CLAIRVOYANCE IN CRIME

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 October 1931, Page 9

CLAIRVOYANCE IN CRIME

LATEST GERMAN NOVELTY. The use of clairvoyance to help solve crime masteries has often been dabbled in by police authorities in Europe and the United States. It has, however, been left to the Berlin police to give clairvoyance in this direction an official cachet. This has ju.-t been done by the appointment to a police post of one August Drost, a man of 40, who was once a school teacher, but who, discovering quite by accident his possession of remarkable powers, has for some little time past been acting as a sort of unpaid wizard of detective work. So striking have been Drost’s achievements that they now call him the “spirit Sherlock Holmes.” It was only two or three years ago that Drost, then a school teacher in the little town of Bernberg, first became at all interested in the occult. It was inevitable that he should meet a medium and should begin to attend a seance or two. It was then that, for the first time, he was told that be was “psychic.” Then he found he possessed the power of being able to send one of the mediums into a hypnotic trance, and it was the things revealed to him as a result of that trance that caused him to turn his entire attention to the matter. Herr Drost went on with liis| experiments. In a little over a year he had become one of the most talked of men in "Central Germany. Not only had he, and his hypnotic medium solve! many burglary and similar police mysteries, they had directly been responsible for the detection of two otherwise baffling murder riddles. It was Drost’s work in the last of these that finally decided the police to enrol him in theih service. The murder was a particularly atrocious one, a young girl being waylaid at a lonely spot. After her assailant had struck her down, he tore . a ring from her finger and was also believed to have taken with him in his flight a small handbag containing a small sum of money and the usual personal possessions carried by a girl. Search was mad ehigh and low for these articles as clues, but without result. t Then Drost offered his services. They were accepted, and he furnished I the police, with a complete description of a young artisan, who, unemployed, had taken to the road. The man, he said, had made his way to the Rhineland, but three weeks hence would again visit the scene of the crime. The police, suggested Drost, should wait and watch and trap him. It came out just as he had predicted.