The Children Who Should Not Know

Reincarnation, verification, and the evidence that refuses to disappear

It usually begins in the least philosophical place imaginable: not in a monastery, not in a scripture hall, not in a scholar’s office, but in a child’s bedroom. A toddler wakes screaming that his plane is on fire. A little girl passing through a town she has never visited insists her house is nearby and that the tea there is better. Another child points to a forgotten face in an old photograph and says, with unnerving certainty, “That’s me.” For most modern people, reincarnation belongs to religion or folklore. Yet for more than half a century, researchers have collected and investigated a large body of cases in which young children spontaneously describe another life with names, places, relationships, fears, and death scenes that sometimes appear to match a deceased person. A 2022 scoping review found 78 scientific studies on claimed past-life memories, with most focused on children.

The modern scientific study of these cases is inseparable from Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia. Later reviews of his work describe a surprisingly stable pattern across cultures: the children usually begin speaking at about ages two or three, stop around six or seven, describe recent and ordinary lives rather than grand mythical ones, and in many cases focus especially on the death of the previous person. One University of Virginia review states that the median interval between the previous person’s death and the child’s birth is only 16 months, that about 70% of the reported previous deaths are by unnatural means, and that more than 2,500 cases had been investigated worldwide. These are not hypnotic regressions in suggestible adults; they are early, spontaneous reports in children, often before school age and often before any “solution” to the case is known.

Of course, serious criticism is not absent. Critics often suggest that such cases might be influenced by cultural presumptions, parental suggestion, translation errors, memory contamination, and confirmation bias on the part of investigators. These concerns are perfectly valid. For this reason, the most persuasive cases are typically not those relying solely on retroactive storytelling, but rather those in which a child’s statements are recorded before the "previous personality" is identified, and where numerous details can be subsequently verified. This is exactly why cases like James Leininger, Shanti Devi, and Swarnlata Mishra are repeatedly discussed in the literature.

Consider the American case of James Leininger. Before age three, he repeatedly had nightmares about an airplane crash. He said the plane had been shot by the Japanese, that it crashed on fire, that he had flown from a boat called Natoma, and that someone named Jack Larsen had been there with him. He later pointed to Iwo Jima in a book image and said that was where his plane had been shot down. Tucker’s published case report notes that some of these statements were documented before the dead pilot was identified. The search eventually led to the USS Natoma Bay, to a real Jack Larsen, and to James M. Huston Jr., the pilot from that ship who was killed in the Iwo Jima operation. The fit was not polished or mythic; it was messy, partial, and therefore more compelling. It looked like memory, not propaganda.

Another American child, Ryan Hammons, began speaking at age four about Hollywood, a big house, a swimming pool, and three sons whose names he could not remember. He became distressed that he could not remember them. Then, while looking through a Hollywood book, he pointed to an old still and said of one man, “That guy’s me.” The man was eventually identified as Marty Martyn. Tucker did not simply tell the family that and call it solved; according to UVA’s account, he tested Ryan with photographs, and Ryan identified Martyn’s wife. Martyn’s daughter later confirmed dozens of Ryan’s statements, including his Broadway dancing, later work as an agent, his Roxbury Drive address, and the fact that he had three sons. This is exactly the sort of clustered correspondence that makes the strongest cases so difficult to dismiss as random childhood fantasy or false memory.

The older Indian cases remain undeniably striking for their sheer depth. Shanti Devi, born in Delhi in 1926, began speaking of another life in Mathura as a married woman named Lugdi Chaubey. Her statements were investigated, and after Lugdi’s family was identified from those statements, Shanti was able to lead people to the former house, recognize Lugdi’s relatives, and display knowledge of intimate details of Lugdi’s life. The case drew the attention of Mahatma Gandhi and was extensively investigated. Swarnlata Mishra similarly began making past-life statements as a small child, asking to be taken to “my house” while passing through Katni. Her earlier statements were written down before her memories were verified, and later she recognized people from the previous family and even performed songs and dances in a language she had apparently never learned. Whatever explanation one prefers, cases like these are plainly not ordinary anecdotes.

Then there is the physical evidence, the line of evidence that tends to unsettle even sympathetic readers because it sounds too dramatic to be true. In a 1993 paper, Stevenson reported that among 895 children said to remember previous lives, 309 had birthmarks or birth defects attributed to the previous life. He and his associates investigated 210 such cases. In 49 cases where a medical document such as a postmortem report was obtained, 43 were said to confirm the correspondence between the wound on the deceased person and the mark or defect on the child. One does not have to leap from that to certainty. But one does have to admit that this is far beyond mere campfire storytelling.

Nor does the later literature support the lazy dismissal that these children are simply pathological. A 2014 psychological study of 15 American children who reported previous-life memories found above-average intelligence, generally normal behavior-checklist scores, low dissociative scores in most participants, and no evidence that their reports arose from psychopathology. A 2024 follow-up of American adults who had reported such memories as children found that they seemed to lead normal, productive lives, with high educational attainment and few negative long-term effects. A 2024 case report from Brazil described a child who made 13 statements corresponding to a deceased granduncle’s life, of which 9 were verified and 4 remained undetermined; the child also showed 8 unusual behaviors matching the deceased man and had a rare skull defect considered compatible with the fatal wound. That does not prove reincarnation in a mathematical sense. But it does show that the phenomenon remains active, investigated, and far from explained away.

At this point, it helps to notice that the empirical literature is only one stream of evidence. The contemplative traditions of Asia have long claimed that past lives can be recalled in deep meditation. In the early Buddhist texts, the Buddha’s awakening narrative explicitly includes recollection of many past lives as one of the knowledges attained in profound concentration, followed by the vision of beings passing away and reappearing according to their actions. More broadly, beliefs in rebirth were already widespread in Indian religious traditions before Buddhism emerged, so the Buddhist claim did not appear in a vacuum.

That contemplative stream continues into modern times. The contemplative blog Awakening to Reality argues that siddhis are not a "supernatural" disruption of the world order, but rather phenomena that manifest under conditions of dependent origination. The same article also records a modern practitioner account in which Sim Pern Chong is described as reliving past lives in unusually vivid detail, including links between present relationships and previous karmic connections; later in the same piece, the recollection is explicitly distinguished from hypnotic past-life regression and instead described as arising through samadhi and jhana, as a kind of “whole-body remembering.” Whether one takes such accounts as evidence, testimony, or contemplative phenomenology, they show that the claim has not vanished from living practice.

This is also where John Tan’s remarks from a 2015 chat exchange become highly relevant. Lightly edited for readability without altering the original meaning, he stated:

“Go read Dr. Sam Parnia.”

“He is very good, like Ian Stevenson — a doctor dealing with death every day, with cardiac arrest and people pronounced clinically dead, and a respected person in his field.”

“Ian Stevenson’s books are scientific studies, not ‘science’ in the grandiose sense. He was a scientist, but he understood that science cannot prove something like this except by verification.”

“How is one to prove a past life except by verification?”

“There will always be doubt because the skeptic will always doubt.”

“There are only three ways: trust a respected expert, take it on religious faith, or practice and experience it yourself.”

“My approach is neither blind faith nor mere skepticism, but practice and listening to respected experts.”

That is more intellectually disciplined than it may sound at first. The core point is methodological: if you are dealing with claims about death, consciousness, and memory, then you should examine the work of those who document cases carefully and those who work directly in resuscitation medicine, not merely the opinions of cultural skeptics or enthusiasts.

And on that point, John Tan was not wrong about where to look. Sam Parnia is currently director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone and describes his work as focused on cardiac arrest, post-resuscitation syndrome, and the mental and cognitive experiences associated with cardiac arrest and end of life. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, published a prospective Lancet study of 344 successfully resuscitated cardiac-arrest patients in 10 Dutch hospitals. Peter Fenwick was a British neuropsychiatrist and neurophysiologist with longstanding research interests in brain function, the mind-brain relationship, and near-death and end-of-life experiences. None of this proves reincarnation by itself. But it does show that serious, medically trained researchers have thought there was enough here to investigate, and to do so in hospitals rather than in fantasy literature.

Ajahn Brahm presses a similar point from the contemplative side. In his October 19, 2001 talk Buddhism and Science, he uses a rhetorical physics analogy to emphasize that science should not dismiss anomalous evidence simply because it challenges the mainstream worldview.

Ajahn Brahmavamso said:

"If you had just one person who had been confirmed as medically dead who could describe to the doctors, as soon as they were revived, what had been said, and done during that period of death, wouldn't that be pretty convincing? When I was doing elementary particle physics there was a theory that required for its proof the existence of what was called the 'W' particle. At the cyclotron in Geneva, CERN funded a huge research project, smashing atoms together with an enormous particle accelerator, to try and find one of these 'W' particles. They spent literally hundreds of millions of pounds on this project. They found one, just one 'W' particle. I don't think they have found another since. But once they found one 'W' particle, the researchers involved in that project were given Nobel prizes for physics. They had proved the theory by just finding the one 'W' particle. That's good science. Just one is enough to prove the theory.

When it comes to things we don't like to believe, they call just one experience, one clear factual undeniable experience, an anomaly. Anomaly is a word in science for disconcerting evidence that we can put in the back of a filing cabinet and not look at again, because it threatens our world view. It undermines what we want to believe. It is threatening to our dogma. However, an essential part of the scientific method is that theories have to be abandoned in favour of the evidence, in respect of the facts. The point is that the evidence for a mind independent of the brain is there. But once we admit that evidence, and follow the scientific method, then many cherished theories, what we call 'sacred cows' will have to be abandoned.

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If you want to look at the scientific evidence for rebirth, check out Professor Ian Stevenson. He spent his whole life researching rebirth on a solid scientific basis at the University of Virginia.[4] Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, (encouraged by his wife) offered funds for an endowed chair at the University to enabled Professor Stevenson to devote himself full-time to such research. If it weren't for the fact that people do not want to believe in rebirth, Dr. Ian Stevenson would be a world famous scientist now. He even spent a couple of years as a visiting fellow at Oxford, so you can see that this is not just some weird professor; he has all of the credentials of a respected Western academic.

Dr. Stevenson has over 3000 cases on his files. One interesting example was the very clear case of a man who remembered many details from his past life, with no way of gaining that information from any other source. That person died only a few weeks before he was reborn! Which raises the question, for all those months that the foetus was in the womb, who was it? As far as Buddhism is concerned, the mother kept that foetus going with her own stream of consciousness. But when another stream of consciousness entered, then the foetus became the new person. That is one case where the stream of consciousness entered the mother's womb when the foetus was almost fully developed. That can happen. That was understood by Buddhism twenty five centuries ago. If the stream of consciousness doesn't enter the mother's womb, the child is a stillborn. There is a heap of evidence supporting that.”