The Body Remembers

Kathy was an unmarried young woman who became pregnant at sixteen and had a son, James, in 1978. Initially, James seemed like a healthy young boy, but at sixteen months he began to limp, and he soon developed a prominent nodule about an inch above his right ear. Eventually, he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, an often fatal form of cancer. As his young mother tried to care for him, the cancer spread over James’s body, and his condition deteriorated. A tumor blinded his left eye, and his weakened body could no longer keep food down. In desperation, the doctors attempted to feed him with an IV through his right jugular vein, leaving a nasty scar. The medical efforts were in vain and James passed from this world in April of 1980.

Two marriages later, Kathy was in her thirties when she had another son, Chad. As she was emerging from anesthetic after the delivery, one of the doctors approached her cautiously. “Has your husband told you yet?” he asked. Petrified that her baby had died, Kathy was relieved to hear that he was in fact alive. But her relief soon turned to shock when she saw Chad for the first time. The newborn boy had a cyst one inch behind his right ear, was blind in the left eye, and had a dark birthmark that looked like a scar running down the right side of his neck near the jugular vein.

As Chad grew up, he began to exhibit other similarities to James, both physically and emotionally. He had the same temperament, and as he began to walk, he developed a limp. When he was four years old, he turned to his mother and asked about their “other house.” He then proceeded to accurately describe the apartment where James and Kathy had lived almost two decades before, recalling details even Kathy’s husband would not have known. “Why do you want to go back to this other house?” she asked Chad. Without hesitating, he answered, “Because I left you there.”

Kathy’s story was originally researched by Carol Bowman, author of Children’s Past Lives, a book that, with its numerous stories from American families, helped to shatter the illusion that children who remember past lives exist only in cultures that believe in reincarnation. What makes the case of Kathy and Chad so remarkable is the physical similarities between the two boys—particularly Chad’s birthmarks and birth defects that corresponded to James’s physical ailments. As it turns out, such things are not uncommon in the Virginia case files.

For example, there is the Turkish child who, at the age of two, remembered a past life as an outlaw. This particular criminal had been well known in Turkey and had died in a standoff with the police only a few days before the child’s birth. Trapped by the authorities, knowing he could not escape, he had committed suicide, holding his gun under his own chin and pulling the trigger. The child grew up remembering accurate details of the criminal’s life and death, but what was even more striking was that he also had a birthmark underneath his chin that precisely matched the bullet entry-point of the criminal’s self-inflicted wound. When Stevenson investigated the case, he inquired about a second possible birthmark at the top of the head. Pulling the young boy’s hair back, he discovered a hairless birthmark on the scalp at the exact location of the bullet’s exit wound.

I learned that there are, in fact, fourteen different cases that follow this same pattern. In all fourteen, Stevenson has documented a small, round birthmark corresponding to a bullet wound that a child remembers suffering in a previous life. And in each case, the birthmark is accompanied by a larger, more irregular-shaped birthmark on the opposite side of the body. “As much as possible, we verify that these birthmarks do in fact match wounds on the body of the deceased,” Tucker told me. “When we can, we get autopsy reports or medical records. If those aren’t available, then we try to obtain eyewitness testimony from people who saw the body and can talk about where the wounds were. Sometimes we even get police reports.” As Tucker showed me one picture after another of birthmarks taken from cases they have investigated, I couldn’t help but consider the implications of what I was seeing.

These types of cases provide some of the most suggestive data in support of reincarnation, yet they also raise fascinating questions. We know that genetics is the source of the physical makeup of any individual and that environmental circumstances play a role as well. This evidence, assuming for a moment that reincarnation is the best explanation, suggests that perhaps there is another factor in our development. It would seem to indicate that whatever matrix of energy is passing from one body to another is interacting in some way with the physical form—even with the genetic code—and impacting its development. Perhaps physical trauma, as well as memories, may survive death and carry on in nonphysical form, destined to affect the makeup of future incarnations. As I looked at the slide of a sixteen-year-old boy with round birthmarks littered across his chest, who remembered dying of a shotgun wound in a previous life, I wondered: How often does this happen? Why does it seem to happen in some situations but not in others? How might this affect our understanding of biology? Whatever the answers, there is certainly evidence of a remarkable correlation between memories of trauma suffered in a previous life and birthmarks or birth defects in the current life.

Birthmarks and birth defects were some of the more incredible aspects of the stories I heard in Virginia, but there were plenty of other mind-stretching cases hiding in those file cabinets. Some are simply hard to categorize, and they challenge one’s ideas about reality no matter what perspective one approaches the material from. For example, in some Native American tribes, there are cases of more than one child having accurate, documented memories of the same previous life. “You see this in the Pacific Northwest tribes,” one researcher told me. “There have been cases investigated where there will be half a dozen grandchildren who remember being the same grandmother in a previous life.” There are the cases of Burmese children who remember being Japanese soldiers stationed in Burma during World War II. They grew up complaining about the spicy Burmese diet and the hot climate, using words that their parents could not understand and requesting to eat raw fish. There are even cases where a child remembers having been aborted. For example, in one case a young girl formed an intense bond with her swim coach immediately upon meeting her, a bond so strong that it surprised both the mother and the coach. Soon the child began to make strange statements to her mother. She insisted that she had once been a baby in the coach’s “tummy” and that a “bad man had come and pulled her out,” though she “desperately tried to hold on.” As it turned out, the coach later admitted that she had had an abortion years before, and she was shocked that the child could possibly have known.

Superpsi Me

Even for researchers who recognize in Stevenson’s children a legitimate phenomenon, there is a great deal of disagreement over how to account for it. One of the most popular and enduring alternative explanations has come to be called “superpsi.” Psi stands for parapsychological phenomena and is the more accepted name in research circles for what used to be known as ESP, or extrasensory perception. Superpsi refers to a particularly powerful version of psi. In this case, it would mean that the information is being obtained not from an actual past life but from a powerful psychic perception.

There are several versions of the superpsi hypothesis. One is that the children are telepathically reading the minds of existing individuals—maybe friends and family of the deceased—to obtain the information. Or perhaps the children are actually traveling back in time and clairvoyantly reading the mind of the person who they claim to have been in a “past life.” While some may balk at the idea of such abilities, the theory is attractive for one particular reason. As philosopher Michael Grosso puts it, “superpsi is . . . preferred [by some] because it appeals strictly to the abilities of living people.” In other words, accepting the superpsi hypothesis means that one need not believe in the existence of reincarnation and the whole metaphysical Pandora’s box that comes along with it. No rebirth. No soul surviving the death of the physical body. No afterlife. One need only believe that individuals are capable of powerful psychic perceptions. Very powerful psychic perceptions. In fact, that’s also the problem with the theory. These kids would have to be psychic superheroes in order to account for much of the data. And there is little evidence that such abilities exist at all—certainly not in these relatively normal children, many of whom are now decades older and show no extraordinary psychic capacities.

Most of the researchers I spoke with were highly skeptical of superpsi. Transpersonal theorist Chris Bache voiced the feelings of many when he told me that “Stevenson has done a very careful analysis of superpsi and explained in specific cases why the hypothesis doesn’t really fit the data. Besides, no one has ever really demonstrated superpsi in the laboratory. The psychic ability which they are proposing is just astronomical.”

Still, even as superpsi has been widely discredited as an explanation, more sophisticated variations on the theory have arisen to take its place. For example, in his recent book, Science and the Akashic Field, systems theorist Ervin Laszlo attempts an explanation that sounds like something Jean-Luc Picard might refer to in a rather wild script of Star Trek. First, he theorizes the existence of a metaverse beyond the universe. (Nothing radical there. Physics journals these days are full of metaverse theories.) Then he proposes that this metaverse (or quantum vacuum, or Akashic field, or A-field, as he refers to it) contains within it both the universe itself and, more importantly, all the experiences of living things in the universe—a universal quantum memory bank, if you will. It’s not a new idea, just new to science. Clairvoyants such as Edgar Cayce have long referred to something they called the Akashic Records, the metaphysical name for an astral record of everything that has ever happened. Laszlo has taken the name, added a healthy dose of contemporary science, and created a new version. And he uses it to explain reincarnation memories. The children aren’t recalling previous lives, Laszlo suggests toward the end of his book; they’re accessing information from the A-field.

These alternative explanations may have some merit and may be applicable in certain instances. But I could find no expert on the subject who believed that any one of these theories was sufficient to account for the data in total. Some cases may be explained, but sooner or later one runs into particular examples that just don’t fit the model, at least not without some major leaps of logic.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” the great cosmologist Carl Sagan famously declared. Sagan was one of the original skeptics. In fact, one of his last books, The Demon-Haunted World, was specifically dedicated to debunking the pseudo-science in our culture. Yet in that same book, Sagan expressed interest in Stevenson’s data and felt that it deserved a fair scientific hearing. That hearing has, for the most part, yet to occur. Very few scholars outside the field of parapsychology have seriously considered the cases collected by the University of Virginia. A few have been supportive, but most have been dismissive or extremely critical. Indeed, Stevenson’s most oft-quoted critic is the late philosopher Paul Edwards. In his book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, he critiques Stevenson’s work on a number of counts. But his primary argument against the reincarnation hypothesis is not actually an argument against the data itself but against the paradigm-shattering notion of reincarnation as a theory. Edwards writes that reincarnation simply clashes with too many accepted scientific conventions to be considered seriously. Therefore, he bases much of his argument on what he calls the failure to overcome the “formidable initial presumption against reincarnation.”

This is perhaps the primary reason why curious researchers and fascinated scientists haven’t been beating a path to Tucker and Stevenson’s door. Of course, many do have questions about the evidence. They worry about faulty memories, sloppy methodologies, problems with translators, biased investigators, etcetera. But the more I studied the critics, the more it became clear to me that the main problem Tucker and Stevenson are encountering with their peers in the academic community has to do with exactly Edwards’ main concern—that the reincarnation hypothesis simply overturns too many precepts sacred to certain branches of science.

For example, most neuroscientists and cognitive scientists believe that consciousness cannot exist independent of the physical apparatus of the brain. And that fundamental assumption effectively rules out reincarnation. And even if we presume for a moment that consciousness can exist outside the brain, we still have absolutely no idea how a “soul” or an immaterial component of the human personality might survive a transfer between bodies. Try bringing up that possibility at the next conference of biologists or neuroscientists and see how quickly they escort you to the door. As Susan Blackmore, a former parapsychology researcher turned skeptic, told me, “The problem with reincarnation is that there is absolutely no sound theoretical basis for it, whatsoever, of any kind.”

Tucker understands that the lack of an acceptable theoretical framework for reincarnation makes scientists reluctant to take the data seriously. However, he was quick to point out that this is not a new story in science. “It used to be anecdotal that French farmers complained that rocks were falling out of the sky and landing on their farms,” he told me. “Scientists completely scoffed at that, because how could rocks fall from the sky? There aren’t any rocks in the sky. Of course, once they figured out what meteorites were, then it changed. So they should’ve been paying attention to what those farmers were saying. But often, you just ignore the anecdotes until you have a theory that lets you make sense of them.”

Stevenson and Tucker are also not without high-profile supporters. One of the most vocal has been retired Georgia State University philosophy professor Robert Almeder. He carefully reviewed the research over a decade ago, refuted the critics, and presented a more positive assessment. In fact, Almeder felt that Stevenson himself was underestimating the power of his own evidence. According to Stevenson’s conclusions, Almeder writes, “It is not unreasonable to believe in reincarnation in order to explain his best cases.” But the “proper conclusion,” Almeder claimed, was that it was “unreasonable” for someone to categorically deny reincarnation. In other words, he felt that while the jury might still be out on the subject, given the evidence, a rational mind would have to consider it as a possibility.

Somewhere between the believers and skeptics lies a public largely unaware of the data. And the scientific community is still investing few resources in pursuing such unconventional research. The current head of the Division of Personality Studies, Dr. Bruce Greyson, told me during my visit to Charlottesville that the new chair of the university’s psychology department strongly disapproves of their studies. Despite their self-sufficient endowment and the impeccable credentials of the staff, Greyson is worried about their status and wondering how long their affiliation with the school will survive.

In the meantime, novel theories—some conventional, some unconventional, some skeptical—will continue to try to account for these unusual children who keep appearing in our world. And now, with Carol Bowman’s pioneering books on American children who remember past lives, we are likely to hear much more about this phenomenon in the West. Over time, I imagine that more research and new theories will shed further light and perspective on this complex enigma. But as the green lawns of the University of Virginia faded into my rearview mirror, I was left with an inescapable conclusion: at this point, reincarnation seems to be the theory that best fits all the facts.