History has been witness to people who were able to remember the lives that they lived in the past. And while reincarnation has always been the center trope for most of the religions on Earth, it has been considered to be a fringe element in the scientific world. Only recently has it started attracting more attention than it did previously. A few decades ago, it was Carl Sagan, the famous American astronomer, and philosopher, who claimed that there were three distinct claims in the field of parapsychology, which deserve serious study in his opinion. While there are no objective tools that can strictly point out verifiable cases of children who remember their past lives, there have been 10 separate verifiable, yet subjective cases that we should be looking at. 

The cases talked about below are from the repertoire of Jim Tucker, the world’s leading researcher on this topic, as well as other reputable doctors in the field. In 2008, he published a separate review of the cases that could indicate reincarnation in the journal Explore. 

10 Cases Of Children Who Remember Their Past Lives

1. Gone With The Wind

One of the most interesting cases handled by Tucker involved a young boy named Lee, who kept insisting that his middle name was actually Coe. He further mentioned that he used to reside in Hollywood, and his birthday was on June 26th, which was not the case. He remembered that he wrote movies, and when rattled off, he did react positively to the movie ‘Gone With The Wind.’ A quick Google survey would tell you that the screenplay for this movie was written by Sidney Coe Howard, who lived in Hollywood, had a daughter named Jennifer, and died at the age of 48- all of which Lee kept mentioning. 

2. Past Lessons

A man going through great business losses during the Second World War had flashes of his previous life, where he had ended up taking his life due to similar losses. This was Ruprecht Schultz, whose laundry business in Berlin, failed with the advent of the war. He then remembered his past life, where he had been in the business of timber, and recalled committing suicide by shooting himself on a festival day. He also seemed inordinately drawn to Wilhelmshaven, a port city in Germany, where he considered himself to be in the 1880s. Psychiatrist Dr. Stevenson then conducted research and found out that a businessman by the name of Helmut Kohler had indeed killed himself in 1887 during the festive Day of Repentance and Prayer in Wilhelmshaven. 

3. Past Life

Another case of children who remember their past lives came from Lebanon, where Dr. Haraldsson had traveled to research this weird incident. The boy, named Nazih Al-Danaf, started telling his parents details about his past, as soon as he could talk. When Dr. Haraldsson asked the boy to direct him to his previous home, the child took him all the way to Qaberchamoun, a small town that was located around 11 miles from his current home. There did indeed live a man by the name of Fuad Assad Khaddage, and his life did match the details that the boy mentioned, to the last detail. 

4. Hollywood Actor, Maybe (?)

A child named Ryan started mentioning his past life as that of an American actor and then went on to claim that it all ended with a heart attack. The memories of the child were further triggered by a book written about Hollywood. After seeing a picture from the 1932 movie ‘Night after Night’, he started mentioning that he was close friends with one of the cowboys in the movie, who was an actor in cigarette commercials as well. To put this in perspective, Gordon Nance was one of the actors in this movie, and he used to be a spokesman for Viceroy cigarettes. 

5. WWII Pilot

The famous parapsychologist Dr. Jim Tucker started investigating the case of James Leininger of Louisiana, who was around 2 years of age when he started having nightmares of plane crashes. When he could speak, the child said that his plane had been shot down by the Japanese and that his plane took off from the Natoma ship and he had a close friend named Jack Larson. The child further went on to mention that his name was James in his previous lifetime. As it turns out, there was indeed a pilot in the Second World War named James Huston Jr. whose life and death matched the details perfectly.

6. Beloved, and Murderer

This was the harrowing case of Semih Tutusmus, who was born in Sarkonak, Turkey. The moment he started talking, he said that his name was Selim Fesli. Interestingly, his mother herself had a dream when she was pregnant where she saw a man who had appeared as Selim Fesli and also had a bloody face. Local historians claimed that a man by that name had indeed been shot in a field in a neighboring village back in 1958. The man had been shot in the face, as well as the right ear- and Tutusmus was born with a deformed right ear.

7. Forensic Specialist

This case was investigated by Dr. Eli Lasch, who is probably best known for the medical work that he conducted in Gaza as part of the Israeli government operations. The case involved a 3-year-old boy who lived near the border of Israel and Syria. The boy used to talk about being killed with an axe in his earlier life. He then showed all of the village elders where his previous body had been buried, where the weapon for murder was buried, and furthermore, identified the killer himself. And as it would turn out, the details matched his words exactly.

8. Fire Chief To Civil War General?

Jeffrey Keene, Retired Assistant Fire Chief, felt quite overcome with strange physical and emotional sensations when he came around to visit the site of the Civil War Battle of Antietam as a simple tourist. When he was discussing these sensations later, a phrase jumped into his mind more often than the rest- ‘Not Yet’. This generated a keen interest within him, and he started flipping through the Civil War magazines, to find that General John B. Gordon had repeated ‘Not Yet’ when he was holding his troops back at the Battle of Antietam.

9. A Monk In Sri Lanka

When Duminda Bandara Ratnayake of Thundeniya, Sri Lanka, started talking about his past life as a monk when he was three years old, he naturally attracted a lot of attention. He stated that he was a senior monk at the Asgiriya Temple and that he had chest pain when he died. He also owned a red car, a favorite elephant, and a radio. Later, it was cross-checked that there was indeed one Ven. Mahanayaka Gunnepana, a deceased monk from the temple fit the descriptions. But there were certain discrepancies- he owned a gramophone rather than a radio.

10. Sam Taylor

One kid, that Dr. Tucker investigated, was born 18 months after his paternal grandfather had passed away. And when the kid was just 1.5 years old, he would look up at his father and tell him that he remembered changing his father’s diapers when his father was a baby. He then went on to talk about certain points of his grandfather’s life which proved that he could have been reincarnated as his own grandson.

There have often been multiple cases of children remembering their past lives, and most of them grow up and forget all about it. So, have you heard of similar cases? Write to us in the comments below

The featured image is just for editorial purposes and not the actual representation of any of the stories provided.