested themselves at an early age, the Dutchman Peter Herkos was up to a certain point a completely ordinary person. However, the parents, ordinary workers from the provincial town of Dordrecht, have always believed that life will present their son with many surprises. After all, he was born enveloped in a fetal shell - in the very "happy shirt" that probably saved him from certain death on July 10, 1941.
RANDOM GIFT
On that momentous day, 30-year-old Peter, who worked as a house painter in The Hague, was painting the wall of a four-story building. But through negligence, he lost his balance and fell from a height of 15 meters. Doctors diagnosed a severe head injury. There was almost no chance of saving the unfortunate man, but the doctors, yielding to the persuasions of relatives, still performed the operation.
After three days in a coma, Horkos woke up, but his vision did not return to him immediately. He spent a week in complete blindness, but at the same time he accurately called the names of visitors, as soon as they crossed the threshold of the hospital ward. Moreover, he was inexplicably aware of events that either had already happened or were about to happen. So, one morning, Peter unexpectedly told the nurse: "Be careful on the train, or you will lose your bag!" "I'm sorry, what? How did you know that ?! " - the girl was stunned. It turns out that this trouble had already happened to her just a couple of hours ago!
A few days later, a roommate, leaving the hospital, approached Herkos to shake his hand goodbye. “You are an agent of the British special services, and they will soon kill you,” he said. The man turned pale: "Where?" “On Calver Street. Alas, that's all I can say,”the psychic turned to the wall. Further events developed, as if in a spy novel.
The next night, three strangers appeared in the ward to find out how Herkos knew about the impending attempt on their comrade. They did not even doubt that he was an informant in the Gestapo. One twisted his arms, the other began to choke him with a pillow, when suddenly the psychic exclaimed: "God, how I hate murder!" The grip immediately weakened: Peter expressed aloud the secret thought of the agent who was strangling him, and this saved his life. The strangers understood: a clairvoyant was in front of them.
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Later, Herkos said that strange thoughts that appeared out of nowhere did not leave him for a second. “Sometimes I covered myself with a pillow so as not to see or hear anything else, but sounds and pictures came to me. Even when I was sleeping, my consciousness went to places that I had not seen before, he recalled. Life has turned into a nightmare.
It seemed that another person had taken over him. The parents felt the same, admitting: "This is no longer the same Peter." However, the psychic found the use of the visionary gift later. Soon after leaving the hospital, he was arrested for sympathizing with the fighters of the Dutch Resistance and sent to Buchenwald, where Hörkos spent three whole years.
I SAY THAT I SEE
At the end of World War II, Peter returned to his native Holland. Walking through the streets of Amsterdam, he came across a poster: "A famous medium reads intimate thoughts in public." The unemployed clairvoyant collected the last trifle in his pockets and, sacrificing dinner, bought a ticket to the performance. But what was happening on the stage caused him only a grin.
The audience passed notes of various contents to the medium. Without opening it, he burned them and said what was written there. Peter also handed over a piece of paper. And when it was his turn, the artist threw it into the fire and said: “A note from Mr. Herkos. He claims that he is a better medium than me. " Well, show us your talent! " He went up to the stage. "Your method?" - "I touch things."
The medium handed him the medallion. The psychic did not hesitate to answer: “In the medallion is hidden a lock of blond hair belonging to a woman, but by no means your wife. Her name is Greta. You take her with you from city to city, and now she is in this hall. The skeptical smile disappeared from the artist's face, he took the medallion and asked the shrewd stranger to leave the stage.
With the air of a triumphant passing through the hall to his place, Peter stopped beside a young blonde and, putting his hand on her shoulder, said publicly: “This is Greta. Its fluctuations coincide with the fluctuations of the curl in the medallion. The flushed girl immediately ran out of the hall - the audience applauded. At that moment, Herkos realized how he could earn his living.
Peter Hörkos' performances were a huge success. He toured Holland and neighboring countries, shocking the audience with the precision of his "revelations". However, he refrained from predicting the future. His main talent was psychometry - the ability to obtain information about a person by touching any of his things. “Sometimes people try to deceive me, but from one touch to the objects that belong to them, a picture of reality appears in my mind, and I’m not afraid to say what I see,” the clairvoyant explained.
IN GUARD OF THE LAW
Since 1947, the police began to actively involve Herkos in the investigation of the most intricate atrocities. In the first case, it was enough for him to hold the victim's coat in his hands for a few seconds in order to compose a detailed portrait of the criminal, including such details as glasses, mustache, and a wooden prosthesis instead of his left leg. A person who fully matched this description had already been detained - the psychodetective had only to find the murder weapon to put an end to the investigation. They turned to him for help and in the search for missing people. So, in Amsterdam, a seven-year-old girl disappeared without a trace. Hierkos not only "saw" the poor thing's corpse entangled in seaweed in one of the city's canals, but also indicated its specific location.
Foreign law enforcement officers have often resorted to the services of a psychic. Suffice it to note his collaboration with Scotland Yard in the case of the theft of the Skunk Stone, a sacred relic of Scotland. A huge 150-kilogram sandstone block, whose history goes back three millennia, was stolen from Westminster Abbey on Christmas morning in 1950. Arriving in London, Herkos examined the crime scene, and then was able to describe in detail the criminals and even give their names. They turned out to be four students who decided to steal out of patriotic motives.
PERFECT HIT
In 1956, at the invitation of Dr. Andriy Puharich, who was studying extrasensory perception, Peter Herkos went to America to take part in experiments. The clairvoyant has shown amazing results. During the tests, he accurately guessed the contents of the sealed envelopes, he could tell exactly about the owners of various items - watches, rings, barely touching them. The accuracy of hits reached 90%!
But most of all, the researcher admired the ability of Herkos to describe the images in the photo with a blindfold, as well as to restore in detail the history of the people captured on it. It seemed that the pictures capture not only real events, but also fragments of the past and future. After two and a half years of research, Puharich was forced to admit: “Peter Horkos is one of the most outstanding psychics I have ever met. His abilities are so deep that they themselves have not yet fully realized them, having tried only what is on the surface."
Herkos decided to stay in the States. He spoke to an audience hungry for miracles, took part in television and radio shows, and conducted personal consultations. The American police also decided to use the services of a psychic. In 1958, he was involved in the investigation of a murder in Miami, where the body of a taxi driver was found in his own car. Since there was no evidence that could give a "clue", Horkos asked permission to sit in the back seat of the taxi. And then he told the detectives that he saw a tall man with a tattoo on his right arm and a woman who, leaving the car, said: "Goodbye, Smitty."
He heard the driver pleading not to kill him and the coldly contemptuous answer, "How are you better than that guy from Key West?" And then gunshots. Herkos added that the killer was not from the world. Most likely from Detroit. The police found the perpetrator - it turned out to be Charles Smith, a member of the famous Detroit gang nicknamed Smitty.
The next high-profile case of the famous psychodetective was the disappearance of the Jackson family in early 1959 in Virginia. Their car was found empty and no evidence was found to aid the investigation.
In March, when the snow melted, the body of the father of the family, Carroll Jackson, was found in a ditch nearby, with his hands tied behind his back and a bullet in the head. Directly below him was the corpse of his 18-year-old daughter Janet - she was buried alive. Two months later, boys from a neighboring village, playing in the forest, stumbled upon the corpses of their mother, Mildred, and their youngest daughter, Susan: both were raped and killed. Horkos, having “scanned” the belongings of the victims of the maniac, gave a description of the house in which he supposedly lived. A dilapidated cottage on the edge of the forest belonged to a scavenger. But the psychic doubted: the worker's appearance did not match what he saw.
According to him, the culprit was a tall left-handed man with a tattoo on his arm and a duck-walk. And yet, the material evidence found near the murder site of Mildred and Susan directly pointed to the scavenger - he was arrested, the case was closed. However, the police soon received a letter from a certain Glenn Moselle, who claimed that the real killer was the musician Melvin Rees, who had personally confessed to him. It turned out that in January 1959 he really lived in the house of the scavenger. It was later revealed that Rhys was guilty of 10 such crimes, and in 1961 he was executed.
SUNSET CAREER
The American police unconditionally trusted the abilities of Peter Herkos. However, his involvement in the investigation of the Boston Strangler case disappointed law enforcement officers. From June 1962 to January 1964, 13 single women became victims of the maniac. The psychic insisted on the guilt of a certain shoe seller who suffered from mental disorders. Numerous pieces of evidence did not support this. None of Herkos's guesses served as a clue in the case. The killer admitted himself - he turned out to be Albert De Salvo, who was repeatedly prosecuted for rape. However, many are still not sure that it was De Salvo who was the Boston Strangler. Perhaps there were two maniacs, as indicated by discrepancies in both the choice of victims and the handwriting of the murders.
By 1969, Peter Hörkos claimed to have helped solve 27 murders in 17 countries. However, according to the police, his role was overblown both by himself and by sensational journalists. Herkos was also mercilessly criticized for often refusing to help the investigation if the proposed fee did not meet his expectations. It seemed that the more money he made (a private consultation cost $ 200 - a lot of money at the time), the weaker his abilities became.
One way or another, in the 1970s, Herkos finally gave up his psychodetective career. He performed in clubs in Los Angeles, but "tricks" were less and less popular. Probably, Peter did not understand why the gift of a clairvoyant "fell" on him, and in the pursuit of fame and fortune, he wasted what was given from above. Towards the end of his life, Hörkos devoted himself entirely to gardening and painting. He died in 1988 in Los Angeles from a heart attack.
Loud investigations
The brutal murder of the film actress Sharon Tate and her three friends in a villa in Hollywood by members of the Manson Family (1969). To investigate the terrible crime, Herkos was invited by Tate's husband, the famous director Roman Polanski. The clairvoyant guessed unerringly that a certain Charlie was involved, although Charles Manson himself was not involved in the murder.
The case of a serial maniac from Michigan, whose victims from 1967 to 1969 were six students. The description of the killer given by Herkos completely coincided with the main suspect - it turned out to be 22-year-old John Norman Collins, who was later sentenced to life in prison.
The mysterious disappearance of the American businessman Jim Thompson, who left his villa "Moonlight" 150 km from the capital of Malaysia on the evening of March 26, 1967. According to the version of Herkos, which coincided with the assumptions of the investigators, Thompson, an undercover CIA agent, was kidnapped by the Vietnamese secret services. However, the case was never solved.