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...
