Research on children who remember previous lives began around 1960

 Beliefs about reincarnation

Before diving into the evidence, I should remind you that what is documented here is another example of simply following evidence. Reincarnation, for some, is an emotionally charged subject because of existing beliefs. This book aspires to be detached from preconceptions or wishful thinking. I certainly hadn’t heard much about reincarnation before I began my research. It was a completely foreign topic to me that  had no basis in reality, as far as I knew. It was an idea that I assumed people made up to comfort themselves about their mortality.

Lead reincarnation researcher Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia reminded us: “Critics of the evidence for reincarnation have sometimes pointed to its element of hopefulness with the dismissing suggestion that such evidence as we have derives only from wishful thinking. This objection wrongly assumes that what we desire must be false. We might be more easily persuaded to believe what we wish to believe than the contrary; nevertheless, what we wish to believe may be true. Our inquiry into the truth or falseness of an idea should proceed without regard to whether it fortifies or undermines our wishes.”6Children who remember previous lives

Research on children who remember previous lives began around 1960. Then-department head of psychiatry at the University of Virginia (UVA) Medical School, Dr. Ian Stevenson, heard about such children and became intrigued. He then devoted the remainder of his life to this study, examining more than 2,500 cases around the world, until his death in 2007. Dr. Jim Tucker, also a professor at UVA, has continued Dr. Stevenson’s research.

Dr. Stevenson’s work is highly regarded. Dr. Larry Dossey remarks:

[Stevenson] reported thousands of cases of children who remembered past lives and whose descriptions of previous existences checked out on investigation.7…No one else has researched this area with the scholarship, thoroughness, and dogged devotion to detail as he has. Stevenson combed the planet, from back roads of Burma and the remote villages of India to the largest cities on Earth. He devoted decades to scouring every continent except Antarctica, investigating always the same quarry—children who appear to remember a past life. The scope of his work is breathtakingly universal, and even skeptics are generally awed by the thousands of cases he has amassed. The cases occur in every culture including our own and demonstrate strong internal consistency.8

Furthermore, Dr. Stevenson received praise from the well-respected Journal of the American Medical Association in 1975: “In regard to reincarnation [Stevenson] has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India, cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.”9 What did Dr. Stevenson find?

He found common themes in the cases reported all over the world and in different cultures: A child between the ages of two and five begins to speak emotionally of a past life, including specific events (typically traumatic ones) that are clustered around the end of some previous life.10 When a child remembers his or her death, the account described is usually violent.11 Dr. Stevenson stated: “Too often the children are troubled by confusion regarding their identity and this becomes even more severe in those children who, conscious of being in a small body, can remember having been in an adult one, or who remember a life as a member of the opposite sex.”12Dr. Stevenson also noted that age plays a role in a child’s ability to describe and recall past-life memories:

I cannot emphasize too strongly that—with some exceptions—a child who is going to remember a previous life has little more than three years in which to communicate his memories of other persons, and he often has less. Before the age of two or three he lacks the vocabulary and verbal skill with which to express what he may wish to communicate. And from the age of about five on, heavy layers of verbal information cover the images in which his memories appear to be mainly conveyed; amnesia for the memories of a previous life sets in and stops further communication of them.13Often children’s traits can be linked to the previous lives they remember, such as fears, preferences, interests, and skills.14 These traits typically bear no resemblance to those of anyone in the child’s current family. In some cases, the traits make no sense for a young child, such as desiring certain foods that the family doesn’t eat, or desiring “clothes different from those customarily worn by the family members.” Stranger than that are cases in which the child has “cravings for addicting substances, such as tobacco, alcohol or other drugs that the previous personality was known to have used.”15

In some cases, the person allegedly being reincarnated had made a prediction of the next life before his or her death. In other cases, the child has birthmarks, birth defects, or other biological features that align with events of past lives (to be discussed further in the next section).  In a minority of cases, the child exhibits “xenoglossy”: speaking a foreign language he or she hasn’t been taught.16Where possible, Drs. Stevenson and Tucker have looked for historical facts demonstrating that the person the child remembered matches the child’s description. The degree of historical verifiability varies from case to case, but in some cases the accuracy is astounding. In such cases, it is difficult to imagine how a young child could possess such knowledge without access to some broader consciousness.

James 3

One such case is of James Leininger, a young boy in Lafayette, Louisiana.17 When James was 22 months old, his father took him to a museum, and he showed an affinity for the World War II exhibit. Prior to going to the museum, James had been pointing at planes flying overhead, but he became much more interested after the museum visit. So his parents bought him toy planes and a video of the Blue Angels, the Navy’s exhibition team (formed after World War II). James was obsessed and would crash the toy planes into the family’s coffee table, denting and scratching the table while saying, “Airplane crash on fire.” After his second birthday, he began having nightmares several times a week. He thrashed around the bed with his legs in the air, yelling, “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” When awake, he said, “Mama, before I was born, I was a pilot and my airplane got shot in the engine and it crashed in the water, and that’s how I died.” He told his dad the Japanese shot his plane as part of the Iwo Jima operation, that the plane was a Corsair (a plane not at the museum James had visited), which flew off of a boat called the Natoma. He also mentioned that Jack Larsen was there. An additional strange behavior: James was signing his name “James 3.”

James’s parents were confused, so they investigated some of James’s claims. Ultimately, they discovered that James’s description matched the historical facts of the life of James Huston Jr. (i.e., James the second), a pilot on Natoma Bay who had flown a Corsair and was shot down (in another plane) by the Japanese. Huston was the only pilot killed in the Iwo Jima operation, and eyewitnesses reported that the plane was “hit head-on right on the middle of the engine,” after which it crashed in the water and quickly sank. Jack Larsen was the pilot of the plane next to James Huston’s plane.

 The Hollywood extra

Another case is of a four-year-old boy, Ryan, who was born into an Oklahoma family that was traditionally Christian and did not believe in reincarnation.18 When Ryan played, he would often act as though he was directing imaginary movies by saying, “Action!” When he would see the Hollywood Hills on TV, he would say: “That’s my home. That’s where I belong…I just can’t live in these conditions. My last home was much better.”19 He also talked about having traveled the world and loved Chinatown, saying it had the best food. Ryan claimed that he chose his mother before he was born.

Eventually Ryan started having nightmares, waking up saying he was in Hollywood and his heart exploded. Confused, his mother bought Hollywood books to see if they would trigger any memories. In one book, Ryan saw a photograph of six men from a 1932 movie called Night After Night. He said, “Hey, Mama that’s George. We did a picture together. And Mama, that guy’s me. I found me.” Ryan’s mother researched and learned that the man Ryan had identified as George was a movie star in the 1930s/1940s named George Raft. However, Ryan’s parents could not identify the person who Ryan claimed was “him.”

After investigation with the help of Dr. Tucker, they discovered that the man Ryan pointed to was named Marty Martyn, an extra who had no lines in Night After Night. Dr. Tucker tracked down Marty’s daughter, and she and Ryan then met in person. Ryan’s reaction: “Same face, but she didn’t wait on me. She changed. Her energy changed.”20

Many of the claims Ryan had made lined up. For example, Ryan talked of taking girlfriends to the ocean; Marty had taken girlfriends to the ocean and had been married four times. Ryan had remembered an African American maid, and indeed, Marty had one. Ryan mentioned meeting “Senator Five” in New York; Marty’s daughter had a picture of Marty with Senator Ives of New York. Ryan said he was a smoker; Marty smoked cigars. Ryan recalled having a nice home and traveling; Marty had a big house with a swimming pool and traveled the world. Ryan talked about liking the food in Chinatown; Marty had enjoyed a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood. Marty died in a hospital room when he was alone, so it is not known whether a heart attack was the ultimate cause of his death, as Ryan’s nightmares would have suggested.

 As Dr. Tucker summarizes it: “Many of the details Ryan gave did fit the man he pointed to in the picture, who had a much more exciting life than anyone could have guessed a movie extra would have.”21

How could these children know such detailed facts at such a young age with no evidence of exposure to the details they report?

No wonder Carl Sagan thought this was an area deserving “serious study.”

Birthmarks and physical defects

Dr. Stevenson also found links between previous lives and birthmarks and physical defects. His body of work is robust—he wrote a two-volume book entitled Reincarnation and Biology, which is more than 2,000 pages long, with dense scientific text and fine print, covering 200 cases (with photographic evidence).

Amazingly, the birthmarks and physical defects he studied correlate to “previous lives” described by the children he examined. It’s one thing to read summaries of Dr. Stevenson’s work here in this book, but it’s another to see the pictures and detail contained in his literature. In an attempt to simply provide some flavor here, I present several examples out of many.

In some cases, birthmarks correspond to wounds verified by a child’s memories. For example, Dr. Stevenson described a Turkish boy who remembered a previous life in which he was stabbed through the liver area. In this life, the boy had a “large depressed birthmark, really a small cavity in the skin, over his liver.”22 In another example, a boy from Burma had “a small round birthmark in his right lower abdomen and a much larger birthmark on his right back. These correspond to wounds of entry and exit on the bandit whose life he remembered.”23In the strongest cases, medical records verify that the location of a birthmark matches where a trauma occurred in a deceased person. A Lebanese boy recalled a previous life in which he was drinking coffee before leaving for work one day and was shot in the face. The story was verified by an actual shooting that took place. According to medical records related to the shooting, the bullet entered one cheek, damaged the man’s tongue, exited through the other cheek, and the man later died in the hospital. The boy, who claims to be the next incarnation of the murdered man, had birthmarks on each check and had difficulty articulating words that required him to elevate his tongue. Dr. Stevenson reported: “I was able  to study the hospital record in this case. It showed that the birthmark on [the boy’s] left cheek, which was the smaller of the two, corresponded to the wound of entry, and the larger birthmark on the right cheek corresponded to the wound of exit.”24In another case, a Turkish boy was believed to be the next incarnation of a recently deceased relative who died after being shot. The bullet did not exit his head, but the pathologist made an incision to extract the bullet. The Turkish boy was born with a birthmark that corresponded with the location of the incision. Dr. Stevenson commented: “Like many other children of these cases, [the boy] showed powerful attitudes of vengefulness toward the man who had shot [him in the previous life]. He once tried to take his father’s gun and shoot this person, but was fortunately restrained.”25 The boy came to his parents in their dreams, before he was born, saying he would be the next incarnation of this same deceased relative.

It gets even weirder.

Dr. Stevenson examined “experimental” birthmarks: cases in which a mark was left on the body of a deceased person in the hopes that the mark would show on the person who later reincarnates. In a case in Thailand in 1969, a boy’s dead body was marked with charcoal before he was cremated. He had died from drowning. The next boy that the same mother birthed was born with a birthmark near the location of the charcoal marking. Once the boy was able to speak, he began describing details of the life his deceased brother lived. He also had a fear of water.26In another case in Burma, a girl died after unsuccessful open-heart surgery. Her classmates put a mark in red lipstick on the back of her neck before she was buried, in the hopes that the mark would show in the deceased girl’s next incarnation. Thirteen months after the girl’s death, her sister gave birth to a girl who had a “prominent red birthmark at the back of her neck in the same location where [the deceased girl’s] schoolmates marked her with lipstick” [emphasis in original]. Dr. Stevenson commented that she also had a birthmark that appeared as a thin line with “diminished pigmentation that ran vertically from her lower chest to her upper abdomen. This corresponded to the surgical incision for the cardiac surgery during which [the girl] had died.”27

In other cases, more extreme physical deformities can be linked to traumas experienced by the previous life remembered by the child. A Burmese girl was born with birthmarks near her heart and on her head; she was missing  the fifth finger on her left hand, and she had “constriction rings” on her legs, the most dramatic of which was on her left thigh.28 In the disturbing picture provided by Dr. Stevenson in Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (shown below), her leg looks as though it had been constricted by something like a rope. But her leg is naturally shaped that way, without anything constricting it. It is by no means the typical shape of a leg. When the girl was able to speak, she identified herself as a man who had been tortured (fingers cut, tied in ropes). Dr. Stevenson was eventually able to verify this man’s identity. There was indeed a person tortured and killed in the precise manner described by the little girl. Distressed by her birthmarks and deformities, the little girl said, “Grandpa. Look at what they did to me. How cruel they were.”29How could she have known such specific details? Why would a young child be saying these things? Why did her body reflect such distinctive deformities that matched the way the man had died?

Dr. Ian Stevenson investigated the case of a young girl who had specific, distinctive deformities that match how she described dying in a past life (shown above). In fact, there was a person who died in the precise manner described by the little girl. She described being tied in ropes and tortured in her past life. The shape of her legs seems to match that description. The figure above is from Dr. Stevenson’s bookWhere Reincarnation and Biology Intersect(1997).

 Dr. Stevenson noted that the girl’s mother happened to have walked past the tortured man’s dead body when she was two and a half months pregnant. She saw the police handling the situation. She believes the same man came to her in a dream before her daughter was born.30 Was this little girl the next incarnation of the man who was tortured—even though this man had no biological relationship to the little girl?

Maternal impressions

Dr. Stevenson conceded that in some cases it is not fully clear that birth defects can be tied directly to a previous life. Instead, “maternal impressions” sometimes could have been the cause. Maternal impressions refer to frightening mental images that the mother of a baby has during pregnancy, which result in the baby’s having a deformity that closely matches the mental image. Dr. Stevenson referenced an 1890 study at the University of Virginia written by a pediatrician who reviewed 90 maternal-impression cases. In these cases, the mother experienced something particularly frightening during pregnancy. And in 77 percent of the cases, there was “‘quite a close correspondence’ between the impression upon the mother during pregnancy and her baby’s defect.”31

Dr. Stevenson researched this topic further and focused on 300 cases from around the world, of which he studied 50 in detail. The example that Dr. Stevenson pointed to is disturbing, but makes the point. He recalled the case of a woman whose brother’s penis was amputated for medical reasons. While pregnant, “her curiosity impelled her to have a look at the site of her brother’s amputation.”32 She then gave birth to a male baby without a penis. Dr. Stevenson researched medical records of the general population and found the odds of a male baby being born with this birth defect is one in 30 million.

Dr. Stevenson’s analysis of the cases revealed that maternal impressions most likely impacted the baby when the impression occurred during the first trimester of pregnancy and when the traumatic incident occurred to the mother or someone close to her.33 Examples such as this caused Dr. Stevenson to question whether every case of physical deformity was induced by reincarnation. Instead, it is possible that some cases could be attributed to maternal impressions (which on its own deserves investigation!).

 But Dr. Stevenson noted that sometimes the mother had no knowledge of a deformity during pregnancy. In those cases, the maternal-impressions explanation doesn’t hold, and something else (reincarnation?) is needed as an explanation.34

Where does this leave us?

The totality of Drs. Stevenson’s and Tucker’s work points in the following direction, as summarized by Dr. Stevenson: “Some persons have unique attributes that we cannot now explain satisfactorily as due solely to a combination of genetic variation and environmental influences. Reincarnation deserves consideration as a third factor in play.”35 If this is true, the implications are immense for science, medicine, and beyond (as we’ll explore in chapter 13).

Under the materialist view that the brain produces consciousness, reincarnation is “nonsense.” However, if consciousness is more fundamental than matter and does not arise from brain activity, then the evidence discussed in this chapter is truly plausible.

Chapter Summary

❍Drs. Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia have studied more than 2,500 children over 50-plus years who claim to remember previous lives.

❍Sometimes the stories these young children tell match historical records of the individuals they claim they were in past lives. In other cases, the children speak foreign languages that they had no way of knowing.

❍In some cases, the child has distinctive birthmarks or physical deformities that match the way in which the child describes having died in a previous life. Sometimes, medical records verified the accuracy of the child’s claims.

An End to Upside Down Thinking

Dispelling the Myth That the Brain ProducesC onsciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life

Mark Gober

Reincarnation

It is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once. 

Voltaire 

Do human beings reincarnate? To think that one's personality could survive biological death (which would imply that the body is not essential to one's full personality) and then subsequently "take up" a new body for some purpose or other seems philosophically fantastic. Nevertheless, in 1982 a Gallup poll found that nearly one in four Americans believed in reincarnation; in 1980 the London Times had reported the results of their own poll in which 29 percent of the British population surveyed expressed a belief in reincarnation. The emerging popularity of the belief, however, is no clear sign that there is any truth to it. Such growing popularity only raises the question of its truth. After all, the National Science Foundation recently conducted a national poll and announced that approximately 30 percent of all the American adults surveyed either did not know or agreed with the statement that the sun goes around the earth.

Even so, serious philosophers no less famous than Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Giordano Bruno, and Cicero have argued for reincarnation on purely philosophical grounds. Of course, most people who believe in reincarnation do so primarily for religious, rather than scientific or philosophical, reasons; and this sort of motivation is apparent as far back as the ancient Pythagoreans, for whom belief in reincarnation (or transmigration of souls) was simply a matter of religious faith.

Quite apart from the religious context, however, belief in reincarnation has not prompted much serious philosophical discussion since Plato. This is not surprising. The most interesting evidence warranting such a discussion did not appear until quite recently. But even so, philosophers have still not yet noticed this evidence. They have been preoccupied with what they consider the more pressing question in the area of inquiry surrounding death, namely, whether we can successfully identify human personality with the corruptible body. There is, of course, no logically necessary connection between the answer to this question and reincarnation. Presumably, even if human personality should turn out to be identified with some nonphysical and naturally incorruptible principle (like a soul), the truth of reincarnation would not follow from that fact alone. One's personality could in some way survive one's biological death and yet not reincarnate. So, even if contemporary philosophers of mind do establish the falsity of mad-dog materialism, the most that would thereby be granted is the possibility of reincarnation as one of the ways in which human personality might survive biological death.

Curiously and interestingly enough, however, the belief in reincarnation offers the best available scientific explanation for certain forms of observable behavior not capable of explanation by appeal to any current scientifically accepted theory of human personality. In the conclusion to this chapter, one of the points that will emerge strongly is that, from a philosophical point of view, the belief in reincarnation is certainly as well established as (if not better than), say, the belief in the past existence of dinosaurs.

Anyway, in this chapter we will assume at the outset something we shall see proven in the conclusion of this book, namely, that belief in personal survival after death is certainly neither logically absurd nor factually impossible. Given this assumption, let us examine the best evidence for reincarnation. For reasons we shall explore later, many philosophers and scientists manage to bypass this evidence while seeking to determine whether human beings are more than just physical bodies.

Stevenson's Argument for Reincarnation, and Some Compelling Cases

The strongest argument for reincarnation has been offered by Ian Stevenson, primarily in his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of  Reincarnation.1 Throughout most of this chapter, we shall review that argument, say why it is convincing, and confront various objections to it.Basically, Stevenson's argument is that the belief in personal reincarnation offers the best available explanation for a large body of data that, until recently, has been generally ignored or rejected for various unacceptable reasons. The body of data consists in a number of case studies (described in great detail in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and elsewhere), many of which typically and ideally share at least the following core features:

A. A young person, usually between the ages of three and nine, claims to remember having lived an earlier life as a different person, and provides his (or her) parents with a detailed description of his alleged earlier life—a description including, but not restricted to, where and when he lived, his name, the names and characteristics of his various relatives, highly selective historical events that could be known only by the person he claims to have been in that earlier life, the way he lived, and the specific details of the way in which he died.

B. These memory claims consist of two types: (1) those that admit of simple verification in terms of available information; and (2) those that admit of verification but not in terms of available information. For example, if a young person from Evanston, Illinois, claims to remember having lived an earlier life as one Lazarus Smart, born in approximately 1630 in Boston, Massachusetts, and the son of Mary and Abraham Smart who lived on Boylston Street during the Boat Fire of 1642, then the fact that one Lazarus Smart did exist under this description could be verified easily in terms of available birth records, historical documents, and other information publicly accessible. But if the same person claims to recall having secretly buried a silver spoon with the initials L.S. in the concrete pier under the northwest corner of the Boylston Street Church when it was rebuilt in 1642, then this is the sort of claim that would be verifiable but not in terms of known or existing information.

C. The person claiming to remember having lived a past life, as well as the person's immediate (present) family members, are interviewed (with near-verbatim notes taken and some tape recordings) at great length, and asked to provide information one would expect to emerge if indeed the subject did live that earlier life. Although the majority of the person's memories are involuntary and spontaneous (and hence not often the direct response to questions of the interviewers), the relevant memory claims and information are provided during the interviews.

D. Investigators independently confirm both the spontaneous and the solicited memory claims; and in some cases (those cases in which the person's claims refer to extant past-life family members with whom he was intimate), past-life family members are interviewed and led to confront the subject, who proceeds to remind them of various nonpublic details of the life they spent together.

E. The person claiming to remember having lived a past life also manifests certain skills (such as speaking fluently a foreign language or dialect, or playing an instrument) that the person in the alleged earlier life had, but that the person claiming to have lived the earlier life could not have acquired or learned in this life. For example, if a person claims to remember having lived a life in medieval Sweden, and in a hypnotic trance he begins to speak and describe his earlier life in a difficult but clear dialect of medieval Swedish, then that person (assuming we can document that he has not learned or been exposed to the study of medieval Swedish) manifests a skill not acquired in this life.

F. Deception, or the real possibility of deception, by way of fraud or hoax on the part of the person claiming to have lived a past life cannot be substantiated.

Stevenson's basic argument says that for cases with characteristics A through F the only available explanation that plausibly fits the data is belief in reincarnation. Before discussing all available objections to this argument, however, we need to examine a few particular cases (some of them Stevenson's) that have the characteristics A through F.

Memory Evidence and Acquired Skills 

Certainly some of the most compelling evidence for reincarnation occurs in cases that, as described in Stevenson's ideal-typical characteristics, offer detailed memory claims substantiated by extant past-life family members. The first case we will examine— the Bishen Chand case—involved just such evidence. The second— the Mrs. Smith case—is more problematic in that the past life remembered took place centuries ago. However, historical records (some of them extremely obscure or only recently available) have been used to verify many of the surprising memory claims of the subject.

Both cases exhibit another of Stevenson's ideal-typical characteristics, namely, the manifestation of skills acquired by the pastlife person but not acquired by the present-day subject in this life. As explained later in this chapter as well as in Chapter 3 in our discussion of possession, this characteristic carries a great deal of evidential weight in replying to those sceptics who see these cases as evidence of paranormal knowledge rather than reincarnation.

The Bishen Chand Case 

Bishen Chand Kapoor was born in 1921 to the Gulham family living in the city of Bareilly, India. At about one and a half years, Bishen began asking questions about the town of Pilibhit, some 50 miles from Bareilly. Nobody in his family knew anybody in Pilibhit. Bishen Chand asked to be taken there, and it became obvious that he believed he had lived there during an earlier life.2As time passed, Bishen Chand talked incessantly of his earlier life there in Pilibhit. His family grew increasingly distressed with his behavior. By the summer of 1926 (when he was five and a half years old), Bishen Chand claimed to remember his previous life quite clearly. He remembered that his name had been Laxmi Narain, and that he had been the son of a wealthy landowner. Bishen claimed to remember an uncle named Har Narain, who turned out to be Laxmi Narain's father. He also described the house in which he had lived, saying it included a shrine room and separate quarters for women. Frequently, he had enjoyed the singing and dancing of nautch girls, professional dancers who often functioned as prostitutes. He remembered enjoying parties of this sort at the home of a neighbor, Sander Lal, who lived in a "house with a green gate." Indeed, little Bishen Chand one day recommended to his father that he (the father) take on a mistress in addition to his wife.

Because Bishen Chand's family was poor (his father was a government clerk), Bishen Chand's memories of an earlier and wealthier life only made him resentful of his present living conditions with the Gulham family. He sometimes refused to eat the food, claiming that even his servants (in his former life) would not eat such food.

One day Bishen's father mentioned that he was thinking of buying a watch, and little Bishen Chand said, "Pappa, don't buy. When I go to Pilibhit, I shall get you three watches from a Muslim watch dealer whom I established there." He then provided the name of the dealer.

His sister Karnla, three years older than he, caught Bishen drinking brandy one day (which finally explained the dwindling supply of alcohol kept in the house for medicinal purposes only). In his typically superior way, the child told her that he was quite accustomed to drinking brandy. He drank a good deal of alcohol in his earlier life. Later, he claimed to have had a mistress (again showing he knew the difference between a wife and a mistress) in his former life. Her name, he said, was Padma; and although she was a prostitute, he seemed to have considered her his exclusive property, because he proudly claimed to have killed a man he once saw coming from her apartment.

Bishen Chand Kapoor's memory claims came to the attention of one K. K. N. Sahay, an attorney in Bareilly. Sahay went to the Kapoor home and recorded the surprising things the young boy was saying. Thereafter, he arranged to take Bishen Chand, along with his father and older brother, to Pilibhit. Not quite eight years had elapsed since the death of Laxmi Narain, whom this little boy was claiming to have been in his earlier life.

Crowds gathered when they arrived at Pilibhit. Nearly everyone in town had heard of the wealthy family and its profligate member Laxmi Narain who had been involved with the prostitute Padma (who still lived there), and how in a jealous rage Laxmi Narain had shot and killed a rival lover of Padma's. Although Laxmi Narain's family had been influential enough to get the charges dropped, he died a few months afterward of natural causes at the age of 32.

When taken to Laxmi's old government school, Bishen Chand ran to where his classroom had been. Somebody produced an old picture, and Bishen recognized in it some of Laxmi Narain's classmates, one of whom happened to be in the crowd. When the classmate asked about their teacher, Bishen correctly described him as a fat, bearded man.

In the part of town where Laxmi Narain had lived, Bishen Chand recognized the house of Sander Lal, the house that he had previously described (before being brought to Pilibhit) as having a green gate. The lawyer Sahay, when writing the report later for the national newspaper The Leader in August 1926, claimed to have seen the gate himself and verified that its color was green. The boy also pointed to the courtyard where he said the nautch girls used to entertain with singing and dancing. Merchants in the area verified the boy's claims. In the accounts published by The Leader, Sahay wrote that the name of the prostitute with whom the boy associated in his previous life was repeatedly sought by people in the crowd (following the boy). When Bishen Chand mentioned the name "Padma," the people certified that the name was correct.

During that remarkable day, the boy was presented with a set of tabla, a pair of drums. The father said that Bishen had never seen tabla before; but to the surprise of his family and all assembled, Bishen Chand played them skilfully, as had Laxmi Narain much earlier. When the mother of Laxmi Narain met Bishen Chand, a strong attachment was immediately apparent between them. Bishen Chand answered the questions she asked (such as the time in his previous life when he had thrown out her pickles), and he successfully named and described Laxmi Narain's personal servant. He also gave the caste to which the servant belonged. He later claimed that he preferred Laxmi's mother to his own. Laxmi Narain's father was thought to have hidden some treasure before his death, but nobody knew where. When Bishen Chand was asked about the treasure, he led the way to a room of the family's former home. A treasure of gold coins was later found in this room, giving credence to the boy's claim of having lived a former life in the house.Finally, Bishen Chand's older brother testified that Bishen could, when he was a child, read Urdu (written in Arabic script) before he had been taught this language. Bishen Chand's father, in a sworn statement about the case, stated that Bishen had (as a child) used some Urdu words that he could not have learned in the family—words such as masurate and kopal (for "women's quarters" and "lock," respectively), rather than the usual Hindi words zenana and tala. Laxmi Narain was reasonably well educated and quite capable of speaking Urdu.

In examining this case, Ian Stevenson urges that it is especially significant because an early record was kept by a reliable attorney when most of the principals were still alive and capable of verifying Bishen Chand's memory claims.3 Many of the people who knew Laxmi Narain were still alive and well when Bishen Chand Kapoor was making his claims. They verified nearly all the statements Bishen made before he went to Pilibhit. Moreover, according to Stevenson, the possibility of fraud is remote because Bishen Chand's family had little to gain from association with the Laxmi Narain family.4 It was well known that the latter had become destitute after Laxmi Narain had died. As in most cases similar to this, the events could not be explained in terms of anticipated financial gain. (...)

The Shanti Devi Case 

Some researchers believe, for various reasons, that the Shanti Devi case offers the best available evidence for reincarnation. However, owing to the inaccessibility of the original case study, and because of the seriously questionable methods used in gathering and corroborating the alleged facts of the case, I will not include it for critical discussion along with the other cases examined here.22 But because, as noted earlier, it is an interesting case and shows what would be strong evidence, it is certainly worthy of our qualified consideration.

Shanti Devi was born in 1926 in old Delhi. At three, she began to entertain her family with "stories" about a former life in which she had been married to a man named Kedar Nath who lived in nearby Muttra, had two children, and died in childbirth bearing a third child in 1925.

Like Bishen Chand, she also described in detail the home in Muttra where she said she had lived with her husband and children. Shanti said her name in that life was Lugdi. She further described the relatives of her former family and those of her husband, what her former life had been like, and how she had died. Unlike Bishen Chand, however, her alleged reincarnation had occurred so quickly (one year after her death) that there was the possibility of extensive corroboration by extant relatives with fresh memories. When her parents could no longer turn her from these stories, her grand uncle Kishen Chand sent a letter to Muttra to see how much, if any, of the little girl's story might be true. He sent it to an address Shanti gave him. The letter reached a startled widower named Kedar Nath who was still grieving the loss of his wife Lugdi. Lugdi had died in childbirth in 1925. Even as a devout Hindu, he could not accept the fact that Lugdi was reborn, living in Delhi, and in possession of an accurate picture of their life together. Suspecting some sort of fraud, Kedar Nath sent his cousin Mr. Lal (who lived in Delhi) to investigate and interrogate the girl. If she were an imposter, his cousin would know. When Mr. Lal, on the pretext of business, went to Devi's home, Shanti opened the door and, after screaming, threw herself into the arms of the astonished visitor. Her mother rushed to the door. Before the visitor could speak, Shanti (now nine) said, "Mother, this is a cousin of my husband! He lived not far from us in Muttra and then moved to Delhi. I am so happy to see him. He must come in. I want to know about my husband and sons."

With Shanti's family, Mr. Lal confirmed all the facts she had testified to over the years. As a result of this, they all agreed that Kedar Nath and the favorite son should come to Delhi as guests of the Devis.

When Kedar Nath arrived with the son, Shanti showered them with kisses and pet names. She treated Kedar Nath as a devoted wife would be expected to, serving him biscuits and tea. When Kedar Nath began to weep, Shanti consoled him using endearing little phrases known only to Lugdi and Kedar Nath.

Eventually, the press featured the case, and independent investigators appeared on the scene. The investigators decided to take Shanti to Muttra and have her lead them to the home where she claimed to have lived and died in her earlier life. When the train pulled into Muttra, Shanti cried out in delight and began waving to several people on the platform. She told the investigators with her that they were the mother and brother of her husband. She was right. More importantly, however, she got off the train and began to speak with and question them using not the Hindustani she had been taught in Delhi, but rather the dialect of the Muttra district. Shanti had not been exposed to, nor had she been taught, this dialect. But she would certainly have known the dialect if, like Lugdi, she had been a resident of Muttra.Later Shanti led the investigators to the Nath home and conveyed other information that only Lugdi could have known. For example, Kedar Nath asked her where she had hidden several rings before she died. She said they were in a pot and buried in the ground of the old home where they had lived. The investigators subsequently found the rings where she said they would be.

As the case developed, it was celebrated in the international press and became the subject of extensive speculation on the part of scholars everywhere. At last word, Shanti never returned to live with Kedar Nath, though; and she could very well still be living in Delhi with her Devi family. As far as we can tell, all those who had known Lugdi accepted Shanti fully as Lugdi's reincarnation.

Apart from the fact that cases like this are somewhat rare, the Shanti Devi case (as well as Stevenson's Sharada case, which we shall not discuss here)23 offers an instance of responsive xenoglossy that was not induced under hypnotic regression. In this respect it obviously differs from both the Lydia Johnson qua Jensen case and the DJ. qua Gretchen case. What is important here is that there are cases of spontaneous (or uninduced) responsive xenoglossy in which the subject demonstrates a clear knowledge of historical events that neither the subject nor any interviewer could have had natural knowledge of in this life, because the truth of the claims made could be established only after the subject's testimony. For example, in the Shanti Devi case, Shanti told the investigators something nobody else knew, namely, where Lugdi had hidden several rings before she died. And, if you will remember, we have seen in the Mrs. Smith case an instance of recitative xenoglossy with this same feature: she was right when it came to the question of the color of the Cathar priests' garments—a fact not known for quite some time after her testimony. More on this later. For now, let us look at a particularly rich memory case that does not involve xenoglossy in any straightforward way, but that is persuasive for other reasons. Thereafter we will begin our discussion on the evidential strength of these cases.

Memory Evidence and Recognition: The Swarnlata Case 

In 1951 an Indian man named Sri M. L. Mishra took his threeyear-old daughter Swarnlata and several other people on a 170mile trip south from the city of Panna (in the district of Madhya Pradesh) to the city of Jabalpur, also in the same district.24 On the return journey, as they passed through the city of Katni (57 miles north of Jabalpur), Swarnlata unexpectedly asked the driver to turn down a certain road to "my house." The driver quite understandably ignored her request. Later, when the same group was taking tea at Katni, Swarnlata told them that they would get better tea at "my house" nearby. These statements puzzled her father, Mishra; neither he nor any member of his family had ever lived near Katni. His puzzlement deepened when he learned that Swarnlata was telling other children in the family further details of what she claimed was a previous life in Katni as a member of a family named Pathak. In the next two years Swarnlata frequently performed for her mother (and later in front of others) unusual dances and songs that, as far as her parents knew, there had been no opportunity for her to learn. In 1958, when she was ten, Swarnlata met a woman from the area of Katni whom Swarnlata claimed to have known in her earlier life. It was at this time that Mishra first sought to confirm the numerous statements his daughter made about her "previous life."

In March 1959, H. N. Banerjee began to investigate the case; and in 1961 (after Banerjee's investigation), Ian Stevenson went to Chhatarpur to recheck carefully the work done by Banerjee. From the Mishra home in Chhatarpur, Banerjee had traveled to Katni where he became acquainted with the Pathak family of which Swarnlata claimed to have been a member. He noted, before journeying to Katni, some nine detailed statements Swarnlata had made about the Pathak residence. These statements he confirmed on his arrival. Incidentally, before Banerjee went to Katni, the Mishra family did not know or know of the Pathak family.

Banerjee also found that the statements made by Swarnlata corresponded closely to the life of Biya, a daughter in the Pathak family and deceased wife of a man named Pandey who lived in Maihar. Biya had died in 1939—nine years before the birth of Swarnlata.

In the summer of 1959, members of the Pathak family and of Biya's marital family traveled to Chhatarpur (where the Mishra family lived). Without being introduced to these people, Swarnlata recognized them all, called them by name, and related personal incidents and events in their various lives with Biya—events that, according to these relatives, only Biya could have known. For example, Swarnlata claimed that, as Biya, she had gold fillings in her front teeth. Biya's sister-in-law confirmed as much. The Pathaks eventually accepted Swarnlata as Biya reincarnated, even though they had never previously believed in the possibility of reincarnation.

After these visits, in the same summer, Swarnlata and members of her family went first to Katni and then to Maihar where the deceased Biya had spent much of her married life and where she died. In Maihar, Swarnlata recognized additional people and places and commented on various changes that had occurred since the death of Biya. Her statements were independently verified. Later, Swarnlata continued to visit Biya's brother and children, for whom she showed the warmest affection.

The songs and dances that Swarnlata had performed presented some problem, however. Biya spoke Hindi and did not know how to speak Bengali, whereas the songs Swarnlata had sung (and danced to) were in Bengali. Although the songs were publicly available and had been recorded on phonograph records and played in certain films, she could not have learned these songs from records or films because her parents had neither seen nor heard them and, therefore, Swarnlata—as a typical child under close surveillance of her family—had no occasion to do so. The parents were also certain that Swarnlata had not been in contact with Bengali-speaking persons from whom she might have learned the songs. Swarnlata claimed that she had learned the songs and dances from a previous life. Stevenson notes that this is a case of recitative rather than responsive xenoglossy, because she could not converse in Bengali although she could sing Bengali songs.25

After careful examination, Ian Stevenson concludes that it is very difficult to explain the facts of the case without admitting that Swarnlata had paranormal knowledge. After all, how otherwise could Swarnlata have known the details of the family and of the house? These details (including the fact that Biya had gold fillings in her teeth—a fact that even her brothers had forgotten) were by no means in the public domain. Moreover, how otherwise can we explain her recognition of members of the Pathak and Pandey families? How can her knowledge of the former (as opposed to the present) appearances of places and people be explained? Her witnessed recognitions of people amount to 20 in number. As Stevenson notes, most of the recognitions occurred in such a way that Swarnlata was obliged to give a name or state a relationship between Biya and the person in question. On several occasions, serious attempts were made to mislead her or to deny that she gave the correct answers, but such attempts failed.Could there have been a conspiracy among all the witnesses in the various families (the Mishras, the Pathaks, and the Pandeys)? Might not all of them have conspired to bring off a big hoax? Well, according to Stevenson, a family of prominence such as the Pathaks, with far-reaching business interests, is unlikely to participate in a hoax with so many people involved, any one of which might later defect. If a hoax did occur, it is more likely to have come from the Chhatarpur side. But even here, Sri M. L. Mishra had nothing to gain from such a hoax. He even doubted for a long time the authenticity and truth of his daughter's statements, and he made no move to verify them for six years. Most of the people involved agreed that they had nothing to gain but public ridicule.

But even if we suppose that there was some attempt at fraud, who would have tutored Swarnlata for success in such recognitions? Who would have taken the time to do it? Sri M. L. Mishra, apart from Swarnlata, was the only other member of the family who received any public attention from Swarnlata's case. And what attention he received, he was not too happy about. Also, how could Sri Mishra have gotten some of the highly personal information possessed by Swarnlata about the private affairs of the Pathaks (e.g., that Biya's husband took her 1,200 rupees)?

Might Swarnlata have been tutored by some stranger who knew Katni and the Pathaks? As Stevenson notes, like all children in India—especially girls—Swarnlata's movements were very carefully controlled by her family. She never saw strangers in the house alone, and she never was out on the street unaccompanied.26 Besides the legal documentation and methods used in Stevenson's examination, what is interesting about this case is that it is one of many similar cases. Can we explain the facts plausibly without appealing to the belief in reincarnation?

Death and personal survival 

Robert F Almeder