THE WORK OF IAN STEPHENSON

The leading scientific researcher of children's past lives was Dr. Ian Stevenson. He was a psychiatrist and parapsychologist working at the Division of Personality Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia. He was funded by Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox machine, to travel to various parts of the world to collect and study cases of young children who reported memories of past lives. He interviewed over four thousand children from the United States, England, Thailand, Burma, Turkey, Lebanon, Canada, India, and other places.

He checked documents, letters, autopsy records, birth and death certificates, hospital records, photographs, newspaper reports, and the like. His work is detailed in several books and academic papers including
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966) revised 1980 and
Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation (1987).

To show that reincarnation cases occur in European cultures where fewer people believed in it, Dr Ian Stevenson wrote his last book European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003).
A summary of just some of the evidence gathered in sixty of his cases is contained in the PSI encyclopedia. Read more.

KEY FINDINGS IN MOST OF IAN STEVENSON'S CASES

Dr. Ian Stevenson found the following were true of most of the cases he investigated:
• age when the memories appear—usually between two and four
• age when memory fades—almost always between five and eight
• child behaves like an adult
• claims the new body feels strange
• vivid events are remembered
• About 70% of children with past life memories recall dying by murder, suicide, or accident
•35% show intense fear related to the manner of death — similar to PTSD symptoms.
• children show fear of objects connected with previous death
• when children visit their previous home they can point out changes
• often the mother or someone else in the family can remember a dream in which they were told that the coming child was a reincarnation.
• the mothers began to like strange foods during their pregnancy which were the same as the foods liked by the person in the previous life.
• the child has skills not taught or learned
• some have birthmarks or deformities in the same place as a previous life injury.