Imagine if your infant child suddenly started talking about piloting warplanes and people
dying in balls of flames.
Imagine if the kid, only three years of age, then mentioned the actual names of people
he’d flown with during the war.
You’d likely feel a bit unsettled.
Or, how would it feel if your child woke up screaming in the middle of the night, for
many nights and many weeks, and then started rambling about being some Hollywood director
from times past?
Incredibly, both these things happened to parents in the U.S. not that long ago.
The two kids joined a long list of children who have claimed to have had past lives, and
what’s fascinating, is the children often make a good case.
Today you’re going to hear a few more incredible cases of kids that convinced people they used
to be another person.
To your everyday skeptic, such cases might sound dubious, but before you turn away you
ought to know that thousands of cases of kids who’ve claimed to have been someone else
in another life have been investigated – and we don’t mean by online mystics who’ll
tell you for $9.99 how your aunt Barbara is doing in heaven.
Dr. Jim Tucker, a Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University
of Virginia, is one such man that has put a lot of effort into trying to find out what’s
going on with these kids.
Since the 1990s he’s been traveling all over the world in search of such kids and
of the 2,500-plus cases he’s studied, few of them fail to fascinate.
Before we get to some of the most confounding cases out there, first we’ll tell you some
things Mr. Tucker discovered during his many years of research.
For one thing, it turned out that 70 percent of kids who claimed to have had past lives
had lived the life of someone who hadn’t had a very natural death, meaning the person
they had lived had died from either an accident, murder, or they had taken their own life.
Tucker said during the research he would never investigate a case if the parent of the child
couldn’t name names, or give addresses, or talk about many places the child said he
or she had been in their past life.
If there was some information to work with however, Tucker would meet the parents and
child and take things further.
Tucker might have started off a bit skeptical, but as things turned out, some children just
knew too much.
You can’t really call his research science, it’s more a psuedoscience, but still, the
kids said some intriguing things.
They knew who they’d dated in their past life.
They knew what their past wife had loved to do on Sundays.
They knew how their past house was decorated and they talked about the pet dog they so
dearly loved.
Usually none of this information was something you could find online or even in a book.
What’s also quite interesting and maybe more convincing in the case for reincarnation
is the fact that most of the kids who claim to have had past lives are only two to four
years old.
In other words, they’re not quite at the stage in life when they want to manipulate
people.
They’re also arguably too young to be making up strange stories about people long dead.
Let’s now look at some cases and later on, you can make your own mind up about the validity
of the kids’ stories.
We’re going to start with an American kid.
What’s good about western cases is they are less frequent in those countries than
in parts of Asia where many people believe in reincarnation.
As it stands, according to Pew Research only around 33 percent of American adults believe
a person can come back to life as another person or being.
In the UK, some studies have shown 29 percent of people believe in reincarnation, and in
the rest of Europe, the numbers weren’t far off.
Still, being born again is much more of a thing in most of Asia.
In parts of Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand, reincarnation is no laughing
matter.
It’s a fact of life for many people….
We’ll come to amazing stories from the East later, but seeing as Americans are for the
most part skeptical of life after death, the good ole U.S. is a good starting place.
The kid’s name is Patrick, and his case was investigated by a U.S. psychology professor
named Dr. Ian Stevenson as well as the professor we just talked about.
Patrick’s mother had called the professors and told them she was convinced that he was
actually the reborn version of Patrick’s deceased half-brother.
Kevin.
After some more chatting on the phone, the professors took off to the Midwest to talk
in detail to the child and mother.
They started with the mother.
She told them that Kevin was born 14 years before Patrick.
He seemed healthy at first but just before he was one and a half years old, he developed
a strange limp.
After a few tests at the hospital, it seemed Kevin was ok, but then when he fell and broke
a leg two days later, his mother started to become very worried.
She was right to be concerned because as time went on doctors discovered that the boy had
a form of cancer.
One of the areas where he was most affected was his left eye.
Kevin began a treatment of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and after the tenth day
in the hospital, he was sent home.
This was all very unpleasant, but given the boy’s young age, he seemed to smile and
laugh as he always had done.
Six months later, he was rushed to the hospital with bleeding gums.
Cancer had spread to his bone marrow.
Doctors all but said his case was terminal.
There was nothing they could do, although he did receive a blood transfusion.
He died just a few days after.
The mother married again and had another child, but that relationship didn’t work out and
some years later she had another child with another man.
That child was named Jason.
Soon after she had a fourth child, and his name was Patrick.
The mother said as soon as she held Patrick, she just knew he was somehow connected to
her first son.
The two babies looked similar, even though they had different fathers.
Not only that, she soon discovered that Patrick had a problem with his left eye.
The diagnosis was a corneal leukoma, a condition that can make it hard to see.
In fact, the kid was pretty much blind in that left eye just as his deceased half-brother
had been at the end of his short life.
The conditions were not in the same ballpark at all, but blindness in one eye was the same
symptom.
Not only that, Patrick had a lump on his neck in the same place that his brother had had
a lump on his neck.
This wasn’t cancer, just a harmless nodule.
For the mother, these things were just too strange to be true.
Things got even weirder when the mother found a kind of dark spot on Patrick’s neck in
the same place where his brother had had a scar from tubes being inserted there.
This was a sad story the professors were listening to, but nonetheless, they checked the deceased
son’s medical records.
They also checked the body of Patrick, of course.
It all rang true.
There were indeed some strange coincidences.
What was perhaps freakier is that when Patrick was able to walk, he walked with a limp, just
as his brother had.
When the professors met him he was already five-years-old but he still had that unusual
limp even though medically his legs and gait should have been fine.
Patrick looked like Kevin.
He had a lump and a mark where Kevin had, and he limped like Kevin.
Ok, so what about Patrick’s mind?
Did he think he was his dead brother?
Well, when he was four years old, he started asking his mother if he could go to the “other
house.”
He asked, again and again, to go to this place, a house where he was sure he’d once lived.
He described it as a “chocolate and orange” house.
His mother of course had changed houses as well as husbands since her first child died.
Then one day he asked his mom if she could recall the day he had surgery.
At first, she told Patrick that he was healthy, and he’d never had surgery, at which point
the young boy pointed to his ear – a place where the deceased boy had once had a tumor.
The mother kept pictures of Kevin under lock and key, but when one day Patrick discovered
one he ran to her and shouted, “Here is my picture…That’s me!”
At other times, he’d talk about a puppy he once had, or should we say, his deceased
half-brother had once had.
He even recalled a day he went swimming with his grandfather and others and a guy’s head
was dunked under the water.
He was referencing events from Kevin’s life.
You might now be thinking, well, the mother could have made all that up.
Sure, that’s a possibility, a weird thing to do, but a possibility.
The professors interviewed other members of the family, including the mother’s sister
and Patrick’s siblings.
They talked about how Patrick would often talk about heaven, although Patrick’s father
said his kid didn’t talk to him about this past life.
When the professors talked to Patrick he told them about this other person he had been,
although he did so as if he was with the other kid, not actually was the kid.
He said he went to the zoo with him, and he talked about how they’d play in the same
bedroom, all the time describing a room that the professors found fitted the description
of the dead son’s bedroom.
Patrick also told them about the time he went to the ranch and saw the bulls, something
only his brother had done.
Ok, maybe that case doesn’t convince you but keep watching because stranger cases are
on the way.
Now let’s swing over to Thailand, a place where every day people try and please the
spirits with bottles of Fanta.
This is the case of a boy named Juta, who was four years old when his case was investigated.
A few months after this kid took his first breaths in the world his mother’s brother
died in a motorcycle accident in Bangkok.
After that, Juta got very sick and came down with a terrible fever.
He also developed two rather strange big spots on his left arm, right at the place where
his deceased uncle had had similar markings.
The uncle had started to get a tattoo, but after suffering a bit, he chickened out.
Instead of a drawing, all he had was the start of a drawing, which were two spots.
Junta then started to call his own mother, “Little Noey”, which was what her dead
brother had called her.
Things got really weird when older folks would go around the house to visit.
Juta would talk to the adults using informal language that kids just don’t use with grownups
in Thailand.
Not only that, he put ice in their beer and stirred it with his finger, something his
uncle used to do…And yes, Thais almost always add ice to beer.
The stuff gets warm there quickly.
After the kid had given everyone a glass of beer, he’d take one for himself.
He was four, don’t forget.
This wanting of beer happened all the time, something which mirrored his uncle’s predilections.
Juta also claimed that he’d once worked in Bangkok in construction.
He hadn’t even been to Bangkok.
All this was heard by the investigators, but when they returned for a second meeting a
few months later little Juta was no longer talking in that adult language and he’d
even gone off the beer, refusing one even if one was put in front of him.
The spots on his arm were becoming harder to see and according to the investigators,
the once grown-up boy had become a normal little boy.
Juta’s family believed that the soul of the deceased had entered Juta but had now
left.
The next case is similar, but quite a lot more confounding.
It was investigated in collaboration between U.S. professors and a Professor of Clinical
Psychology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in India.
It’s about a woman named Uttara who at the time of the investigation was 33 years old.
She’d had some mental health issues so had been told to meditate.
She did just that, but what happened next surprised her caregivers.
She’d alternate between extremes of silence and hysteria, and sometimes start talking
in a foreign language even though she couldn’t speak any foreign languages.
The doctor at the time thought she was speaking Bengali, although her parents told him she’d
couldn’t speak a word of it, never mind talk for ages in it.
She was sent home, but there were problems, to say the least.
She could no longer speak her native Marathi and instead used her new language, something
her parents did not understand at all.
Bengali speakers came to the rescue and they soon told her parents that their daughter
was now claiming to be someone called Sharada.
It seemed Sharada thought she’d never even left Bengal.
She didn’t recognize people or things around her.
It was as if her world was alien to her.
In fact, she didn’t even know what modern appliances were, like she was living in a
time long before such things existed.
After a few weeks in this state, Uttara came back.
During the investigation it was revealed that Sharada would make an appearance for a couple
of days for a total of 23 times over a few years, each time forgetting who her family
was and not understanding how something like a TV worked.
Over time, details were collected when Sharada came around.
She described the village where she lived in West Bengal and she described her friends
and family.
It turned out she thought she was living in the 18th century.
What shocked the researchers is when they searched for the names of Sharada's alleged
father and six brothers, they had all lived in West Bengal in the 18th century in a village
like the one Sharada had described.
On top of that, professors who were native Bengali speakers talked with Sharada and they
agreed that while she made a few mistakes, she was definitely fluent.
Still, skeptics have said that the girl could have somehow secretly learned the language.
That rings true when you find out a linguist said her way of speaking was not from the
18th century and her accent wasn’t spot on.
Was this a case of a woman suffering from a severe case of multiple personality disorder,
or was she really the part-time vessel for a possessor of souls?
Let’s finish with another story from the West.
If you think these kids are all making things up, this tale might change your mind.
It’s the story of a Scottish boy named Cameron.
At the time academics got to hear about his unusual story he was five-years-old and living
in Glasgow.
They were told young Cameron believed he had another mother, and she lived a long way off
on an island called Barra in the pretty remote part of Scotland called the Outer Hebrides.
This island has just over 1,000 people living on it, but it seemed young Cameron thought
he was one of them, or had been one of them.
When the U.S. investigator arrived in Glasgow, he soon found out that at the age of just
over two, Cameron kept asking his mother if they could go to Barra.
He seemed obsessed with the place.
In nursery school, he’d just walk around all day saying I want to go to Barra.
So far, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Maybe he saw beautiful Barra on TV and he liked the idea of looking for dolphins and
whales, which you don’t generally see in downtown Glasgow.
But it was more than that, the kid talked in detail about his family in Barra.
When he was asked about that family, Cameron said his father was named Shane Robertson.
Apparently, the boy had been talking about this man from the age of two and a half.
Unfortunately, it also emerged that one day Mr. Robertson had been out walking, slipped
off a sidewalk and fallen right in front of an oncoming car.
That car, according to Cameron, was of a greenish hue or green and silver.
His mother in Barra had long brown hair and it was cut short.
He often cried for this woman, sometimes shocking the teachers at preschool when he talked about
her.
Cameron said he also had three brothers and three sisters and one of the sisters was named
Lindsay, although he couldn’t recall all the other names.
He said they lived in a big white house and it had lots of bathrooms, so Cameron’s Barra
family were obviously not short of cash.
That house he said had lots of boxes outside of it.
Ok, so we’re talking about a really remote place here, an island that can’t be too
hard to investigate in terms of what families have lived there.
We’re also talking about a wealthy family, likely not your regular fishing family.
Cameron gave even more information than that.
He said he loved to swim in rock pools and went to the beach a lot.
He also said he had a black dog with a white stripe down its chest and the family would
often play with it.
He even described using one of those old black rotary dial phones.
Those things were around most of the 20th century, but you didn’t see many of them
by 1990, not in Scotland anyway.
What’s also important is that Cameron said he’d often watch planes come into land on
the beaches of Barra.
Now, Cameron never said he became an adult on Barra, but he also didn’t mention anything
about his own death.
He used to often say that he’d merely “fallen through” into his new mommy’s tummy.
He said one minute he was in Barra and the next minute he was growing up in Glasgow.
There he had an older brother who not surprisingly soon got tired of hearing about Barra.
Everyone who talked to Cameron soon realized he was obsessed.
When the researchers talked to him he wasn’t in the slightest bit shy as other kids had
been during their research.
He regaled them with tales of living on Barra, how he loved picking apples and hunting for
crabs that always nipped him.
He told them about his father’s black, spiky hair and he said those boxes outside his house
he’d mentioned before were full of fish.
In conclusion, he said when he was four he just fell out of bed, went down a hole, and
appeared in his new mom’s womb…although he called it a tummy.
Ok, so the researchers were now loaded with information and all they had to do was go
to this tiny island and look around.
They didn’t go alone.
They took Cameron and the family.
The researchers were both excited but also apprehensive since some things Cameron had
told them didn’t match with some things the mother had said.
For instance, he’d told her the house had stairs, but he told the researchers it was
a one-story abode.
It’s important to note, though, that he first talked about these places just after
turning two, and when the researchers arrived, he was five.
Nonetheless, the professors talked to Cameron’s uncle and friends of his mother and they said
his stories had always been the same.
Maybe he had stage fright since now the camera was turned on him.
The only thing to do was set off.
They landed there on the beach, which was the landing strip for a very small airport.
As soon as that plane opened its doors and young Cameron was blasted by the fresh sea
air he was smiling from ear to ear.
It was good to be home, he said.
Still, at first, it was hard for the researchers to tell if he really knew the place.
It wasn’t as if he was bumping into old friends and marching off to the nearest sweetshop.
The team started asking around about a family that sounded like the one Cameron had talked
about so effusively.
A local historian said since there were so few accidental deaths on the island he knew
about them all.
He had all the records going back to a time that seemed applicable to Cameron’s descriptions
of the island.
Only one guy was hit and killed by a vehicle, but the vehicle was a bus and the man wasn’t
called Robertson.
This happened in the early 1950s.
The historian also said that he knew of no Shane Robertsons, and while Robertson is a
pretty common name in Scotland, there hadn’t been so many of Barra.
There was one Robertson family there at the moment, but they’d moved there recently.
There was also another Robertson family in the 1930s.
Other things didn’t match up.
Houses with many toilets were a recent thing on the island.
Cameron could have watched planes land, but he’d have had to have been on the northern
part of the island, although he seemed to know the southern part better.
Nonetheless, swimming in rock pools was a very popular activity for kids in the past.
Was that it, though?
Did Cameron just have an amazing imagination for a two-year-old?
The researchers were about to give up when the historian called them a few days later.
He’d found a Robertson family that had lived on the northern part of the island.
The reason they didn’t show up in the records is that when they stayed on Barra, they only
did so for vacation periods.
And listen to this, this fairly wealthy shipping family had a large white house built for them
and that’s where they vacationed in the 1960s and 1970s.
It was built right next to the beach!
This house was called “Sanderling” and according to some of the older residents on
the island, it was often full of kids.
Then the researchers and the historian made a breakthrough.
They found the address of a man related to the Sanderling Robertsons and he was still
on the island, albeit living in a secluded place.
They soon arrived at his house and with trepidity and excitement banged on the door.
No answer.
The team was about to leave when an old man walked out into the blistering wind and pouring
rain, shouting, “I don’t know anything!
I don’t know anything!”
The cold gust howled as the man retreated back to his house.
The researchers knew they would likely not find any more evidence that Cameron the Glaswegian
had once lived on this rugged isle.
Cameron was brought to the Sanderling, though.
At first, the place seemed to mesmerize him, and then he just looked very sad.
He walked around the house as if he knew every part of it, and then at one point just stopped
and then ran to embrace his mother’s legs.
This is actually what often happens when kids who claim to have lived past lives are confronted
with their past.
It emotionally devastates them to be back where they were, or think they were, before.
Now you need to watch part one if you didn’t see it, “Kids Who Remember Their Past Lives.”
Or, have a look at...