Kids Who Remember Their Past Lives

A sweet 6-year-old girl looks up at her mom and in a very serious voice tells her, “I wouldn’t sleep in your bedroom if I were you.” The mom has kind of grown used to her daughter saying freaky stuff to her, but still, it comes as a shock. What is the girl seeing? What is behind her dark thoughts? To better understand this girl, you have to know that she doesn’t even think her parents are her real parents. She once announced to her alleged imposter parents that her real mom and pop were dead. She said to them, no big deal, you’re just my second set, I’m ok with that. If that isn’t disturbing enough, the girl sees what she calls “skeleton men” running around the house.

They run through walls; they inhabit the room where her parents sleep. Sometimes, dressed as soldiers, they walk through the living room while everyone is watching TV. This is a true story, well allegedly, and the girl is now grown up and remembers nothing about accusing her parents of being fake. She can’t recall ever seeing the skeleton men. She’s forgotten all about a friend she used to have who lived in the spooky attic. That friend, Felicia, was of course a figment of the girl’s imagination. But the question is, what was going on in that girl’s head? As you’ll see today, she’s one of many children who say the creepiest stuff to their parents. In fact, some kids say they have past lives, and they make a very, very strong case for that being true. They remember entire villages where they’ve never been. They know their old houses, their old lovers, the clothes they used to wear. They know things they just shouldn’t know. It’s frankly unbelievable, but sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Other times, well it’s just fiction. Let’s now have a look at some amazing cases of reincarnated kids.

A child was born on April 10, 1998, in the state of Louisiana. He was named James Leininger, son of Bruce and Andrea. He was a healthy baby and a joy to his doting parents, but not so long after he learned how to talk, he announced something incredibly strange to his mom and pop. He told them that they were in fact not his parents. In the year 2000, the two-year-old told his parents that he remembered being an air force pilot during the second world war. It’s not the most convincing past-life story you’ll hear today, but it’s up there with the best. Ok, so James might not have had those memories had his parents not taken him to a World War II exhibit. No sooner than he got there he was absolutely fascinated by the planes he saw.

He was so fascinated with planes that his parents took him to the exhibit a second time, but on seeing one plane in a hangar James suddenly became quiet and looked quite sad. After that trip, he developed a habit of just repeating the words, “airplane crash on fire.” He would then take his toy planes and smash them down on the kitchen table, so hard that he destroyed the planes and made dents in the wood. Ok, thought his parents, our kid seems a bit traumatized by the war exhibit, maybe we made a mistake taking him in the first place. Things got much worse. James then started waking up in the middle of the night just screaming and screaming. Sometimes he’d scream and then shout, “Airplane crash on fire!” One time his mother and he dropped his father off at the airport and James’ reassuring words to his pop were, “Daddy, airplane crash on fire!” James was starting to become a bit of a downer, but he had many more surprises in store. He started having hissy fits.

He’d just writhe around screaming, kicking, punching, shouting, “Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can't get out!” After a few weeks of this he started telling his parents that during the war he’d flown a fighter plane called a “Corsair.” 6 months short of his 3rd birthday he told them he’d flown his plane off a boat called the “Natoma.” Unless he was secretly using Google, he just couldn’t have known such a boat existed. His father went online and discovered that during the war there was such a boat. It was the USS Natoma Bay, an escort carrier that sailed in the Pacific Ocean. His parents, now truly spooked, asked James a number of times the name of the little man in the plane. For a while, James kept telling them that he was the little man, but after a while, he said the words, “Jack Larsen.” He told his parents that Jack Larsen was in the plane with him when it was shot down. His father gave him a book called, “The Battle for Iwo Jima 1945” and James looked at all the pictures. When he saw a picture of the Mount Suribachi dormant volcano James told his pop, “That’s it, that’s where my plane was shot down.”

The father turned to his son with an incredulous look on his face and James reiterated, “My airplane got shot down there, Daddy.” James’ father didn’t give his son up to the local mental health facility and instead looked for veterans of the war that had been on the USS Natoma. He found one, and guess what, he’d served with a guy named Jack Larsen. This was all getting a bit much now for James’ parents, so they started researching children who claim they’ve had past lives. They found a woman named Carol Bowman who’d written a book on the topic and following her advice they assured James that the past was the past and he didn’t have to worry about it. The war was over. He was now safe. James’ nightmares stopped after that. James’ third birthday passed, and he had taken up a new hobby: drawing battle scenes. He signed all his sketches James 3, and when asked why, he told his parents it was because he was living his third life. This doesn’t make sense until you know that James’s father found something out when he attended a Natoma Bay reunion.

He discovered that a John M. Larson had served on that ship. If you don’t know, John’s are sometimes given the nickname Jack. The father found out that Jack had actually survived the war, although he wasn’t at the reunion. Not one to give up, the father went looking for Jack and he found him. Jack told him that only one pilot had crashed after taking off from that ship. His name was James M. Huston, Jr. The 21-year-old from Pennsylvania had been shot down during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Now we have James’s senior, James junior, and James the freaky kid. Huston was shot down during an eight-plane assault. Through research, James’ father discovered that the plane next to Huston’s was flown by none other than Jack Larsen.

His father was now convinced that his son had once lived the life of James Huston Jr. James’ parents claimed that their son gave them many details about the war and the stuff, he’d told them about his other family life was confirmed by the real James Huston’s sister. Ok, so you might now be thinking, “FRAUD!”, especially when you hear that his parents made money from a book they wrote about the case of their strange son. But you should know that his case has been investigated thoroughly, and it seems that no one thinks the whole thing is a hoax. Investigators think it’s more likely that James lived in some kind of fantasy world that was triggered by that first visit to the war exhibit. That might explain the nightmares, but it doesn’t explain Jack Larsen and James Huston. James could not have read about those names and there are no known TV shows that have featured them or the Natoma. This is what one investigator concluded after very lengthy research, including talking many times to all the people involved: “The documentation in James's case provides evidence that he had a connection with a life from the past. On the face of it, the most obvious explanation for this connection is that he experienced a life as James Huston, Jr. before having his current one.” Are you convinced?

You know that children have vivid imaginations and you know that any child psychiatrist will tell you that it’s not out of the ordinary for young children to be rather obsessed by death, dead people, ghosts. Still, reincarnated kids...that’s not easy to believe. Now you need to hear this: In the 1950s a British couple named Florence and John Pollock had two kids, Joanna and Jacqueline. The kids had a happy childhood and were inseparable. One thing you need to know is that Jacqueline had a big scar on her forehead from an accident and Joanna had a birthmark on the left side of her stomach. To cut a long story short, they were both killed when a car struck them on a country road. Joanna was 11 and her sister was 6. It was a big case at the time because it seemed that the female driver had driven right into them after swerving around on the road. That driver took her life shortly after the accident. Some years later, the couple had more children, twins they named Gillian and Jennifer.

The father was convinced that these two new girls were Jacqueline and Joanna reincarnated and he was more convinced when he saw that Jennifer seemed to have a funny mark on her forehead that looked like Jacqueline’s scar. Her sister also had a birthmark where Joanna had had one. These two twins suddenly started to call their toys the same names that the deceased kids had called them. They knew of landmarks to places they had never been to. They knew what school the dead girls had attended. Things then got quite dark. The young twins started playing a game that involved one girl lying on the floor and the other girl pretending to attend to her bloodied head. Not long after that, whenever the pair walked near a car they’d start screaming. The strange case came to the attention of a paranormal psychologist named Dr. Ian Stevenson. He studied the girls for many years, often following them around while they were growing up.

His conclusion was they were reincarnations of their deceased sisters. He was very aware that the sisters’ behavior could have been the result of the father thinking they were reincarnations, but after spending so much time with them he concluded that this just wasn’t possible. He believed the girls were so young they couldn’t have possibly learned their crazy behavior. Something strange was afoot said the doctor. Still not convinced? You will be by the time this show is over. Can you imagine if your three-year-old son suddenly started saying that he had been shot to death? That’s what Kakshappa Ishwara told his parents in 1975. His parents didn’t believe a word of it, but then his twin brother, Indika, started to remember a past life of his own. In fact, Indika remembered so much that his parents were able to find out who he was speaking of. They actually went to visit the dead kids’ parents and immediately Indika fell in love with them. Then there was the case of the reincarnated Burmese twins.

They said they had been Japanese soldiers during the war. They spoke a language no one could understand, and they demanded to be taken back to Japan. They were girls, but they acted like boys while growing up. Balderdash! you’re thinking because you don’t believe a word of this and you like to say balderdash a lot in a manner that suggests you are an authority on matters. We don’t blame you for either of those things, but you need to hear more before you make up your mind. Now we will introduce Ryan. When Ryan was four, he had a very vivid imagination, so much so his parents would often hear him shout, “Action!” from his bedroom. The kid used to think he was directing his very own movies. There was a problem with his colorful imagination, though, and that was the fact he had terrible night terrors. He’d scream and scream in his sleep, and then when his parents woke him up, he’d tell them, “Mom, my heart exploded in Hollywood.” They took him to a doctor and the doctor said he’ll grow out of it. He kept on having those nightmares and then one time after he was awoken, he told his mom that he thought he had lived the life of someone else. He said he’d lived in a big white house with a large swimming pool.

The place was in Hollywood, a very different place to Oklahoma where he lived. His mother didn’t really believe her son had lived in Hollywood, but the now five-year-old Ryan went on about it every day of the week. He was totally convinced of this other life. The mom reluctantly brought books home from the library that contained photos of Hollywood in the past. On one occasion they were looking through one of the books and Ryan stopped at a particular photo. He said, “Hey mom, that’s George, we did a picture together.” He then looked at another photo and said, “That’s me. I found me.” The movie was a 1930s hit called, “Night After Night.” The strange thing is, the book didn’t provide any names of the men in the photo, so Ryan’s mom did a bit of investigating. She found out the guy her son had said was named George was in fact named George. He was George Raft, a movie star. The problem was that she wasn’t able to find out who the other guy was. She then went online and found Jim B. Tucker, a psychiatry professor who’s spent years investigating the claims of people who say they have lived past lives. It should be said that Tucker is a serious scientist, and he looks at every angle when investigating these claims. Tucker turned up at Ryan’s home with four black and white photos.

Three of them were random people. When Tucker asked Ryan if any of the women were familiar to him, he pointed to one. She was the wife of a guy named Martin Martyn. This guy was the man in the photo who Ryan claimed to have been. The reason he was so hard to track down is that he had only been in movies as an uncredited extra. Tucker didn’t stop there. He went in search of Martyn’s living family and he found his daughter. At first, she wanted nothing to do with Tucker, or some crazy kid, but when Tucker told her lots of intimate details about her father that Ryan had told him, she was flabbergasted. There was no way this kid could have known those things. There were dozens of facts. Here are some of them. Ryan said he’d been a dancer on Broadway. True. He said he’d been a talent agent and worked with people who’d changed their names. True. He said he got sunburnt a lot. True. He had two sisters. True. His mom had curly, brown hair. True.

He had four wives. True. He had a green car and his wife had a black car. True. He had an African maid. True. He owned a piano. True. He said his home where he’d lived as Martyn had the word “Rock” on it. True. He said he’d lived at 825 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. True. He said he’d been friends with a man named Senator Five…not true. Her father had been friends with a man named Senator Ives. All in all, Ryan knew over 50 facts about Martyn’s life, and most of those facts were impossible to find online. When Ryan was introduced to the person who was his daughter from a past life he was scared. Remember Ryan was just a young kid then. He hid behind his mom and said something had changed. His mother told him that people had to grow up. Ryan told her that he never ever wanted to go back to Hollywood. He didn’t much like his daughter as an old woman. Tucker has investigated over 2,500 cases and to this day scientific research can’t really explain what’s going on.