The Boy Who Knew Too Much

by Cathy Byrd

  My next significant memory of my friend Patty was when I was six years old and my mother broke the news to me that Patty and her entire family had died in a tragic car accident. Both parents and all five children died instantly when their camper was hit by an oncoming truck on a winding mountain road. When I asked my mother the big question, “What happens when you die?” I could tell by her response that it wasn’t a topic she was comfortable talking about.

  This experience sparked my curiosity about God and the mystery of life—and death—and what happens after you die. During my elementary school years, I tagged along to churches, synagogues, and temples with just about anyone who was willing to take me—neighbors, friends, babysitters. Being exposed to different belief systems helped me to understand at an early age that all religions share the underlying teachings of love, compassion, forgiveness, faith in a higher power, and a common belief in the existence of a soul that outlives the body. These concepts are what I was thirsty for, and the packaging was less important.

  By the time I was in the fourth grade, I attended church every Sunday with my best friend and her family. At the age of 11, of my own volition, I read the entire Bible from cover to cover one summer. This is when I discovered a deep connection with God, a Divine presence who gives me answers when I pray and makes me feel that I am never alone.

  This relationship with God is what I’d hoped my own children would someday find. Attending church regularly seemed like the best way to provide Charlotte and Christian with a foundation for nurturing their own relationship with God. I wanted them to be equipped with answers to life’s big questions. The enigmatic questions that have puzzled human beings since the beginning of time such as, What is God? Is there life before and after death? Do our souls survive the death of our bodies? Will we be reunited with our loved ones after this lifetime?

  The accommodations at our church camp were no frills, with no Internet access or television, but we weren’t exactly roughing it because I had opted for a room at the lodge, rather than a tent in the woods with our fellow campers. This was about as primitive as I was willing to bear as the sole caretaker of two young kids in the wilderness. The breathtaking sights, sounds, and smells of nature were at our disposal, while we were also able to enjoy the luxury of a private bathroom and clean sheets. Each day began with a loud clanging bell signaling breakfast was about to be served at the main mess hall, immediately followed by an outdoor worship service overlooking the lake. Charlotte joined our church band on stage to play a bongo drum while we communed with God and our fellow parishioners in the wooded sanctuary. This idyllic, slow-paced environment, where the chirping birds replaced the buzz of cell phones, provided a welcome respite from the stimulation of our daily lives.

  However, the one thing that followed us wherever we went was Christian’s baseball obsession. Thankfully there were plenty of kids at the camp who offered to play baseball with him—morning, noon, and night.

  Every night before bed, Christian would entertain Charlotte and me with stories about his proclaimed life as a “tall baseball player.” I no longer corrected him by setting his tales in future tense, and I pretended to be a believer. It was as if the floodgates had opened and, whether real or imagined, Christian’s candid tales became more and more entertaining and rich with detail. He continued to express his disdain for Babe Ruth and told us what it felt like to play baseball in front of a big crowd. There was no hint of make-believe in his reflections about the past.

  “One time I hurt my knee when I was a tall baseball player,” Christian explained.

  “Did the doctor have to cut it open to fix it?” I inquired.

  “No, I just had to take a break.”

  On our final night at the camp, after singing songs by the campfire and gobbling up s’mores as quickly as we could make them, Christian said something else new, just before falling asleep.

  “Mommy . . . when I was a kid before, there was fire in my house.”

  “Your house was on fire?” I asked.

  He adamantly shook his head from side to side.

  “No! There was real fire—in the lights!”

  After a few more questions, it became clear that he was saying the lamps in his childhood home used fire for illumination. He was quite convincing when he insisted that they were not candles. From this time forward, I stopped judging and started listening—really listening—to what he had to say.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OLD SOULS

  “It’s so silly,” [Teddy] said. “All you do is get the heck

  out of your body when you die. My gosh, everybody’s

  done it thousands and thousands of times. Just

  because they don’t remember it doesn’t mean

  they haven’t done it. It’s silly.”

  J.D. SALINGER, “TEDDY”

  As our summer break came to a close, Michael’s consulting job with Lockheed Martin ended just as abruptly. Although losing the steady income was a financial setback, it was a blessing to have our entire family living under one roof again. Charlotte was looking forward to starting kindergarten, and I was excited at the prospect of Christian attending preschool three days per week so I would have a few mornings to devote to working, rather than playing baseball.

  On the eve of the first day of school, our son, who had never before expressed interest in television, spotted a baseball documentary on PBS as I was flipping through channels to find a children’s show for Charlotte. It was the first time that he had ever glanced in the direction of the television for more than a few seconds, so I immediately pressed the Record button on our DVR. As inconsequential as it may sound, this new development was a life-changing event. Despite my previous attempts to entice Christian to watch television so that I could get a break from his never-ending demands to play baseball, this was the first time a television show had ever captured his attention. It was an episode of the Ken Burns documentary miniseries Baseball, “The Ninth Inning,” a chronicle of Major League Baseball from 1970 to 1990, and from that moment onward, it became Christian’s beloved companion and my much needed babysitter for as long as it could hold his interest, sometimes up to an hour per day.

  Christian’s preschool teacher, Mrs. B, noticed after the first few days of school that Christian was very different from the other students she had taught over the years. Mrs. B was not overly concerned about his unique wardrobe fixation—he insisted on wearing a full baseball uniform to school every day—but she was worried about his detachment from his peers and his unwillingness to engage in typical developmental play. Rather than trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, she embraced Christian’s idiosyncrasies and managed to find creative ways to lure him into participating in group activities by tailoring them to his fascination with baseball. If an art project required painting pictures of animals, Mrs. B would encourage Christian to paint a baseball. She even made a special round carpet that looked like a baseball for him to sit on so that he would join his classmates for story time. Michael and I contemplated telling her about Christian’s claims of being a “tall baseball player” and asking her professional opinion on whether or not we should be worried, but decided against it out of fear that other families at the Christian-faith-based preschool would get wind of it and think that we were crazy.

  Then something happened that made us question our own sanity. One evening after school, I went to meet Michael at a party at the Mercedes-Benz dealership in Calabasas while Charlotte was at an art class nearby. The only thing Michael loves more than the game of tennis is luxury automobiles. Even though looking at fancy cars wasn’t my idea of entertainment, I agreed to join him. Christian was sound asleep in the car by the time he and I arrived at the underground parking lot of the three-story Mercedes-Benz dealership, so I carried him, half-asleep in my arms, to the elevator. When he saw the elevator doors open, he leapt out of my arms and raced to press the button, a habit he had developed from competing with his big sister.

  Glancing at the wal
ls and ceiling of the elevator, Christian remarked, “This elevator kind of looks like a hotel.”

  “Mmm-hmmmm.” I nodded.

  “When I was a tall baseball player—tall like Daddy—I used to stay in hotels almost every night.”

  I was startled, hearing this new bit of odd information, but I went along with his story to get more.

  “Did you fly on airplanes?”

  Christian replied in a matter-of-fact tone, “No, mostly trains.”

  Our conversation in that elevator is forever etched in my memory, as crystal clear and distinct as the moment he was born.

  Hearing these words come out of my three-year-old son’s mouth froze time for me, and my mind raced with confusion. How could he know that baseball players travel to games and stay in hotels? Where in the world did his comment about trains come from? I don’t recall any of this information being in the documentary he loved to watch. Christian had been to only three Major League Baseball games in his life, did not watch baseball games on television, and had never been on a train or expressed interest in playing with toy trains. This is the moment when I started to think that Christian’s colorful musings about his life as a baseball player in a former life might be grounded in reality.

  When the elevator door opened, I grabbed Christian’s hand and raced to find Michael. This time I wasn’t sure he’d be able to provide a sanity check. We found him sitting in the driver’s seat of a showroom Mercedes-Benz, sipping champagne and chatting with the sales manager. Christian hopped into the backseat of the car, and I told Michael about our strange conversation in the elevator. Michael was just as perplexed by Christian’s comments about hotels and trains as I was, and said out loud what I was thinking.

  “Wouldn’t it be weird if Babe Ruth traveled on trains?” Our conversation was interrupted by a scantily clad model offering champagne—a perfect excuse to drop the subject and try to forget about what had just happened in the elevator.

  Later that evening I went to my computer and Googled: did babe ruth travel on trains? I was bombarded by images of Babe Ruth and his Yankees teammates traveling on trains. I read that all professional baseball teams traveled by train during Babe Ruth’s era—from 1914 through 1935—and that it wasn’t until the mid-1940s that players were given the option of flying to their away games. I shared this new discovery with Michael, and together we searched for a rational explanation as to where Christian could have gotten this information. Ruling out the possibility of a lucky guess, we assumed he must have learned it from the Ken Burns baseball documentary he had been watching for the past couple of months.

  The following day Michael and I watched the entire episode of the Ken Burns miniseries from beginning to end, hoping to solve the mystery. But the film didn’t contain any references to baseball history prior to 1970. We decided to investigate other ways Christian may have come across the information. The only times he had ever been out of our care since being born were on the rare occasions when my mom would babysit, or while he was at preschool. After my mom and Mrs. B assured us that he hadn’t learned any baseball trivia under their watch, Michael and I were both convinced that there was no possible way that Christian could be getting this information from outside sources. Mrs. B advised us not to dismiss our son’s comments as fantasy.

  “Kids at this age are much closer to God,” she said. “Their hearts are pure love.”

  Before having children of my own, I often looked into the eyes of a young child and felt an old soul staring back at me. I frequently used the term “old soul” to describe children who appeared to have an unexplainable wisdom beyond their years. But now . . . having my own son tell me historically accurate things about a time long before he was born felt downright creepy. The leap from “old soul” to “reincarnation” was one that I was reluctant to take because it directly conflicted with my Christian beliefs. I had always been taught that the final destination of the soul after death is Heaven. Despite my internal battle of beliefs, I was determined to figure out what was going on with our son.

  My quest for answers led me to a woman named Carol Bowman, who wrote the book Children’s Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child. I came across her name when reading an old ABC News article from 2005 about her work with a young boy named James Leininger. This boy gave his parents extremely specific information about his previous life as a fighter pilot in World War II—so specific that his parents were able to identify the man as James Huston, Jr. Even James Huston’s 78-year-old sister believed James Leininger was the reincarnated soul of her deceased brother because the young boy revealed personal details about her family that nobody could have known. The story resonated with me because the little boy’s obsession with planes was similar to Christian’s obsession with baseball.

  James Leininger’s parents reported that by the age of two, their son’s every waking moment revolved around planes and war. They said it was mostly before bed when James was drowsy that he would reveal extraordinary details about his former life. This observation caught my attention because Christian’s statements about being a “tall baseball player” had always surfaced just as he was falling asleep or right after he woke up. According to therapist Carol Bowman, this was one of the common patterns among children who report past-life memories. After reading that Carol had worked with the Leininger family to help James overcome terrifying nightmares about dying in a plane crash, I immediately clicked over to her website to learn more.

  I was a little put off when I clicked on a tab on the home page that read, Past Life Regression Therapy. As I read the information, it became evident that Carol was advocating the use of hypnotherapy to access supposed past lives, something that was way out of my comfort zone.

  My next click was on a tab that read, Children’s Past Lives. This is where I found an overview of Carol Bowman’s 25 years of research on the topic of young children who recall past lives. Carol’s bio said her interest in the study of children’s past-life memories began when each of her own children expressed knowledge of having lived before. The website offered two options for parents who thought their child might be recalling a past life: the first was to join a public forum, and the second was to contact Carol directly. I ruled out the option of sharing our story with strangers and instead chose to send Carol Bowman a private e-mail, desperately hoping she would be able to shed some light on our situation. On a deeper level, I may have actually been seeking validation from Carol that we weren’t crazy for considering the possibility that Christian’s stories about the past were true.

  Carol’s response to my e-mail arrived in less than 24 hours, and I held on to every word as if I was back in college at UCLA, listening to one of my professors speak on a subject I knew nothing about. Carol stated in her e-mail that children who remember past lives frequently refer to a time when they were “big” or “tall,” just as Christian had. She said one of the most difficult aspects of children talking about these memories is the state of shock parents go into when they realize their child is indeed remembering a previous life.

  “If Christian says anything more,” she wrote, “just take a few deep breaths, and then keep the conversation going.”

  This feeling of shock she had described was something I could totally relate to because I had experienced it on more than one occasion over the past few months, and so had Michael.

  Carol went on to say, “Children’s past-life memories can manifest as unlearned talents, abilities, and knowledge—as exhibited by your son. Or sometimes children may show an obsession with WWII airplanes, toy soldiers, boats, playing a particular instrument, horses, or anything that connects to their former lives.”

  She found Christian’s story fascinating because his attraction to the sport of baseball was clearly not something that we had initiated, or that we had taught him.

  “Christian’s natural talent for baseball at such a young age is the most telling,” Carol concluded. “It is highly likely that he acquired these skills in a former l
ifetime as a baseball player.”

  Her words confirmed what I had been thinking and threw my mind into a tailspin. Carol suggested that we try to figure out who he had been by showing him photos of teams Babe Ruth had played with. She said it was important not to prompt him, and just show him photos and see if he recognized his former self.

  “Don’t worry about reading too much into it. I know this is new territory for you. Just be a careful observer and write down everything that Christian says about his previous lifetime. If he’s in the mood to talk about the past, it’s fine to encourage him by using open-ended questions, as I describe in my book. Don’t worry about planting suggestions because he can override any suggestions that aren’t accurate.”

  Carol encouraged me to do this sooner than later because there is a very small window of time when children talk about the past and these memories are accessible. She said that by the age of six, the specific memories generally tend to fade, although a child may continue to have the talents, interests, and other personality traits that have carried forward from the past. This was certainly new territory for me, but the signs were too big to ignore.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE GRUDGE

  “Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more

  painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that

  inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.”

  MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

  During the fall of 2011, Christian’s candid storytelling about his proclaimed life as a baseball player from another era had become an evening ritual as predictable as our bedtime prayers. With Charlotte and me as his captive audience, Christian vividly described his life as a “grown-up baseball player” during a time he referred to as the “olden days.” He told us that the Dodgers used to play in New York, which he never could have known, and further surprised me by saying, “We played our games during the day because there were no lights on the field in the olden days.”