*Names of boys and their family members were changed to protect privacy.

“When I was your age, I changed your diaper,” said the dark-haired boy to his father. Ron looked down at his smiling son, who had not yet turned two. He thought it was a very strange thing to say, but he figured he had misheard him.

But as baby Sam made similar remarks over the next few months, Ron and his wife, Cathy, gradually pieced together an odd story: Sam believed that he was his deceased grandfather, Ron’s late father, who had returned to his family.


More intrigued than alarmed, Ron and Cathy asked Sam, “How did you come back?”

“I just went whoosh and came out the portal,” he responded.

Although Sam was a precocious child — he’d been speaking in full sentences from the age of 18 months — his parents were stunned to hear him use a word like portal, and they encouraged him to say more. They asked Sam if he’d had any siblings, and he replied that he’d had a sister who “turned into a fish.”

“Who turned her into a fish?”

“Some bad guys. She died.”

Eerily enough, Sam’s grandfather had a sister who had been murdered 60 years earlier; her body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. Ron and Cathy then gently asked Sam, “Do you know how you died?”

Sam jerked back and slapped the top of his head as if in pain. One year before Sam was born, his grandfather had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

IS REINCARNATION REAL?

Today 24 percent of Americans — or more than 75 million people — across all religions believe in reincarnation, according to a Pew Forum on ?Religion & Public Life poll; a separate survey reports that roughly one in ten people can recall his or her own past life.

In October, the Dr. Oz Show covered the “reality of reincarnation,” and two reality-TV series on the topic are currently airing (LMN’s Ghost ?Inside My Child, about children with past-life memories, and Reincarnated: Past Lives, in which people go under hypnosis to discover their earlier ?existences).

Why this fascination? Part of reincarnation’s appeal has to do with its hopeful underlying promise: that we can do better in our next lives. “With reincarnation, there is always another opportunity,” explains Stafford Betty, a professor of religious studies at ?California State University, Bakersfield, and the author of The Afterlife Unveiled. “The universe takes on a merciful hue. It’s a great improvement over the doctrine of eternal hell.”

Yet despite the popular interest, few scientists give reincarnation much credence. They regard it as a field filled with charlatans, scams, and tall tales of having once been royalty.

Reincarnation is “an intriguing psychological phenomenon,” says Christopher C. French, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, who heads a unit that studies claims of paranormal experiences. “But I think it is far more likely that such apparent memories are, in fact, false memories rather than ?accurate memories of events that were experienced in a past life.”

For more than 45 years, a team at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA) has been collecting stories of people who can recall their past lives. And if the professors determine that there is some merit to these memories, their findings will call into question the idea that our humanity ends with our death.

“MOMMY, I’M SO HOMESICK”

Among the UVA case studies is the story of an Oklahoma boy named Ryan. A few years ago, the four-year-old woke up screaming at two in the morning. Over the preceding months, he’d been pleading with his bewildered mother, Cyndi, to take him to the house where he’d “lived before.” In tears, he’d beg her to return him to his glittering life in Hollywood —? complete with a big house, a pool, and fast cars — that was so fabulous, he once said, “I can’t live in these conditions. My last home was much better.”

When Cyndi went into her son’s room that night, Ryan kept repeating the same words — “Mommy, I’m so homesick”—as she tried to comfort him and rock him to sleep.

“He was like a little old man who couldn’t remember all the details of his life. He was so frustrated and ?sad,” Cyndi says.

The next morning, she went to the library, borrowed a pile of books about old Hollywood, and brought them home. With Ryan in her lap, Cyndi went through the volumes; she was hoping the pictures might soothe him. Instead, he became more and more excited as they looked at one particular book. When they came to a still of a scene from ?a 1932 movie called Night After Night, he stopped her.

“Mama,” he shouted, pointing to one of the actors, who wasn’t identified. “That guy’s me! The old me!”

“I was shocked,” Cyndi admits. “I never thought that we’d find the person he thought he was.” But she was equally relieved. “Ryan had talked about his other life and been so unhappy, and now we had something to go on.”

Although neither Cyndi nor her husband believed in reincarnation, she went back to the library the next day and checked out a book about children who possessed memories of their past lives. At the end of it was a note from the author, professor Jim Tucker, MD, saying that he wanted to hear from the parents of kids with similar stories. Cyndi sat down to write him a letter.

This article excerpt was reprinted with permission of Reader's Digest. Read the complete article with more fascinating accounts.