Part I

Is Reincarnation Real?

“At the time of this writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study. . . . [One of these is] that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”
- Carl Sagan

Seven hundred years ago, the Tibetan Buddhists gathered together all of their knowledge about reincarnation and the afterlife and recorded it for posterity in a one-of-a-kind manual, a guidebook to the bardos, or the states that exist between lives. Called TheTibetan Book of the Dead, it described exactly what the dying person could look forward to as he or she walked along that mysterious road that traverses the terrain between death and rebirth. In the last nine months, I’ve learned that a few radical and innovative researchers are in the early stages of gathering the data that may one day fill the pages (or web pages) of a contemporary version of this ancient guidebook. Indeed, we live in an age of great discovery, and the veil between this world and whatever lies beyond seems to be yielding its secrets as never before to the endless curiosity of the human mind. And like explorers setting foot on a new continent that was once only the subject of rumor, belief, and speculation, we are establishing beachheads on the subtle sands of the nonphysical realms and getting a sense of the initial landscape. Much to my surprise, I discovered that one of those beachheads is in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“At this point, we have registered over twenty-five hundred cases of children from all over the world who remember their past lives.” The man speaking to me was practicing child psychiatrist Dr. Jim Tucker, a researcher at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. With his warm southern accent and gentle demeanor, Tucker didn’t strike me as a nonconformist, but he has one of the most unusual academic jobs in the country—researching young children who spontaneously recall previous lives.

Tucker is part of the Division of Personality Studies, a branch of the university’s psychiatry department that is dedicated to survival research. In a nondescript two-story house that sits on the corner of the main campus, a staff of almost a dozen researchers and assistants is exploring the diverse aspects of survival: near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, visions of deathbed apparitions, after-death communication, and reincarnation. The department was founded in 1967 by Ian Stevenson, who has become a legend in the parapsychology community for his four decades of meticulous investigations of children who claim to remember previous lives. As philosopher and author David Ray Griffin writes, “Nowadays reincarnation research in the West is virtually synonymous with the work of Stevenson.” Stevenson himself is in his eighties and rarely makes an office appearance, but Tucker is probably the closest thing he has to a successor, and he has taken the research baton and run with it. Each case in the department’s voluminous files tells a unique and unconventional story.

For example, I came upon the case of William, a young boy who was born with a serious heart condition called pulmonary valve atresia—a birth defect in which the main pulmonary artery has not formed completely. When William was about three years old, he began to talk about his grandfather’s life in ways that shocked his parents. For example, one day when he was misbehaving, his mother exclaimed, “Sit down, or I’m going to spank you,” and William replied, “Mom, when you were a little girl and I was your daddy, you were bad lots of times, and I never hit you!” William seemed to know details of his grandfather’s life that often left his parents scratching their heads trying to figure out where he could possibly have come by the information. He surprised his mother by accurately remembering the names of long-dead pets that had belonged to her when she was a young girl. He also recalled the exact circumstances of his grandfather’s death, and even the day of the week on which it had occurred. William’s grandfather had been a New York City policeman killed while attempting to prevent a robbery, shot six times. The killing bullet had entered his back, cutting through his lung and slicing open a major artery—the main pulmonary artery.

Another file tells the story of Mehmet Bekler, a Turkish man born in about 1940. He grew up in a small town called Ekber and worked in the family’s flour mill. One day, a local customer arrived at the mill and proceeded to start an argument with Mehmet. The argument became physical, and at some point the customer attacked Mehmet with a flour shovel, delivering a sharp blow to the head and wounding him fatally. The year was 1965. Sometime later, a pregnant woman in a nearby village had a memorable dream. In it, a young man approached her and said, “I was killed with a blow from a shovel. I want to stay with you and not with anyone else.” Soon after, in 1966, the woman gave birth to a son, Süleyman, who was born with a marked depression in the back of his skull. As soon as Süleyman was able to speak, he began to reveal details of a previous life, including his former name, “Mehmet.” The child insisted that he had been a miller in his past life and had been killed in an argument with a customer. From an early age, he would point across the Turkish countryside and say he wanted to go to “the stream.” Eventually, his parents relented and let the young boy lead them to the nearby town of Ekber where the mill stood, next to a stream. In Ekber, the parents were able to verify many of Süleyman’s memories, and they also encountered the family of Mehmet Bekler. Eventually, all family members from his past and present life were persuaded of the legitimacy of his memories. As Süleyman grew up, he would occasionally see the customer from the mill who he claimed had murdered him. He always expressed anger toward the man, and one day he even asked his father to give him a gun so that he could take his revenge.

These are only two out of the twenty-five hundred children who have told their stories to researchers in Virginia. Cases have been found in the U.S., India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Brazil, Lebanon, Britain, Nigeria, and elsewhere. And they have many striking similarities. For example, most of these children report past lives that occurred in places that are geographically close to their current lives, helping to make their memories easier to verify. Most of them begin speaking about their former lives soon after they can talk, around two or three years of age. Many seem to have knowledge way beyond their years and outside of their life-circumstances—like the three-year-old Sri Lankan girl who stunned her parents by knowing obscure details about incense-making and naming specific brands of incense not available in her local area. Or the six-year-old Turkish boy who accurately recalled features of a house that he claimed to have lived in, decades before his birth in a city he had never seen over five hundred miles away. Some children even remember secrets that were known only to their past life personality—like a hiding place where money is discovered to be stashed.

Tucker and Stevenson are like crime-scene investigators, and each case in their files has detailed notes attached to it. They often interview the children, the parents, and family members from both the present and previous life, and any friends or acquaintances who might be able to shed light on the memories. They are looking for answers to questions such as: How accurate was the child in describing the past life? Does the child exhibit any unusual traits, behaviors, or phobias related to previous life memories? Was there any alternate way the child could have come by the information? The stronger cases, Tucker explained, are those in which “the child makes a number of specific statements and—this is the critical part—somebody writes down the statements before anyone goes to verify that they’re true. At the last count I think there were thirty-three cases where there was documentation written beforehand. But even in many of the cases where there isn’t prior documentation, the children have made these statements repeatedly, dozens or hundreds of times over a number of years.”

It seemed significant to me that there are no Napoleons or Cleopatras in these files. The old joke that past-life memories always seem to involve famous people didn’t apply to these kids. “They are remembering ordinary lives,” Tucker told me. “Usually just somebody in a village who lived maybe twenty miles away.” But there is one factor that is extraordinary about a large number of the cases. Over seventy percent of the children, Tucker said, have reported previous lives in which they died of unnatural means, often violently. Car wrecks, bus accidents, murders, gunshot wounds, fatal fights—all of these causes of death are littered throughout the files. There is no shortage of speculation as to why violent deaths figure so prominently. The most common suggestion is that perhaps something about the shock of these sudden or untimely ends caused memories to be retained that would otherwise be forgotten. “It implies that the usual process has somehow been short-circuited,” explained Tucker.

As I stood in the dusty hall closet of this one-of-a-kind university department examining the floor-to-ceiling file cabinets filled with case reports, I was struck by the sheer quantity of evidence that has been painstakingly gathered since Stevenson began his field research in the early sixties. I simply had no idea, prior to beginning this article, that such a formidable body of scientific research had been conducted, and at a major American university no less. Individually, the stories are striking and convincing, and many simply defy prosaic explanations. Indeed, the explanations that immediately come to mind—fraud, fantasy, faulty memories, wishful thinking on the part of the parents—do not readily apply to a significant number of these cases. The stories have been carefully researched, and family members and friends have been interviewed. Taken as a whole, these files constitute what is probably the single best collection of evidence for reincarnation on the planet today. What may be a matter of faith for billions of people around the world has been, for the last forty years in this small office, a matter of empirical study.

I was curious whether Tucker felt that the evidence in these files was enough to prove that reincarnation is real. “We certainly don’t use the word proof, because these are not cases that are done under tight laboratory conditions where you can rule out everything,” he cautioned. “This is the messy real world. If you’re studying naturally occurring phenomena, you take what you can get. Ian Stevenson has said that reincarnation is the best explanation, but not the only one, for the strongest cases. They provide evidence. But they are not proof.” While they may not amount to proof, the stories of these unusual children certainly force us to temporarily suspend our disbelief (or our beliefs) about life after death. But I had not yet finished my journey down this Charlottesville rabbit hole. Tucker’s next stories surprised me even more, and after seeing the cases, I can honestly say that I’ll never look at birthmarks the same way again.