Retro Bio: Psychic: The Story of Peter Hurkos by Peter Hurkos
Peter Hurkos could have been known as "The Scrying Dutchman." He claimed he was clairvoyant, with precognitive and psychometric abilities. But he received his powers, as he often referred to them, in an unusual way. In 1943, while painting a building for the Nazis in occupied Holland, he fell 30 feet to the ground. The fall knocked him unconscious for three days. He awoke in a local hospital having sustained a skull fracture.
Almost immediately whenever he was around someone, he saw images connected to them and future incidents involving themselves and others. Somewhat like Christopher Walken's character in the movie based on Stephen King's book The Dead Zone, he received impressions from someone whenever he shook his or her hand. He was uneasy with this new ability which interfered with his daily life. He couldn't stop it. At first hospital staffers thought Hurkos was crazy. He was able to convince them of his abilities through meeting a man who turned out to be a British secret agent. He warned a nurse afterward that the man would be killed by the Germans. The Dutch underground found out and they thought Hurkos was a traitor -- how else could he have known that? A member of the underground was sent to kill him and he nearly succeeded, covering his face with a pillow. It was only through Hurkos' chance expression of a phrase in Spanish that he shocked his would-be murderer into stopping the act -- the man (who sometimes when "under strain" thought in Spanish) was thinking about how much he hated killing people. Hurkos didn't know Spanish.
As Hurkos explains, "Sometimes I thought I was crazy; at other times I wished I were. No one can imagine, but perhaps a reader can begin to imagine, how unsettling it is to see people, the doctors, the nurses, the other patients, and know all about them in an instant. I did not want to know! I did not want to pry into the private lives of others, but I was given no choice at all. From time to time, when someone passed my bed, or my attention was directed to some individual, I felt a mental shock, and then clear pictures began forming in my head -- just as though I was visualizing my own room at home. But these pictures were of places and people I had never seen. Many times the faces were blotted out, and many times they were not. But the pictures were there, almost constantly, and they distracted me completely." Hurkos claimed for years his powers affected his ability to concentrate and he couldn't work. But he believed they
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