Can Children Remember Their Past Lives? | Real Stories Full-Length Documentary

He was two years old. He saw a lady on TV, and he said, I was at my boat when I was a girl. So I said, all right, when were you a girl? He said, before I came to you. This came out over a period of time. Before he came to us, he had been a girl. And he'd got married, and he'd married a man called George. And they'd had a baby, and George didn't like the baby. So she had taken herself and the child to a bridge and jumped off it and killed herself and the child. My son was two years old, and he suddenly said, Mummy, when I was an old man, I was very, very sad. And I asked him why. He said it was because his house had burnt down and his two daughters had been standing at the bedroom window in their smocks, and they were burnt to death. Around the world, thousands of children from different backgrounds and religions have described a life they have lived before. The belief in the survival of the soul is an ancient one, but the fact that these children talk about events which seem beyond their childhood experience is considered by some to be evidence of reincarnation. At the Division of Personality Studies in Charlottesville, Virginia, there are 2,700 documented cases of children who talk about a previous life. These children come from around the world, southern Asia, West Africa, Europe and the United States. Scientists at this centre of international research are hoping to find proof of reincarnation, so they carefully investigate new cases as they emerge. My son Harley was three years and three months old when I first heard him speak of something which indicates a prior life experience. It was on Halloween, 1997. I don't have a problem believing in reincarnation, though until Harley started telling me things about his other mama, I never really thought about it in any concrete way. I would like to ask him more about it, but I don't want to do so in a way that will suggest answers to him. Any suggestions? Sincerely, Pamela Pascualito. I'm in a town called Exeter, California, which has about 10,000 people, and I'm going to visit a mother and a little boy who has said some things about having lived before. We've got over 100 American cases in the files, and they tend to break down into two camps. There are the same family cases where the child remembers a deceased relative, and then there are the unsolved stranger cases like this one where the child has made statements about a stranger that so far we've not been able to identify. The best-case scenario is that I meet with them. They're very straightforward and seem like honest, reasonable people. He's made a fair number of rather specific statements, so if I'm able to verify it, it'll be a very strong case. The worst-case scenario, I suppose the worst, would be where we begin to suspect it's fraud. As far as we know, we only have the mother as a witness, so even if we assess her and don't think that fraud would be involved, it does increase the chance that she has simply misinterpreted some statements that the boy has made. And this must be Harley. This is Jim Tucker. This is an interview with Pam Pascualito on May 28, 2000, and her son Harley, who is the subject. All right, so when was the first time that Harley said anything that might be related to that? When he was a two, around two, when he got in trouble or was sent to his room or something, he would sit in his room howling over and over again, I want my mama, even though when I walked in the room and stood in front of him saying, here I am, he would still keep saying, I want my mama. Then when he was three, on Halloween, we went trick-or-treating at one of the neighborhoods over there on the other side of town. We pretty much exhausted the possibilities of that particular neighborhood, and I said, okay, well, let's get in the truck and drive over to the other side of town. And he said, oh, you mean the part of town where we used to live? And I said, well, we never lived in town. And he said, oh, when I lived with my other mama. And I was like, oh, your other mama? And I don't know if it was then or later that he said it, or her name was Stacy. Do you remember that? The day when he mentioned the road being paid, had you guys done anything special? No, we were just like, on our way home from work. There are other statements that added to Pam's concern. Harley had pointed to a road they passed every day and said, oh, they've paved it now. Yet the road was paved 30 years before. He talked about an older brother pushing him out of a tree and going on a camping trip to the mountains with his other mother, Stacy. Harley's story fits the pattern of many of these cases. He said these things repeatedly when he first learned to speak and stopped when he began school at the age of five. Harley also had a birthmark, which in such cases is thought to be a physical reminder of injuries received in the previous life. He could also remember his own death. And he had also mentioned when he died? I think he said 15 or 17, or I honestly don't remember right now. But it was a teenage age. And I think in the letter he mentioned he said he died in a car accident. Right, in a car accident. I asked him how he died, and he said in a car accident. I mean, I believed him. I believed that he was saying something that was true to him. It's like, I believe that you believe it. It did not seem that he was kidding. It didn't seem like he was kidding. Because he would say it all very matter-of-factly. Usually when he's making up stories, he puts on a silly little voice. Like, you know, I don't know. He wasn't doing that at all, no. Don't break your neck, please. It's possible that he was doing some make-believe and that she took it a little too seriously. Certainly a lot of kids have imaginary friends that is sort of make-believe but where they're not quite sure that it's make-believe. I didn't get the sense that Pam was particularly wrapped up in the idea of having a child who was a Reaper, at least. I mean, even though she agreed to a television interview. She is keeping it pretty hush-hush. She hasn't even told her mother. So I don't think she's seeking publicity or anything like that. It's a very Christian, right-wing sort of town. And I just don't know that these new-agey sorts of ideas, if you want to call them that, are something that would go over big with the local community. But, I don't know, maybe they would be Jesus Got Born Again. So, who's to say? Authentication of Harley's story is essential if this case is to be anything other than a curiosity. The key is to find whether Harley's previous personality ever existed. I started at the date of Harley's birth. I'm just working my way back, looking through the obituaries, any stories of car accidents. Like, here's an accident where six people were injured, but it looks like nine were killed. We find that a 15-year-old named Jonathan was killed in a car accident, and he had a mother named Stacy. Oh, no, we had our man. Well, I went through the newspaper archives, but only got through 94 and 93. I found one Jonathan that was 19 when he was killed in a car accident. Of course, Harley had said that he was 15. But also, the mother's name didn't match. I think this one was named Sylvia, where the one thing that Harley seemed certain about was that his mother had been named Stacy. Where are you going to get? Well, no, no, I need a picture of you just standing there. Finding a previous personality match isn't scientific proof of reincarnation, but these cases constantly throw up questions which investigators are compelled to address. Good, thank you very much. Good job. In my experience as a child psychiatrist, it seems clear that 3- and 4-year-olds do not have any meaningful understanding of death. You may say it, but not really know what it means. Many of these children speak of having a violent death. That implies that a sudden death or a violent death contributes to the children being able to remember. It doesn't necessarily mean that it contributes to them reincarnating. After the accident, I was watching what was being done to me. My younger sister cried a lot. There was a garland on my body when I was brought home. I've seen a photograph of my corpse, and the garland is there in the photograph. I can't remember much after that. I was in darkness and saw some light. I remember coming in the direction of the light, and then I was reborn. In the East, there is a long-established tradition of children with past life memories. In Buddhism, the main religion in Sri Lanka, there is a firm belief that the dead will be reborn back into the physical world, on the path towards spiritual enlightenment, or nirvana. This is a culture where reincarnation isn't a hope, but an expectation. Dr. Erlanda Haraldson has investigated over 60 cases in Sri Lanka. He has found that compared to the West, children here recall specific details, which makes it easier to discover the identity of the person the child claims to have been before. Dr. Haraldson considers the case of Purnima to be one of his strongest. I came to know the case of Purnima in 1996, and I published it in January 2000, so we studied it for some, well we can say like for three years. Dr. Haraldson and his interpreter have visited Purnima's family many times to investigate her story. They live in a small town called Bakamuna in the central province. Her father is a head teacher of a local school. All her family are practicing Buddhists. When Purnima was about school age, she asked me if I wanted to know where her mother and father were from. I thought she meant me and my husband, so I ignored her. Then she said her other parents were living in Kalania, about 140 miles away from here. She went on talking about her previous life. She talked about a fragrance, a sweet smell, anything she made at home, food or clothes. She said, I want to take it to my mother. Purnima was three years old when she started talking about her past life, but what's unusual is that now age 12, she still has the same memories. I was a man before, my real name is Jinnadasa. I was called Jinnasena, but they called me Jinnadasa. I had a sister and younger brothers. What I did in those days was to manufacture incense sticks and then distribute them to shops. We had vehicles, but mostly I went on push bike. I spent a lot of time traveling from place to place. As a small child, Purnima could describe not just the way she used to make incense, but the names of the brands she sold, Ambika and Getapicha. Her parents were baffled. In Kalania, Angoda, 140 miles away, lived the Vijasiri family, who are incense makers. They are the only family in the country registered to make Ambika and Getapicha incense, the brands Purnima talked about. One member of this family, Jinnadasa, was killed in an accident four years before Purnima was born. When Purnima first described her past life memories, these families, separated by distance and class, had never met. Jinnadasa was my brother. He manufactured incense sticks for a living. We worked together before he had his accident. That day, Jinnadasa and I, we started together from Galvani Junction and separated at Welimpicha. We were on push bikes with our incense packed in boxes. Jinnadasa said he was going to Delkanda, so I sold my incense nearby. Then someone asked me, where is Jinnadasa? I got down to the Delkanda Junction and I had to cross the road. I got off my bike and tried to cross to the other side and I saw a bus coming. I didn't like the way it was heading towards me. But then the bus came right by and it knocked me down. When I opened my eyes, I was on to the bus. At about two in the afternoon, the police came and showed me a packet of incense and said that the person who was selling this had been run over by a bus. It was the Ngugoda police and they had a packet of Ambika incense. And then I realized what it meant. When she was very young, Purnima's memories were overwhelming. She had difficulty in separating her past life from her present one. Then when she was five, a new teacher came to work at her father's school. He lived in the area where she claimed to have lived before. Purnima's father is my head teacher. I work in his school in the week and go home to Kelania at weekends. I told him that I could make investigations. He didn't tell me to do it. I went home and mentioned this and my brother-in-law said that he didn't believe in rebirth. He suggested we investigate the matter together to see if there was any truth to the story. We made inquiries here first because Purnima had remembered praying at this famous temple in Kelania before. We asked if there was anyone near here who made incense sticks. I was told there was a village across the water over there where there were several families who made them. We managed to find the place and eventually discovered that someone who made incense sticks had died in a road accident. When the teacher Suman Asiri reported back with positive information, we spoke to Purnima about it and decided to go there. I realized it was true because Purnima had directed the driver straight to the house. After we got out, she led us there. I couldn't believe how strong her memories were. She talked about how we'd pass a pond and described the house exactly as being on a higher level than the road. Purnima was only five years old when she first met the family. She has kept in written contact over the years. All the family, including Jinadasa's wife and daughter, are convinced that this 12-year-old girl is his reincarnation. They said they were sure from the moment they first met. One day I was coming back across the paddy fields and a young girl was pointing at me and saying that I was her brother-in-law. I heard her saying it. She asked for her sister, my wife, who wasn't here. Then she asked where is she. She went right around the house looking for incense sticks that we used to sell. She asked for a particular packet of incense. The packet wasn't here when she came, but we made it at the time when Jinadasa was alive. She asked why have we changed the colours. She was looking for the vans. She was asking lots of questions. What are you doing? On the day of the trial over Jinadasa's death, we had to go to the police station first. Purnima was there too. She went up to Jinadasa's sister and sat on her lap and kissed her and called her my younger sister. The police were very confused and the magistrate said it was very unusual. She kissed me. She knew who I was. I was amazed. When a five-year-old is calling a grown woman her younger sister, it's a surprising thing. The Buddhists, that's the majority of the population, they believe in reincarnation. That certainly has an effect on the cases. I think here in Sri Lanka, when a child starts speaking about a previous life, I think then people here would listen more carefully than they would listen in Europe or in North America. In spite of that, there is an important additional factor in this case, and that is, after this family was identified and some of the statement found to fit, then additionally to that, it turned out that Purnima had very marked birthmarks on the left side of the chest. These birthmarks correspond to the fatal injuries of Jinadasa. We were able to trace the post-mortem report regarding the death of Jinadasa. He was run over by a bus, and his ribs on the left side were broken. They penetrated his lungs, and probably the greatest pain he felt was on the left side. But of course, birthmarks start to form in the embryo. They are not a matter of any cultural influence. When I was little, I'd never heard of rebirth or reincarnation. I was going on my own memory. When I went to see the family, I came to realise that rebirth was something real, something factual. I learned about it through my experience alone. Do you think these cases are suggestive of reincarnation? Someone said, in the night I believe in ghosts, but never during the day. I have no idea whether there's life after death. I have no idea whether God exists. I study the psychology of deception. I look at the psychology behind essentially things like magic tricks, for example, how it is that we manage to fool ourselves when we're watching a magician. When we go along to a magic show, we want to be fooled. We make certain assumptions. We allow ourselves to be fooled. When people investigate reincarnation, lots of investigators want the claims to be true. They're not impartial at all. They want to believe that people have lived before, and so they're prepared to make assumptions, prepared to look at the evidence in a certain way, and essentially, in my opinion, trip themselves up. We conducted an experiment which assessed the role of chance for evidence of reincarnation. And essentially, we wanted to come up with a situation which was very similar to what's happening in actual cases of alleged reincarnation. There you have children saying they have lived before. The families go away. They look at often several families who have unfortunately lost a child, and they find matches with one particular family. In our experiment, we went to four children and simply asked them to make up an imaginary person. What would he do? He'd like to go to his bedroom. He'd like to go to his bedroom, yeah. Is it a little boy or a little girl? Girl. She likes to clean up the house. Once we had the stories, we then needed to match them or try and match them against various actual deaths of children. Now, the way in which we did that was to look through the databases from national newspapers for child deaths of various types. What we found was that for one particular story, there were in fact an incredible number of matches. It was Molly that gave us the most interesting case. When we asked her to make up an imaginary person, she came up with a child called Katie. She said she was an only child, that she had red hair, blue eyes, that she was dressed in pink clothing that had a pattern on it and particularly had flowers on it. Lots of adventure. Go to the beach. That she was age three, she enjoyed going to the beach, but that she'd run away. In fact, run away from mummy. The monsters had come. I asked her what the monsters looked like and she said that they looked like me, that actually the monsters had bit her and actually killed her. Now, we came across an instance where unfortunately a child had been abducted and killed and there were very, very strong similarities between the two cases. For example, the child who'd been abducted was an only child. She had got red hair. She had got blue eyes. It's exactly as Molly had described her. On the day that she was abducted, she was dressed in pink. She had got patterned clothing on and particularly she was wearing a T-shirt with a flower on it. She was age three. She lived very close to the beach. She did run away on her own and that's when a captor came along, took her away and unfortunately killed her and, you know, he does look rather a lot like me. Let's imagine that Molly had turned around and said, no, I've lived before and that Katie was my previous life. We would be looking at probably the best reincarnation case of the century. This essentially is strong evidence. Unfortunately, it's evidence against reincarnation. People should realise that Charles does actually explain quite a lot of what's going on in the quotes, genuine reincarnation cases. Scientific evidence of reincarnation is obviously hard to prove. Coincidence and religious belief may account for children like Purnima, but can it really explain the increasing number of children with past life memories now coming forward in the West? But for those around them, it offers reassurance. Perhaps in the West, the belief in reincarnation is a powerful way of coming to terms with things we cannot control. Death is real. You can't euphemise it. You can't talk about it as falling asleep or passing away or whatever. A person who is dead is actually dead. We are not, on the whole, used to death. It's done in places like hospitals or hospices. Death and endings is something that none of us can ever make sense of completely. Reincarnation at one level holds the living and the dead together. It says there is a link between the living and the dead. We've given up the formal Christian belief system, which historically was used to make some sort of sense of death. But it is a question of how we develop, if you like, a language and a set of symbols that help us cope with mysteries and realities like death. 25% of people in Britain, nominally a Christian country, now believe in reincarnation, although mainstream religions reject it. Religious beliefs are becoming a matter of personal choice, so we pick and choose ideas which bring us comfort. There's solace in the belief that a life will be constantly recycled. There's a case in Britain of a woman who's had past life memories since childhood and has been accepted by a family as the reincarnation of their late mother. In this they find great comfort. Well, we've been Roman Catholics. We do not believe in reincarnation. That's what we were taught. And when Jenny said that she was the reincarnation of her mother, well, I felt a bit dubious about it. But it's very hard to explain. To me there's no way that Jenny could make that up, because, as she told me, something that nobody else remembers, only me. Sonny Sutton grew up in a town called Malahide in Southern Ireland. He's the eldest of eight children. His mother died when he was 13 years old, but a few years ago a woman called Jenny Cockell contacted him, claiming to be his mother, Mary. Mary was, to me, who I was, who I had been. I had very personal memories of bringing up those children. When I was a small child, she was still a part of me. Jenny began to tell me about the nightmares and why she often woke up crying and that that was because she had nightmares about being an adult, dying. I just felt awful. This was beyond my experience. This was my daughter. I could do nothing to help her, nothing to ease her pain, nothing to make her feel better, except be there when she wanted to talk and just wait to see what developed. Jenny dreamt that she died in a hospital room, leaving her eight children alone and vulnerable. Sonny's mother, Mary, had died in a hospital in Dublin, and after her death, his seven brothers and sisters were split up and sent away to orphanages. He didn't see them again for many years. I grew up with this sense of having deserted my children. I'd let them down. I knew that if I possibly could find them, I would. Ever since Jenny first talked about her memories of Mary when she was four years old, she held on to them all through her childhood into her adulthood, until she was able to investigate them herself. She visited the town of Malahide which she could draw from memory when she was a child and found the ruins of the cottage where she lived as Mary. She relied on local records of the area to track down the surname of the family and then traced each of the children, one by one. I was standing at the window this day and this car pulled up outside and this person got out. And I said to Ivy, I said, there's a person getting out of the car, Sonny, she looks very much like my mother. Nice seeing you. Jenny has that soft, gentle voice to say anything, doesn't she? I don't like the jacket. Don't you? No, because it's the same as mine. Is it? She started telling me of dreams and memories and I said to myself, my God, how can she know all this? I could remember standing on a jetty and it was dusk and I was waiting for a boat and sometimes I've had that as a memory and sometimes it would come back as a dream but it was one of those ones, it left me with a question. Who was I waiting for? Who was on the boat? My mother used to come down to meet me and she'd sit on the stone steps opposite the jetty waiting for the boat to come in. Do you understand? To meet me. Is this your mummy? Within half an hour or so we were exchanging our halves of memories. I would give him half of an incident and he'd finish it off. I was so happy for her that after all these years of agonising about everything and being so concerned about the children and unable to do anything or find out anything to finally find that they were all right, they'd all had good lives that what had happened to them being sent to orphanage hasn't destroyed them as people I was just so happy for her. The way I looked at it was when my mum died I said to myself, that's my life is gone. Without her, what am I going to do? I love my mother and I lost my mother and Jenny's come into my life now. She's a great substitute for my mother. My eldest son was killed in 1986 and his daughter was killed last year but it does make it a little bit easier being convinced that there's continuation. I'm sorry about this. Not easier enough, obviously. Christians say the soul doesn't die and it obviously doesn't. It goes from person to person which is something I couldn't have believed myself thinking at one time but has now become blazingly obvious. Most religious or spiritual beliefs bring comfort and meaning to our lives. Just because people want to believe in reincarnation doesn't mean it isn't true. There are thousands of children who persistently describe memories of events that seem beyond their understanding and experience. While scientists and investigators have observed this phenomenon they have yet to explain why these children talk about their past lives. They remain an enigma. She suddenly turned around and said when I was a baby my mummy fell down the stairs with me and I went into the fire and I died but then I came alive again in my mummy. I've never known another child to say things like that and I've been teaching for 12 years now. When she started she whittled on but the more that it goes on even her brothers say to her give it a rest Ella keep an eye on your brother and your mum she's always got this other mummy and daddy. She has obviously got a good imagination and she's full of it but I do think there is something there I don't quite know why or how. There are people out there starving not only in Africa and places like that but in where you're actually living now. And when you skip a meal you kind of get like this sore feeling like sometimes you just feel ooooh like it's like a really bitey feeling like something is biting you and it's like oh I wish there was something there to eat but there is nothing there so you just have to kind of like relax and like watch telly.