Prakash often insisted on being called Nirmal, and told his mother that she was not his mother. The family was not amused by their son's behavior, and began punishing him for it, sometimes corporally. Yet he continued to profess vivid memories of Nirmal and his relatives and friends. A few more years passed, and Prakash spoke less of this other life, and began to forget it.
When Prakash was ten, Nirmal's older brother, J. Jain, moved back to K.K. (he had been living some distance away) and heard tell of the boy in Chhatta who claimed to be Nirmal and who had identified J. Jain's father, by name, as his own. A few months later, the father, B. Jain, happened to be in Chhatta on business. Curious, he looked up Prakash, who immediately recognized him as "his father." A few days later, some other members of' the Jain family came by, including Nirmal's mother and older sister. At the sight of' the sister, whom he named correctly, Prakash wept with joy.
The Jains persuaded Prakash's parents to let the boy come visit again. On arrival in K.K., Prakash seemed to know the way to the house, and, entering it, he correctly recognized several relatives and friends of the Jams, as well as parts of the house where Nirmal had lived.
The Jain family accepted and embraced the idea that Prakash was Nirmal reborn. Prakash's folks were less enthused and did their best to discourage their child from visiting K.K. (including, once again, corporal punishment).
Dr. Stevenson began investigating the case in 1961, shortly after the boy's second visit to K.K. Prakash's family was somewhat paranoid, fearing that the Jains wished to adopt their son. However, at subsequent interviews a few years later, this concern had abated, and Dr. Stevenson was able to speak extensively with both families.
As with the studies of xenoglossy, the investigation focused on whether the information acquired by the four-year-old could have come from friends or family, or from a willful attempt at fraud. Stevenson met with both sets of parents and siblings, as well as some friends and neighbors and Prakash himself. Prakash's memories of being Nirmal Jain had faded considerably, but they returned when he was questioned about it or when he visited the town of K.K.
Members of' both families denied ever meeting or having knowledge of' the other. Being of different sub-castes, it was unlikely that they shared friends. The animosity of Prakash's parents, and the joy Stevenson witnessed on the boy's face when he was in the presence of the Jains, made an elaborate hoax unlikely.
Stevenson tabulated Prakash's remembrances, identifying the family member who provided the information, as well as the one who confirmed it, and added comments. There were thirtyfour items in all. Prakash knew the names of neighbors, including one who was alive when Nirmal lived but had since died. He knew that the family owned four shops, and that the shops sold shirts. He picked out Nirmal's older brother in a crowd of people in the Jain house. He identified the room where Nirmal slept and the one in which he died. He recognized the tax collector and the Jams' family physician. Stevenson does not believe all this knowledge was obtained "normally."
Roberta Has Two Mommies
Here's another example.10 Roberta Morgan was born in Minnesota in 1961. At the age of two and a half, she began to speak of a previous life, and of her "other mommy and daddy." Roberta did not supply another name for herself, but she seemed to have clear images of these other parents, and she often compared Mrs. Morgan to the other woman-and not always favorably.
Roberta's "previous family" lived on a farm not far away, and had horses and dogs. Once when the girl was four, she visited a horse farm and was unusually comfortable around the animals, walking up to the horses and petting them, adding that she had "been on horses lots of times." She requested toys like the ones she used to have. Sometimes she joined parental conversations, seeming versed in subjects that she shouldn't have known anything about.
One time, when the family was out driving, they passed a dirt road and Roberta asked them to turn, saying the farm was down that road. They ignored her. Her parents were Christian, and reincarnation was not part of their belief system. Soon, the girl's carryings-on got on Mrs. Morgan's nerves, and recollections of life on the farm brought spankings; the spontaneity ceased.
In 1971, Mrs. Morgan heard about the work of Ian Stevenson, and telephoned him. He met with her and interviewed her extensively. She supplied the above information (her daughter had by now completely forgotten it). After much consideration, Mrs. Morgan had had a change of' heart, and now regretted having stifled her daughter's memories. For reasons Stevenson never fully understood, Mrs. Morgan never did look for that dirt road again.
Susan and Her Sister
Another American case was that of a child in Idaho named Susan Eastland.' The Eastlands, also Christian, did not subscribe to reincarnation. At about two years of' age, Susan appeared to make references to her older sister, Winnie, who had been hit by a car and killed three years before Susan's birth. Susan repeatedly claimed that she was six years old (Winnie's age at death). Spotting a photograph of the sister, Susan announced that this was a picture of her. She knew certain aspects of the sister's routine, and some specific scenarios involving Winnie and who she was with at the time. She remembered (as Winnie) being kissed by a little boy in a bowling alley (the incident had annoyed the Eastlands). At two, according to Stevenson, Susan "could barely scrawl," but she wrote "winni" on the kitchen door with a crayon.
Charlotte Eastland, her mother, learned about Dr. Stevenson's line of research in a magazine and wrote him. After an exchange of letters, he visited her in Idaho in 1969, when Susan was five. Until then, she hadn't told her children (Susan and two older siblings) that she thought Susan might be Winnie reborn; but following the visit, she told the inquisitive children the reason for it. Charlotte continued to attend her church, but, in order to remain a congregant in good standing, kept her family's experiences concealed.
A Catalogue of Cases
Archived at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville are the details of over 2,500 cases like the ones above. About 1,400 were examined personally by Dr. Stevenson; the others by his colleagues. They were collected from around the globe, and they have certain similarities. Some of these are noted in a 1983 paper by Dr. Stevenson in The Journal of Nervous and Mental DL,eaoe: "American Children Who Claim to Remember Past Lives."
In this work, generalizations that can be made include the mean age at which a child begins making statements (thirtyseven months of age) and ceases to make them (six or seven years old). The children often manifest oddball personality traits that correspond to those of the deceased. There may be relevant phobias, such as a fear of the water in a person whose "previous personality" (Stevenson's term) had drowned. Or cross-dressing may be noted if the prior personality was of the other sex. The recalled lives tended to be those of ordinary, everyday people.
The main thrust of the paper was to compare American children's past-life remembrances with those of similar children in India. These are different cultures, with different beliefs. Gallup polls have the percentage of Americans believing in reincarnation at about 25 percent, while Hindus, particularly in northern India, largely accept person-to-person reincarnation. It is possible that a family's belief system could affect a child's enthusiasm for "coming forward."
When a child's pronouncements can be corroborated by finding records or family members of the person whom the child "remembers," the case is deemed "solved." When no such individual can be located, it is deemed "unsolved." One difference between the children from America and those from India is the percentage of solved cases. Among 266 cases from India, 77 percent were considered solved, whereas in the U.S. this figure was only 20 percent for the seventy-nine cases studied. In the examples above, that of Prakash/Nirmal and Susan/Winnie would be recorded as solved, while that of Roberta would go down as unsolved.
Other differences: Of the solved cases in the U.S., the child's persona usually corresponded to that of a deceased family member. In India, this was true only 16 percent of the time; most Indian cases involved an unr
elated person living anywhere from six to seventy miles away. Only about a third of the American kids knew the name of the person they claimed to be, whereas three-quarters of the Indian children named their alter-ego selves.
One troubling thing that both groups shared: The majority of the deaths that preceded the "reborn" child were violent. Indian children tended to identify how the demise occurred, while Americans did not (for cases within a family, these details would of course be available, as in the case of Susan Eastland). Phobias in the child, as I mentioned, seemed to correspond to the method of death.
In the paper, Stevenson discusses the possibilities of childhood fantasies or imaginary friends accounting for some of the data. Fantasy could be involved in some cases, but he notes that parents often do not warmly receive their children's previous life musings, so such a fantasy creates conflict rather than comfort. And imaginary playmates are living, not previously deceased.
Stevenson addresses the issue of another person's life details trickling into a family where they might have been subconsciously available to the child. He cites several cases from India where there was considerable mileage between the two involved families, and where a written record-later verifiable -was made of the child's comments before the two families had ever met. (In India, where reincarnation has acceptability, it is not uncommon for the two families related in this most unusual way to get together.)
Lastly, Stevenson wishes to alert psychiatrists and primary care physicians to the possibility that such a case could come to their attention. Neither the child nor the family need be considered psychotic; reporting of cases for further study may be warranted. Stevenson assumes that many cases go unreported or unrecognized.
Who Are These Children, Anyway?
I)r. Erlandur Haraldsson, now a professor emeritus in the faculty of'social science at the University of' Iceland, published a paper in 1995, "Personality and Abilities of'Children Claiming Previous-Life Memories," in "1'he Journal of Aerr,u., and Jleutal 1)i:sea.oe. He investigated, in detail, twenty-three new cases in Sri Lanka. The circumstances of these cases were quite similar to the ones Stevenson had evaluated.
Data collection may be different in Sri Lanka than it might be at, say, Harvard Medical School. Haraldsson, an interpreter, a Sri Lankan psychologist, and their rental-van driver paid unannounced calls to each subject at home or at school. (Most of the families had already been interviewed by a team member.) To compare these boys and girls with "normals," control children who were the same age were selected by teachers at school or from the neighborhood (if the visit was to the home), and they were given the same battery of psychological tests as the subjects.
Haraldsson's team expressed their appreciation, after the testing, with gifts of sweets and ballpoint pens to the children, and found all the families to be cooperative and helpful. Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) is predominantly Buddhist, and while this belief' system differs from that of the Hindu, it does allow y for rebirth.
So, how did the comparison turn out? Relative to a control sample, children claiming previous-life memories were actually smarter, had better memory skills, and were doing much better in school than their peers. They also tended to be more serious in their studies, clowning around less, and were perfectionists. Although a bit more argumentative and stubborn, they were not socially isolated. Their test scores did not show them to be particularly suggestible.
It is Haraldsson's impression that these children are sincerely convinced as to the reality of their alleged memories, and that simple deja vu (a common phenomenon that affects all age groups, is transient, and lacks coherency and detail) does not explain them.
Gory Details
As if the foregoing were not disquieting enough, there is another aspect of Stevenson's work that is, for lack of a more scientific term, creepy. Consider the case of Corliss Chotkin, Jr.,11 a Native American of Tlingit lineage in southeastern Alaska. The Tlingits have a belief in reincarnation that predates contact with European culture and persists to this day, although mostly in the elder generation.
The Tlingits' take on this is that most "returns" are intra- familial, may be foretold by the dying person, and can be verified by birthmarks. An elderly, dying Tlingit named Victor Vincent told a favorite niece, Irene Chotkin, that he would be reborn as her son. To press his point, and to make sure that Irene would recognize his arrival, he showed her two scarsone on his nose and one on his back-from past minor surgeries. The back scar had the signature look of a sewn-up wound: little stitch-hole scars straddling it.
Victor died in 1946. Irene gave birth to Corliss Jr. (named after his father) eighteen months later. Stevenson investigated the case during a series of visits in the early 1960s. He found the usual declamation by the toddler, in this case at thirteen months, that he was "Kahkody," Victor Vincent's tribal name. In later years, Corliss also recognized people whom Victor had known (people Corliss had never previously met). Corliss spoke about events in Victor's like about which he had no knowledge; he combed his hair and even stuttered just like the old man.
Then there were also the birthmarks. Corliss Jr. was born with two-in exactly the same spots where Victor Vincent had pointed them out on his own body. When Stevenson examined him, Corliss was already a teenager and had lost his stutter and his memories of being Kahkody, but the birthmark on the back was a thick line over an inch long, with dots on each side, surgicalsuture style.
Stevenson finds birthmarks or birth defects in over a third of' his cases. And these almost invariably correspond to wounds or existing marks on the previous personality. Thus, if the original person was shot in the abdomen and killed, the baby who will claim to be this victim may have a pair of birthmarks, one front, one back, as if in remembrance of the bullet's entrance and exit.
Susan Eastland had a birthmark (medically, a nevus) on her left hip. When Stevenson obtained a copy of Winnie Eastland's medical records, the point of impact of the car that struck and killed her was at this very spot.
Another piece of this bizarre puzzle has to do with dreams. The Eastlands' older daughter had a dream, six months after Winnie's death, that Winnie would return to the family. When Charlotte Eastland became pregnant two years later, the daughter again had such a dream. Now, dreams are often wish fulfillments, and one can see why a grieving sister might dream this way. [)reams often have a way of being remembered if something in them ultimately rings true, and forgotten when they seem irrelevant. Yet Stevenson finds a similar pattern -ofper- tinent dreams preceding the birth of a child who will claim to be someone else-often enough to consider this an occasional part of the package. As previously noted, we don't know why we bother to dream anyway....
Stevenson's "classical" case (he uses the term "fully developed case") contains five features: a prediction of rebirth, a dream, a birthmark or defect, statements by the child about the previous life, and associated unusual behavior. Of course, as is usually the situation in medicine, individual cases are rarely fully classical. Stevenson rarely finds all five items together. While the core features of cases are the same worldwide, some of the variations occur within cultures.
Reincarnation Around the World
For about forty years, beginning in 1960, Ian Stevenson traveled the world researching these unusual children. While all cultures harbor some, there are certain areas, usually where the people accept reincarnation, in which the cases are found more easily. These include northern India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, parts of Turkey, Lebanon (among the Druse), Syria, West Africa, and the Tlingits of Alaska. It is not surprising that cultures that subscribe to reincarnation produce more cases, as a child is more likely to be taken seriously in these venues. But Stevenson also finds cases in Europe and North America, where the belief is minimal, and notes frequent suppression of cases in areas where it's accepted, because of fear, jealousy, or inconvenience. For case-finding, Stevenson relies on associates and other people he's worked with (e.g., interpreters) in foreign countries, and on calls and letters fr
om Americans who've seen something about his work in the media. Basically, once he started researching cases, he had no trouble finding them.
Reincarnation-friendly societies vary in their beliefs and manifestations. The Tlingits feel that one can specify the family into which they will re-emerge. (This was true in the case presented above; Stevenson found this tidbit in ten of the forty-six Tlingit cases he studied.) Heraldic dreams are common in Myanmar, and occur before conception; they are also common among the Tlingits, but tend to occur in the last month of the pregnancy. Same-family returns constitute most of the solved cases in Myanmar, Thailand, Nigeria (among the Igbo), and the lower forty-eight U.S. states, but are rare in India and Sri Lanka. Opposite-sex redux varies from zero to 50 percent, by area (it's 15 percent in the U.S.).
Despite these variations, the essential features-the onset at about age three, the stubborn persistence of the child as to who he or she really is, the rapid and near-complete disappearance of the syndrome at about age seven-are fairly consistent globally. The time interval from death to reappearance varies, but the median is relatively short-about fifteen months. Reportage rates vary greatly, and the majority of cases likely go unreported. Still, this condition is rare. Most children, in fact, do not espouse a prior life. Those that do are aberrations, and some twist of nature is perhaps responsible.
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 15