Ian Stevenson, M.D.
Director, Division of Personality Studies
Department of Psychiatric Medicine
University of Virginia
"Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives"
January 16, 2002

Ian Stevenson: I am going to be talking about very young children because that is when these cases begin. Some of the interesting things that these young children say:

"When I was big, I . . ."

"You’re not my mother. I want to go to my real mother."

"This house is too small. My house is much bigger."

"Before I came to you, I lived near the sea."

Let me tell you briefly about one case to give you a feel for this. A child in Lebanon, about 18 months old, is picking up the phone and calling into it, "Lela, Lela, Lela." When she could speak more, she spoke about a previous life as a middle-aged married woman who had children, one of whom was called Lela. This deceased woman had died not long before our subject here was born. She actually happened to die in Richmond, Virginia where she had come to have cardiac surgery. The little girl, when I first met her, was about 6 or 7-years old, still speaking fluently about the previous life. She was still attached, not only to the children of the deceased woman, but also to the husband of the deceased woman whom she used to call three or four times a day to ask about his health. She showed immense jealousy when he seemed to show some interest in a neighbor who had been a friend of the deceased woman and ultimately married that person. At the age of about 25 she was still unmarried and still very attached to the husband of the deceased woman. This case illustrates not only the statements that these children make, but also the unusual behavior and the involvement with the other family. That is a point that I will be emphasizing repeatedly during my remarks.

It is a lesson for myself because when I first began studying these cases, I thought they would consist only of statements that the child made. All you would have to do was verify those and make sure that the child couldn’t have learned about the other person normally. But, there is much more to the cases than that as I subsequently discovered.

The components of the "complete" case of reincarnation type is as follows:

• Prediction by a dying or elderly person about parents and/or circumstance desired for the next incarnation
• Announcing dream
• Birthmarks or birth defects corresponding to physical textures, e.g. wounds, cross-dressing, play
• Statements by the subject about persons, places and events of the previous life
• Unusual behavior corresponding to behavior shown by the presumed previous personality or conjecturable for him/her, e.g. phobias, philias, aversions, cross-dressing, play

The behavior might include phobias and aversions such as the instrument, mode or sight of the death. Equally prominent are philias, especially for foods and intoxicants like alcohol and tobacco. Then there are disturbances in relationship between the child and the parent. The child wants to go to the other family often. One child, whose case I will mention in a little while, was so determined to go to the family where she claimed she belonged, that she actually fasted to the point of mal-nourishment and had to be admitted into the hospital. She went on a food strike.

Sometimes there are unusually strong relationships that correspond to the relationships between the deceased person and the person to whom the child is attracted or perhaps repelled. Some of the children show vengefulness and inclinations to crime related features of a previous life. Some play in childhood corresponds to vocation of the deceased person.

Where are the cases found most readily? Let me first clarify that we have almost no knowledge of the real incidence of these cases. So, what I am talking about here is where we can find the cases and what parts are reported. They are found most readily in Southeast Asia, especially in Shrilanka, Burma and the valley of India, West Africa, and Northwest North America among the tribes. But, they are also found in other countries, including Western Europe and North America. A book now is just about to go to press on the cases in Europe. These cases in Europe, to some extent, show features similar to those cases studied in Asia.

The principle instrument of investigation is the interview. But, they must be interviews with qualified people which means first-hand informants. We try to set aside second-hand informants who will often narrate something they heard or imagined themselves. We allow the informants to talk freely at first and then come in with questions about details. The interview ultimately becomes somewhat scheduled–we have a checklist of items that we want to cover about details. The recording of the interview is rarely done with tape recorders. Most often we make notes because the interpreter translates for us and handwritten notes enables us to record many details that might be missed in a tape recording. Printed and written documents have become of special importance in recent years when we have given more attention to the cases with birthmarks and birth defects. We have sought the autopsy reports and have been successful in some 65 or 70 cases in obtaining those. That consumes an immense amount of time–one has to drink cups of coffee with the bureaucrats who have access to the records. It is all very worthwhile because an autopsy report in black and white made before the child’s impression was born in most cases we find a close correspondence between the post-mortem report and the birth marks and birth defects.

More recently we have been concerned with psychological tests. These were first conducted by our colleague from Iceland, Dr. Harrelson, who did psychological testing in Shrilanka comparing the subjects with other children of the same age and general background. Dr. Tucker is now conducting this kind of program with American children.

The interviews are rather informal. We declare one area as a "witness box" and ask everyone else to remain sound (which they usually do). We tell them that if they have something to say, we would be glad to listen to them later.

Here is one picture of a man who had a prominent birthmark on his head. He remembers a previous life of a man who had been shot by communists and his body was thrown into a river.

Here is a woman in Burma who remembers a previous life as a Japanese soldier. She was loaded with Japanese-like traits when she was a child. She gradually became more "Burma-fied."

I want to say something about the alternative ways of analyzing the data. We can look at each individual case and consider alternative interpretations for them. We can also look at groups of cases–we have plenty of them now–so it is possible to make analyses of the cases within a country and then perform cross-cultural comparisons. What we found is that if you look at cases across all the cultures where we have worked, certain "universal" features stand out and other features seemed to be "culture bound."

This is a list of the principle interpretations of cases of the reincarnation type:

• Fraud
• Fantasy
• Crypronesia (source amnesia)
• Paramnesia (crediting subject with more knowledge about previous life than he really has)
• Genetic memory

If I were to coach a skeptic, I would tell him to focus on paramnesia–confusion and unconscious editing of the memories of the informants. If you could eliminate all of these false interpretations, you would get down to what we call paranormal processes:

• Extrasensory perception combined with development of a secondary personality
• Possession (imposition on the subject of memories of a discarnate person)
• Reincarnation

This is a summary of the ways in which we would appraise cases with regard to their strength. The seven statements must directly correspond to events in the life of only one diseased person, so that requires a fair amount of specificity in the names given. Then the two families concerned must have no previous knowledge of each other. And ideally, the subject’s statements should be recorded before they are verified. Unfortunately, too often, parents under pressure from the child or influenced by their own curiosity, try to find the other family if the child has given enough indication. They then carry out their own verifications before we reach the case. After all these years we still have only 35 cases in which the subject’s statements were recorded before they were verifiable. We accept a case if we get to it fairly soon, preferably a few weeks or months so it’s relevant.

These universal features occur in cases of the reincarnation type (factors found in every culture from which cases have been studied so far):

• Age of first speaking of previous life (two to five years)
• Age of discontinuance of spontaneous references to previous life (five to seven years)
• High frequency of violent death in concerned previous personalities
• High frequency of mention of mode of death in previous personality by subject of case

As examples of features that are not universal, I would mention, most importantly, sex change. Many cases of claimed sex changes in Burma and Thailand–even 26% of the Burmese claimed to have been a purpose of the opposite sex in a previous life whereas in Lebanon, it is unknown. I thought for years that it was also unknown in Turkey, but our colleague, Dr. Collins, told me about a case of sex change type in Turkey.

Now I want to come to the topic of birthmarks and birth defects. I’ll show you some examples, particularly of birthmarks. This is a photograph of a baker in South Central Turkey. We are still a little bit in touch with him. He remembered the previous life of a person shown on the next slide. This is a photograph of a notorious bandit, General Hayak (??), who in the 1930’s was highly successful in robbing highway travelers in that part of Turkey. He hid out in the woods and evaded the police for two to three years until, eventually his hiding place was betrayed. After a conventional shoot-out with the police, the police succeeded in setting fire to the house where he had sheltered. He decided that he would kill himself rather than be killed and possibly tortured by the police. So, he shot himself, putting the muzzle of the gun to his chin and then setting off the trigger with his toe. The subject was born with a birthmark–I thought he had only had one birthmark. I eventually met one of the policemen who had been at the shootout and it actually turned out that he had been the first person who kicked the door of the house open and gone in and seen the body. He described to me, with unnecessarily dramatic vividness, the bullet had gone through and lifted his skull right off the top of his head. I thought that this subject should have another birthmark. So, I went back to him and I asked him if he had another birthmark. He said that he did and showed me it on the top of his head.

One of my ambitions is to have this man taken out to a medical center and studied by a MRI to see whether there is a track of defective tissue along this line. I have not been able to do that, yet, partly because the urologist never replied to my letter.

The next slide shows a young boy from Thailand, if you remember the previous slide of the schoolteacher who had a sideline in gangster-ism and was shot as he was riding his bicycle to work. This boy had two impressive birthmarks, as the next slides show, on his head. The 2 birthmarks correspond to the wounds--enter and exit (large and irregular). I would also like to study him with a MRI. I did not have a medical record in this case.

This is a young girl in India. She is the one I mentioned before who went on a food strike and would not eat until she was taken to the town where she said that she had lived. They took her to another town and she got very angry about that and said that they were lying and to take her to the right town where she belonged. Eventually they did take her to the right town and verified her statements about having fallen from a height. Apparently a few children were playing together above an open area in the house where there was a stairway and a well and a very low railing. Apparently the two children, in teasing each other and jostling each other, were so in position that one of them toppled over this low railing and landed about three meters below on a hard concrete floor. She was taken to a hospital and I did obtain that hospital record that showed that she was bleeding from the right ear. She died a few hours later. I presume she had a fracture of the base of the skull. The birthmark on our subject was on the right parietal side of the head, corresponding pretty well to the site where the child landed on her head on the pavement below.

I have one last slide of a boy who had a birthmark on his chest. The birthmark was an area of decreased pigmentation–which is not uncommon among these cases. I got an autopsy report on this case and persuaded the pathologist, who helped me find the post-mortem report, to draw circles of the wounds in a shotgun killing. By the dispersion of the shotgun pellets, you can tell the distance of the gun from the victim.