Imagine having a chat with your little brother or sister, and they suddenly start talking about a time when they lived before. Sounds spooky, right? That’s exactly what happened to a man named Dan. His young son began describing a past life, including the day he died in a driveway accident. The boy calmly explained that his ‘old dad’ accidentally ran him over with a car. This left Dan feeling both amazed and a bit creeped out.
Reincarnation is the belief that after we die, our soul can be reborn into a new body. This idea is common in many cultures and religions, especially in Hinduism and Buddhism. Some people believe in reincarnation because it gives them comfort about life and death. There are even stories of people, especially children, who claim to remember their past lives.
There are many stories from around the world about kids who seem to remember details from past lives. These children often talk about places they’ve never visited or describe events they couldn’t possibly know about. Sometimes, their stories match real-life events or people who have passed away.
One of the most intriguing stories is about a three-year-old boy who might have solved the mystery of his own past life’s death. A woman named Jodie shared how her son, at just eighteen months old, began talking about a previous life. He mentioned missing his other family and described an accident involving a motorbike and a dog, which supposedly led to his death. This little boy even had a strong dislike for dogs and often muttered about a ‘stupid sandwich,’ linking back to his past life’s story.
Many people have shared similar stories online. For example, a Reddit user talked about their nephew who remembered living near red rocks in Arizona with a different family. He described being lost in the desert and encountering animals that sounded like coyotes. These stories are often dismissed as children’s imagination, but sometimes the details are eerily accurate.
There are cases where children’s memories seem to connect with real people. One family named their son after a Marine who had died. While driving past a military base, the young boy pointed out that he was ‘buried over there,’ even though he had never been to the area before. This left the parents wondering if their son was somehow connected to the Marine’s past life.
Another story involves a boy named James who had nightmares about being a pilot in World War II. He knew details about planes that he shouldn’t have known at his age. His parents discovered that there was a pilot named James Huston who died in a similar way during the war. This made them believe their son might be the reincarnation of the fallen pilot.
While these stories are fascinating, it’s important to remember that not everyone believes in reincarnation. Some think these tales are just coincidences or the result of children’s vivid imaginations. However, they do make us wonder about the mysteries of life and what might happen after we die.
Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, these stories of kids remembering past lives are certainly intriguing. They remind us of the vastness of human experience and the many things we still don’t fully understand about our own existence.
Imagine you have a past life story to share. Gather in a circle with your classmates and take turns creating a short story about a past life experience. Use your imagination to describe who you were, where you lived, and an interesting event from that life. This will help you explore the concept of reincarnation creatively.
Choose a culture or religion that believes in reincarnation, such as Hinduism or Buddhism. Research their beliefs and practices related to reincarnation. Prepare a short presentation to share with the class, highlighting key aspects of how reincarnation is viewed in that culture.
Create a “memory map” of a fictional past life. Draw a map that includes important locations, events, and people from your imagined past life. Use this activity to think about how memories might be connected to specific places and experiences.
Split into two groups and hold a debate on whether stories of children remembering past lives are real or just imaginative tales. Use evidence from the article and additional research to support your arguments. This will help you develop critical thinking and public speaking skills.
Write a short story from the perspective of a child who remembers a past life. Describe a day in their life, focusing on how their past life memories affect their current experiences. This activity will help you practice narrative writing and empathy by imagining life from another person’s perspective.
Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:
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You’re having a conversation with your young son, who’s only three years old. Then, he mentions something that makes you feel uneasy: he starts talking about the day he died. That’s exactly what happened to a man named Dan, whose son seemed to recall, in intricate detail, someone else’s final moments. When Dan asked his son to tell him more, the boy described parts of a completely different house: a green kitchen, a large backyard, and the driveway—the place where the child claimed he had died. Dan pressed the matter further, and that’s when his son told him, with an eerie sense of calm, that the driveway was where his ‘old dad’ had run him over with the family car. “It was an accident though, Dad, so it’s okay,” the young boy told his father, delivering one of the creepiest sentences that Dan had ever heard his child say.
But the tale recounted by Dan’s son is hardly the only example of this strange phenomenon. Across the world, there are numerous cultures that believe in the idea of reincarnation, particularly within Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Many non-religious people also share a belief in reincarnation, mostly as a means to bring themselves comfort when faced with the inevitability of death. Some even claim to have concrete evidence of their past lives.
It can be easy to brush off many of these stories or people’s recounting of dreams they believe are linked to who they were before reincarnation. But it’s another, far creepier story when children seem to harbor knowledge of their supposed past lives. Some have recalled details that they couldn’t possibly be aware of at such a young age, with a few even sharing memories of places they’ve never been to before. In rare instances, the details of these children’s stories align with the deaths of real people.
We’ve scoured the internet for some unsettling stories of kids who can seemingly remember their past lives, heading towards one we think might be the scariest of all: a three-year-old boy who may have solved the murder of his own past self! Take the son of a woman named Jodie, who was having recollections of a supposed past life at only eighteen months old. According to Jodie, her child developed speech surprisingly early, since most babies only speak their first words after the first ten to fifteen months of life. Jodie described how her child said he missed his other mother and his older brother but seemed to also be aware that he couldn’t see them. They wouldn’t know it was him, the boy had said; he was too young. When Jodie asked her son why, he described getting on a motorbike and heading out to buy a sandwich. According to the child’s story, in this supposed past life, he hit a dog while riding the motorcycle, causing him to crash and die as a result. The child reportedly loathed dogs and would even mutter the phrase ‘stupid sandwich’ under his breath a lot.
All across the internet, thousands of people have shared stories of unsettling things their children have said or about children they know telling them details of the lives they used to live. Of course, as with many things, just because someone on the internet says something happened doesn’t make it true. We’re omitting details like the full names of children or their families to respect their privacy, but we’ll leave it up to you to decide whether these are legitimate tales of reincarnation or just examples of kids saying silly things that coincidentally and creepily line up with the real world.
One Reddit user described a similar story about their nephew, who seemed to harbor eerie and vivid memories of his previous life and family. One day while babysitting the boy, who was around three or four at the time, the user recalls their nephew pointing to a refrigerator magnet that displayed a picture of rock formations in the Arizona desert. The nephew asked where the place on the magnet was, and the user told him. At this point, the child described that he had lived near red rocks similar to those in the picture, with his ‘first family.’ The user’s nephew then went on to describe in detail the family from their past life. According to the boy, his relatives had all had straight dark hair, and he’d had a mother, father, and a brother. That was until he had wandered too far into the desert one day, at a time too close to when it got dark. The child’s tale concluded with a description of how they died, saying that they’d been eaten by animals that were ‘not dogs, not wolves, but smaller.’ While they’re not typically known to be a threat to humans, Arizona just so happens to be home to coyotes, which are smaller than both wolves and dogs.
Many of these children’s supposed recollections are dismissed as purely being fantasy, nothing more than an overactive imagination or a child repeating something they’ve heard an adult talk about, seen on TV, or perhaps even experienced in a dream. They might claim to remember another family or a different set of parents, a home that isn’t the one they currently live in, or even the circumstances of how a past version of them supposedly ‘died.’ But sometimes, there are instances when a child’s statements line up accurately with the life of a deceased person. Such was the case with one couple, whose eldest son was named after a Marine that the husband had served alongside. One day, on a drive towards the husband’s sister’s house, the couple and their son passed a military base. This just so happened to be the place where the Marine their son was named after had been buried after he was killed in action during deployment. At the time, the couple’s son was no older than three, and the family hadn’t taken him to the grave of the Marine he’d been named after. They had never even taken him anywhere near the area where the base was located. But right as they were driving past the site where this soldier had been buried, the couple’s son casually pointed out: “I’m buried over there.”
This is far from the only story of a child recalling a past life of military service. When her son was only four years old, Patricia noticed that the boy, Edward, had developed a phobia of rainy, overcast days. Hardly something unique to him, of course, as the sound of rain or thunder can often startle small children. But that doesn’t explain why, during a heavy thunderstorm, this one user reportedly started asking: “When do the bombs drop? Are they gone yet?” Unbeknownst to this user, their grandfather used to alert the city of incoming air raids during wartime. He’d died three days before the user was born, and at the time, they were unaware of their grandfather or either World Wars.
But back to Edward’s case, things started to become strange after he’d developed his own hang-ups about rainy days. The boy reportedly began to experience severe pain in his throat and complained to his mother whenever he felt it hurting. Specifically, he told her that it was his ‘shot’ that hurt. Naturally, Edward was taken to a doctor to try and determine a cause for the pain he was experiencing. However, unable to determine the exact cause, doctors decided it would be best to remove the boy’s tonsils as a precaution. After this happened, Edward developed a new problem: a cyst formed in his throat. Normally, this too would be drained and removed surgically, but doctors found that the cyst wasn’t reacting to usual treatment, leaving them baffled as to what to do.
It was then that Patricia asked her son what he had meant when he said his ‘shot was hurting.’ To her amazement, he started to give a detailed story about wading through mud on a rainy day, describing in frighteningly accurate detail the trenches of the First World War. It was then that Edward told her that, on the battlefield, he had been killed by a gunshot wound to the throat. The story gets even stranger as, after Edward had explained all this to his parents, opening up about his past life and describing how he’d supposedly died, the cyst that had formed in his throat seemed to disappear. While not impossible for a cyst to clear on its own without any treatment, this can take months or even years. The doctors were unable to provide a concrete explanation for exactly why Edward’s had seemingly vanished or how it seemed to line up with the story of his apparent death in the trenches.
Something similar happened in 2014 when a young boy made some statements that startled both his parents to the extent that they believed he might even be possessed by a ghost or some kind of entity. It all started when Andrew, at the age of only four, began to experience fits of inconsolable crying. Now, it’s true that something like that tends to come with the territory when you decide to have children, but what isn’t so typical are the unnerving things Andrew was telling his parents when they tried to console him. Upon asking their son exactly what was wrong, his mother recalls him responding tearily with: “Why did you let me die in that fire?” Hearing such an unsettling question coming out of her son’s mouth had Andrew’s mother convinced that there was a spirit dwelling within the boy. Of course, it could have just been the result of a bad dream or even Andrew play-acting. This excuse was thrown out when he mentioned living at a specific address: 860 Main Street in Sumter, Georgia. That was over 840 miles away from where the family lived in Virginia Beach.
From there, with her son recalling things that a child his age had no way of knowing, Michele started researching. She tried piecing together the vague details Andrew was giving but couldn’t find anything concrete. Michele did, however, manage to reach out to a reality TV show titled “Ghost Inside My Child,” which focused on kids who had allegedly been experiencing memories of their past lives. There’s been a little debate as to whether the producers of the show came up with the eventual story that supposedly linked to Andrew’s past life or if Michele reached that conclusion without the help of the show. Regardless, everyone seemed convinced that they’d found a match for the things Andrew had been saying.
In October of 1983, there was a bombing attack in Beirut, Lebanon, one that claimed the lives of multiple US Marines. Among them was Sergeant Val Lewis. Apparently, when shown photographs of six different Marines who had died in the bombing, all from Georgia, Andrew felt a strong connection to Val’s picture. According to producers working on the show, Andrew kept going back to the picture of Val Lewis even after the cameras had stopped rolling. When prompted, he even referred to the photos of the other Marines as his friends. Some have called into question the legitimacy of Andrew’s story, given that in the show itself he parrots back a lot of the same phrases his mother uses, possibly feeling uneasy with the cameras on him. Naturally, the producers of “Ghost Inside My Child” were primarily concerned with making a show for TV, and there are plenty of non-scientific ghost-hunting shows that rely on lackluster investigations and debunked, pseudoscientific methods to reach a hasty but definitive conclusion without any loose ends. Still, Andrew’s parents took their son’s word as confirmation that the source of his apparent past life memories was indeed Sergeant Lewis. The family took Andrew to visit Val Lewis’ grave in Georgia, hoping it would provide the young boy with some closure over his supposed past life experiences. Andrew laid flowers at the gravesite and even remarked that another grave, belonging to another Marine, was his friend. However, there are still critics who remain skeptical, pointing out that the show could have done a better job at determining the source of Andrew’s worrying memories rather than jumping to the conclusion that it was Sergeant Val Lewis.
Still, Andrew’s story isn’t the only time a little boy was widely believed to have been the reincarnation of a deceased member of the military. In fact, people were so convinced by the next story that even the surviving friends of the dead pilot believed that six-year-old James was their fallen comrade reincarnated. From an early age, according to James’ parents, Andrea and Bruce, their son loved nothing more than playing with toy airplanes. However, once he reached two years old, these were the very things that seemed to plague the boy with regular nightmares. He would wake up screaming, and Andrea even recalled the way he described the dreams he was having: “Airplane crash, plane on fire, little man can’t get out.” According to Andrea, her mother was the first to suggest the possibility that these could be memories of James’ past life. However, his parents were quick to dismiss the idea until even more strange details started to present themselves.
In one instance, James started going over one of his toy planes as if he was doing a pre-flight check. His knowledge of planes seemed to be way too advanced for a young boy. This surprised his mother when she bought him a new plane with an object that she thought was a bomb on the underside of the toy. Without missing a beat, Andrea’s son corrected her, telling her it wasn’t a bomb, but a drop tank. Similarly, while watching a History Channel documentary, a narrator referred to a Japanese plane as a ‘Zero’; only for James to insist it was called a ‘Tony,’ the Allied nickname for the plane. In both instances, James was right, even though his parents had never heard these terms before, and there seemed to be no way that James should know details like these. He had only watched children’s shows, and neither of his parents had been watching anything relating to military history that contained the details he was referring to.
Then, his nightmares started to get more intense. Multiple times a week, the boy would be troubled by violent dreams about a plane crash and being shot down by a plane with a red sun on it—a Japanese plane. He began to talk more about it when he was awake. From what he described, it sounded a lot like he’d been a pilot in his previous life. According to his story, his past self had also been named James, who had flown off a ship named the Natoma. The story got much creepier when James’ parents looked further into what their son had said. Andrea and Bruce discovered that there was, in fact, an aircraft carrier used by the US Navy during World War Two called the USS Natoma Bay, and among their squadron was a twenty-one-year-old fighter pilot from Pennsylvania named James Huston, who was killed in action after being shot down by Japanese artillery in Iwo Jima over the Pacific Ocean. That was over 50 years before young James was even born.
That might seem pretty conclusive, but not everyone was completely convinced. Desperate to help rid her son of his perpetual nightmares, Andrea contacted a therapist who believed in the possibility of reincarnation, Carol Bowman. She told Andrea not to dismiss the worrying things that James was saying, but to instead reassure him that these things had happened during another life and in another body, and that his parents should remind their son that he was safe now. To his credit, this advice seemed to work, and James’ nightmares diminished soon after. It’s also worth mentioning that the death of James Huston would have been forgotten in history had it not been brought up again by being connected to James’ nightmares, whether he truly was the reincarnated pilot or not.
But skepticism abounds when it comes to these supposed tales of reincarnation. For one, research into cases like James’ generally begins after families have already accepted that their child is genuinely a reincarnated person. Plus, it’s worth noting that while they might not have watched many Second World War documentaries, James’ family had taken him to a flight museum at eighteen months old, which began his fascination with planes, particularly those from the World War Two era. It’s entirely possible that the specific details he was able to recall had been subconsciously implanted when he was much younger. A lot of what children say is often ambiguous, leaving it open to interpretation, and even James’ own father wasn’t without his own sense of disbelief. But he considered the information given by his son to be so striking and unusual that it all but confirmed the idea that he had, in fact, been US Navy pilot James Huston in his previous life.
Details of past lives and nightmares certainly have a link in more than just Andrew’s story. One online user’s father experienced many sleepless nights after they made a creepy statement. While watching a war documentary, the user— a child at the time— reacted strangely to the mention of a tube: “You mean the tube from when I was a grown-up?” When the father asked for a further explanation, he was left wishing he hadn’t. The child described being placed in a tube with another person and given a knife. Both were tasked to kill each other, but the supposed past self of the story was stabbed in the chest—a detail that apparently still keeps this user’s dad awake at night.
That’s unsettling enough, but another dream described by a Redditor detailing their past life might be much more harrowing. They explain that, as a young child, they had always used the wrong words for ‘stop’ and ‘come back.’ When their parents eventually asked them about it, the child described a recurring dream they’d experienced. In this dream, they were a man in his late twenties, with a female partner who stood in a long line on a road curving around the edge of a hill. They also distinctly remembered being worried about papers, and that there were men in uniforms checking these important documents. As the uniformed men came towards the man that this child seemed to remember being, they heard a gunshot. Grabbing the hand of their partner, they remembered turning to run down the hill, distinctly aware they needed to get to a nearby river to escape from dogs that were pursuing them. The men in uniforms were also yelling as they gained on the escaping couple, using the same words the child had used for ‘stop’ and ‘come back.’ Their dream ended with the man being shot in the back, before everything suddenly went white. Even as a child, they recalled an overwhelming feeling that everything would be better now. The online user recalls their parents asking around about the words they had been using in place of ‘stop’ and ‘come back’; as it turned out, they were using Czech phrases.
Much like Andrew’s story from earlier, we uncovered another reincarnation tale on Reddit that was surprisingly spurred on by a Navy vehicle. According to the user, they had been watching their friend’s son when a large Navy aircraft carrier caught the child’s attention. The boy stared at it with a vacant, faraway expression before saying that he remembered when his boat had sunk… and that there had been so many sharks. When the user later mentioned the incident to the boy’s mother, she simply replied by casually stating: “Yeah, he does that sometimes.”
Hearing a child claim to have died in war or been eaten by sharks is frightening enough, but another user reportedly received an ominous statement from her five-year-old daughter… one that linked to a real personal tragedy. According to the user, one day, out of the blue, her five-year-old told her: “I was in your belly twice, Mama. The first time I died before I came out… but I came back.” The user
Psychology – The scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context. – In psychology class, we learned about how emotions can influence our decisions.
Reincarnation – The religious or philosophical concept that the soul or spirit, after biological death, begins a new life in a new body. – Some religions teach the belief in reincarnation, where people are reborn into new lives after they die.
Memories – The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information. – Our family loves sharing memories of our vacations during dinner time.
Children – Young human beings below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority. – The children were fascinated by the stories of ancient myths and legends.
Stories – An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. – The teacher read stories from different cultures to help us understand diverse traditions.
Life – The existence of an individual human being or animal. – Life is full of challenges and opportunities that help us grow and learn.
Death – The end of the life of a person or organism. – Many cultures have different rituals and beliefs about what happens after death.
Imagination – The ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful. – Using her imagination, she wrote a story about a world where animals could talk.
Beliefs – An acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof. – His beliefs about kindness and helping others were inspired by his family’s values.
Experiences – Practical contact with and observation of facts or events. – Traveling to new places gives us experiences that teach us about different cultures.