When A Child Claims A Past Life Who Do You Believe

A haunting story lands in our inbox: twins who speak like they’re the same daughters a family lost years earlier. They point to “impact” marks, ask for toys they’ve never seen, and run through a village like they already know the way home. It’s the kind of reincarnation story that can make your stomach drop and your skepticism wobble at the same time. So we do what we always do in Spirit Tales and Magic: we tell it straight, then we test it. 

We dig into why that specific tale doesn’t hold up as literal fact, and how urban legends about past lives travel the world by changing names, dates, and tragedies while keeping the emotional punch intact. From there, we zoom out to the bigger question: what do researchers and psychologists say about child past life memories, especially ages two to five? We talk about memory construction, subconscious association, suggestion, and why many experts dismiss these claims, even as investigators continue to collect thousands of reports and look for patterns like phobias, preferences, and even birthmarks that match documented wounds. 

Then we share experiences closer to home: an old safe hidden in a forgotten place, a teenager who claims it was “hers,” and the moment she opens it on the first try. We also touch the well-known case files that keep showing up in serious conversations, including Shanti Devi and James Leininger, and what makes them so difficult to wave away with a quick explanation. 

If you’ve ever wondered whether reincarnation is real, why some paranormal stories feel true, or what to do when a kid says something impossible, you’ll feel right at home here. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves the unexplained, and leave a review. Do you have a reincarnation story of your own?

Transcript

Surprise Email Changes The Plan

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey everybody, it's Dr. G Spirit Tales and Magic. Hope you're doing well. It's almost two o'clock in SoCal. We're looking at about 76 degrees and about 160 days until October. October this year may be a little different than it has been, but we'll talk about that when we get a little bit closer. If you're a frequent flyer of the podcast, you know that sometimes we come in to do a podcast and it's descripted and laid out, and then before we do it, I'll open an email or a snail mail and I'll read it, and then everything changes. Which is the case today. And of course, some of this will be done on the Nash, as they say. So might get a little bit stumbly. And the other thing you need to know for today is we're in somebody else's office. So I am not in control of ringing phones and dinging doorbells and loud noises outside and all of those things. So this email comes from Michaeline. And for those of you who know the podcast well, it's I'm gonna say it's not that Michaelan. If you know, you know. Hey Doc, could you read this story? Or you can do it from memory if you can, about the England incident in Redwood Hollow. I was going over that with my wife, and we met a person who swears that they lived in an old log cabin that used to be on the property from our house, which was taken down over a hundred years ago. Being that this person is 14 years old, I don't see how that's possible. Well, in about 1956 in Redwood Hollow, England, I believe, the family lost their two young daughters in a very tragic automobile accident. And of course the parents were devastated. Months passed, then a year, then a little longer. Then in 1958, the mom gave birth to two twin girls. It seemed like a miracle, but from the moment the twins could speak, things were not what you would call normal. At age three, one of them points to a birthmark on her knee and says, Look, this is where the car hit me. The other twin refused to sleep without the lights on. She said, The man in the car comes back when it gets really dark. Now, of course, the parents are a little bit horrified, and they never spoke about the accident in front of the twins. But things got a little stranger yet. The twins began asking for toys that they had never seen. Toys they would describe that belonged to Emily and Grace, the first set of twins. They described their old schoolyard perfectly. And whenever the family got into the car, the twins sat quietly. They took the exact same two spots that their sisters had preferred and sat in silence, looking at everything around them as if they were waiting for something to happen. Long before the accident, they find it very odd that these two sets of twins behaved in the same manner, and keep in mind that the family never discussed the accident. The parents didn't know what to do, desperate for answers. They took them back to their old village, and as they walked down the street, there came a moment when the twins froze. They looked back at their parents, then they looked ahead. They began to run down the street, laughing and saying, Come on, we know the way home. They sprinted directly to their old playground, a place that they had never been to in their new lives. One of the twins pointed to a faded chalk drawing on a wall and whispered, Grace drew this on the wall right before we died. The mother collapsed and the father could barely breathe, because the drawing had been washed out so many years prior, and the girls could have never seen it. Yet they described it perfectly. To this day everyone in Redwood Hollow knows the truth about this incident. The girls were not just twins. They were two sisters who came back. This stands as the only reincarnation case that scientists still refuse to explain. Michaelin, do they call you Mikey? Because the Michaeline I know I call her Mikey, but it's a good story. And if you don't want your bubble burst, now be a good time to switch the channel and come back in five minutes. There's no such place in England. This is an urban legend. It's a story about reincarnation. It changes throughout the world. Different years, different names. The twins are girls, the twins are boys. It's a tragic auto accident. It's a fire. It's anything that would cause the death of someone young. If you are a frequent flyer of the podcast, you'll hear me say a lot of times that most urban legend is taken from some sort of reality. And while, let's say, modern academic sources treat past life regression and reincarnation claims with a bit of skepticism, and we'll keep it nice, most of the psychologists I know view recalled past life experiences as arising from subconscious associations or a memory construction, or maybe a suggestion rather than evidence of an actual past incarnation. They tend to poo-poo those sorts of things. And if you're among them and you do not, then you kind of get this rap as the crazy old parapsychologist who does magic. Oh, wait a minute, I digress. Some young children, usually between the ages, I want to say, of two and five, speak about memories of a previous life that they claim to have lived. Now, this is not all children, but some of them. And at the same time, they often show behaviors, let's say uh phobia or preference, that are usually within the context of their particular family and cannot be explained by current life events. So in many of these cases, the child's statements correspond accurately to the life and death of a deceased individual. Now, this deceased individual could be someone that the family has never heard of before, or someone that lived generations before they came along in the family. The statements of some children, let's go over some examples. A birthmark or a birth defect congruent with a wound or a mark on a deceased person. Now you discover these using post-mortem reports to confirm. Older children may retain these apparent memories, but these memories generally seem to fade in these cases when the child gets to about the age of seven. Very few of them linger longer than that. The subjects of these cases have been found all over the world, including Europe and North America. And for the past 20 years, and I hope I've got this right. If I don't, Doctor, excuse me, but I think it's Dr. Jim Tucker. He's focused mainly on cases found in the United States recently, but some cases offer a little more compelling evidence than others for past life memories. There are a couple of thought-provoking cases. James Lenninger has memories of being a World War II pilot and getting shot down. He can describe the incident 100%, how it started, how it ended, everything about it. And in during research, all the things he says are correct. Ryan Hammonds. He has memories of being a Hollywood extra and a talent agent. And the stories he tells are 100% verifiable. How does he know that? So we thought it would be interesting to compile some statements that a child might make. So we did a lot of research, and the following list is that's designed to give an idea what a parent or a caregiver might hear from a child reporting these kinds of memories. It's not meant to be exhaustive and it's not the end-all be-all. These statements can vary from child to child, state to state, country to country. But some of the most popular ones, or the ones you hear the most frequently, you're not my mommy or my daddy. I have another mommy or daddy. When I was big, I used to have blue eyes, or I had a car that was this color, or I worked downtown, or I drove a bus, or things like that. I have a wife or a husband or children. I used to insert whatever here, drive a truck, live in another town, etc. I died in a car accident. A fire. Or maybe a fall. In Western culture, these types of statements often get dismissed as fantasy, or as an old colleague of mine used to say, it's bunk, even though they might contain something other than pure imagination. It's probably best, from a psychological standpoint, not to repeatedly question a child, nor should you try to prevent them from speaking about these topics. It's healthier to let them talk about it, to talk about it with them. And I guess for more info on that, and again, I believe it's Dr. Tucker. Research him and you can see all kinds of things about that. He has decades of research and thousands of cases. I believe in the last 50 years, um, he has a collection system called DOPS D-O-P-S, and I can't remember for the life of me what that stands for, and I apologize for that. But I know he's collected over 2,500 cases of the reincarnation type. You hear about that if you're anywhere near parapsychology or something that's a little different, other than the usual stuff. For the mass, the vast majority of those cases, I think the field notes were coded on greater than 200 variables. And he put that all in a database. It's literally taken countless hours and hundreds of people to accomplish. And he would tell you that there's still so much to be known or learned about it. Some people just dismiss it immediately as bunk or fantasy. But isn't that the way it usually goes with things that people can't understand? They either hate it or dismiss it. Now, I will say that in my young life, we're talking pre-adult, pre-legal adult young life. And if you're a frequent flyer of the show, you know that I grew up in an area that had it all haunted asylums, Indian burial mounds, haunted prisons, tuberculosis facilities that closed down. You name it, the Ohio Valley possesses it. There were Civil War battles, Indian battles, many, many things. The Underground Railroad. Benjamin Lundley's house was a block away from the last haunted house that I lived in. There was a place I used to frequent. We found some tunnels that we used to play in when we were kids. After we had outgrown that, one of those leaded to a mound type of structure. And inside of there was an old gathering place that had an old safe in it. The safe had to be the 1800s, 1900s. Extremely heavy. We couldn't move it because I was going to take it and put it in my house. I have a fascination with vaults and safes and that sort of thing. I don't know if that comes from the magic or just the mystery of what it could be. There was a young lady that used to pal around with us from another town. She would occasionally come up and run around with us. And as we got more toward adulthood, we began to notice her in different ways than we did when we were much younger. That's a nice way of putting it. Use your imagination, it's probably correct. So we end up in this place. There are three people in there: myself, her, and a young lady she brought with her. We're exploring and looking around, and we're talking as we're walking out. And all of a sudden she's not there. So her friend looks at me and says, Where'd Diana go? I don't know, I'll find her. So we go back through and she's sitting in front of the safe staring at it. You know, if you stare at that long enough, it turns into a pile of money. She kind of raised her middle finger, she never turned toward me. And I said, hey, time to go. She goes, This was my safe. Really? How old are you again? You know how old I am. See, you're 17. Yeah. So that safe's a lot older than you are. This was mine. She reaches up, begins to fiddle with the combination. We've been working on that for years. Nobody can crack it. She opens the safe. First try, doesn't flinch, zip, zip, zip, and click, opens the safe. In the safe is an old piece of paper that you cannot read because it's so old there's nothing legible on it. There's an old pin, like a hat pin, and a whole lot of dust, nothing else. And the dead safe smell that's always inside of a safe when you open it after it's been empty for a millennium or two. So we talked about that incident for years. I think I lost track of her when we were in our late 30s. Um, but it was the topic of discussion more than once. Much later in life, when that place was accidentally dug up by someone, you know, progress. There was a newspaper article about the safe, which ironically I was a weekend photographer, and I shot the photo of it. I told the story to a couple people. But the guy that bought it had to have a locksmith come in and drill into it. The items that were in it when we opened it were still in there because we didn't feel right about taking them with us. So I know that sort of things happen, and I myself have been in places DeSanta and I tromp the earth looking into things like this. I was in a place that I'd never been in serious need of a bathroom. And did you ever notice that sometimes when you really need an employee to ask him a question, there isn't one anywhere around. So I walked through the building straight to the restroom, used it, came back, went over on the other end of the building to this machine that you put a quarter two quarters and a penny in, and get your, you know, you smash the penny and it leaves a little picture on it. Didn't think much about it. And then toward the end of the day, Cassandra says, How did you know where that bathroom was? I don't know. So we'd like to hear if you've had a case like that. Now let's twist it around just a tiny bit. Let's talk about the case of Shantae Derry, 1926 to 1987, in India. This is often cited as one of the most compelling and let's say rigorously investigated, making it exceptionally difficult to disprove. She was born in Delhi. At age four, she began recounting details of a past life in Mantra, a city she had never visited, claiming to be a woman named, and I hope I don't mess this up, Lugdi Devi. Now Lugdi Devi died in nineteen twenty five. Why does this case appear so indisputable, they say? A committee appointed by Mahatma Gandhi in nineteen thirty five, investigating her claims, found that she correctly identified her previous husband, recognized the family members, and spoke in the local dialect of Mantra, which was unfamiliar to her own family. Chante provided over fifty specific details about home life, the death of Lugdy, how, where, when, that sort of thing, all which was subsequently verified. When brought to meet her past life husband, she recognized him immediately and provided in detail information regarding intimate details of their life together, including promises he made to her on his deathbed. Now, while a current report by Belchad Nahta argued against the claim, many researches, including Swedish investigators and authors, later traveled to investigate. And concluded the case was indeed credible, noting that it could not logically be debunked or explained away. There was James Leininger, he's a Louisiana boy, who at age two had nightmares of a World War II plane crash. Remember, we mentioned that, and identified as a pilot named Jimmy Huston, with details verified by investigators. Then there's one from T2. This case involved a three-year-old in India who described being shot in a past life, had a birthmark that matched the bullet wounds of a man that she claims was named Shurish. A deep investigation into that claim discovered that all of the details were 100% correct. You know, we always say there is indeed a world unseen, a world that exists all around us all the time. Every now and then we catch a glimpse of it in the debt give in. The longer that we're in this business, the more that we find that that is true. So tell me, do you have a reincarnation story? We'd love to hear it. Give us a like, give us a share, tell all your friends about us, send those stories to us. Just like Mikey did. And you could be a small star on a little stage. Stage is not so little anymore, and I want to mention that we do love our listeners and we appreciate you wherever you are. That's genuine. I don't say that just to put sunshine in parts that I shouldn't attempt to get to. We're in 75 countries and 455 cities. Not bad for a couple of people who started out holding a laptop in a five foot by five foot storage unit in a place called Herndon, Virginia many years ago. And hey, tell a paranormal story. It's good for you. Good afternoon from SoCal