For example, Rylann O’Bannion, the girl who remembered dying when a plane crashed in her backyard during a thunderstorm, told her mom at the age of three, “It was raining a lot. There was a loud noise, then the rain shocked me. I floated up to the sky then.”
In another case, a Brazilian girl named Silvia mixed Italian words into her speech from the time she started talking, even though no one around her spoke Italian. She also had a fear of airplanes flying overhead. This fear appeared linked to her memories of living in a place she called the “capitolio,” where planes would drop bombs. Like Rylann, she was three years old when she told her grandmother about a boy who was carrying a bomb that blew up and hurt her and her friend. “Then my friend and me, we went up and up,” she said. Her grandmother asked if she meant up the stairs of the capitolio, but she said, “No, Grandma, we went up, high up there.” When her grandmother asked what happened next, Silvia replied, “I don’t know. Then I came here.”
Another Brazilian child, Kilden, had more precise memories of his death. He announced to his mother, again around the age of three, that his name was “Alexandre” (this was in fact Kilden’s middle name) and he was “the priest.” A decade ago, his mother had been friends with a priest she called Alexandre, and he had died in a car accident—or so she had heard at the time. Her friendship with the deceased priest was the reason she had given her son the middle name Alexandre. Now Kilden not only insisted that his true name was Alexandre, not Kilden, but also said that, when he had been a priest, he was hit by a truck when he was riding a motorcycle. He fell over, hit his head, and died. When his mother checked the facts of her friend’s death, she discovered he had indeed been hit by a truck while on a motorcycle. He’d fallen on his head and died in the hospital the next day.
Years later, around age 13, Kilden heard about a man who died after falling off a ladder, and he started explaining to his mother what happens when someone has an accident like that:
The person who suffered the accident arrives and is put in a room full of instruments. The doctors connect them.... Then the equipment is connected to the chest and the head, and the doctors keep trying to save the life of the person. At this point the person flies into a corner of the ceiling, watching the doctors’ fight to save him. Then a big hole like a funnel appeared in the corner of the wall near me, trying to suck me [in]....
His mother interrupted to ask if he was talking about himself or someone else. He said, “I think it was me. I saw my body and the doctors trying to save me.” He then continued his description, changing again between the third and first person:
When he was sucked through the hole into the tunnel, he saw a strong light at the end, so strong that I turned my head to one side. The light was very bright, and the hole closed behind him, near the wall. At that moment the doctors saw the screen on their machine stop.
Other children have after-death memories of being escorted by guides of some kind. Jim Tucker reports that a boy named Kenny who had detailed memories of dying in a vehicle accident “said that after he died, another spirit, probably the driver of the vehicle, took him by the hand, and the two of them were with other spirits in what seemed to be a huge hall.”
Three-year-old Stephen Ramsay remembered fighting as a soldier in a jungle-like place and dying when a plane “came down and hurt my tummy.” “That was when I died,” he said. “My tummy got hurt and it was bleeding.” Stephen said he then fell asleep, and when he woke up, he was still in the trees, but his tummy felt all better. Then, he says, “[a] lady came to see me. ... She was a nice lady and she told me to follow her. She took my hand and took me with her.” He gave an extended description of the place where the lady took him: a place where people rested after dying and waited until it was time for them to be born to new parents.
This next account comes from someone who retained past-life memories into adulthood. The Venerable Chaokhun Rajsuthajarn, a Buddhist abbot in Thailand, published his description of his memories in 1969, before NDEs had been widely written about. But his account of what happened at the moment of his death sounds very much like the experience many NDErs report of being able to go anywhere instantly and perceive anyone just by thinking about them, while at the same time having difficulty communicating with those still in living bodies. Regarding the time just after his death, when he was still realizing that he was dead, he wrote,
I felt stronger and could move much more rapidly from place to place. My body was light, as if it had no weight. I was so glad that I rushed up to join the conversation of my relatives. But no one noticed me. I grabbed this one’s hand and pulled that one’s arm, to draw their attention. Still, no one did anything. ... I could not make them understand [that I was all right].
They were crying and moaning. Some of them went to tell other relatives and friends in the neighborhood. The latter were now pouring into the house. At that moment, I felt as if I were omnipresent: I could simultaneously see people coming in from two or three different directions. Moreover, I could be there to receive them all at the same time. I could also hear their voices as well as see things quite clearly.
Far distant places appeared to be near, because I could move very rapidly from place to place. I could immediately be there to hear or see. There seemed to be no obstacle at all.
Those who remember dying in a previous life also sometimes remember viewing their funeral and/or burial. In some cases, they mention something unexpected that was done with their body that can then be verified.
In one of Ian Stevenson’s cases, a young Thai woman remembered that her previous body—that of a mere baby—wasn’t buried in the village cemetery as it should have been, but rather outside of it. She confronted the undertaker responsible, and he admitted to having done this thing that apparently no one else knew about.
In a Sri Lankan case, a girl named Disna Samarasinghe remembered her body being buried near an anthill, which was indeed true of the body of the person whose life she remembered. Disna was also able to point out the location of her unmarked grave.
This next case comes from Hertfordshire, England, and was reported by Mary and Peter Harrison in their book The Children That Time Forgot. It involves a young girl, Mandy Seabrook, who appeared to be the reincarnation of her sister who had died at the age of five months. Even though the family never spoke about her deceased sister, when Mandy was two years old, she started recounting memories of having been this other child. One day, while riding past the cemetery where her sister was buried, two-year-old Mandy exclaimed, “Look, Mummy! That’s the place you put me in the ground that time, and you nearly fell on top of me, remember?” At the time of the burial, her mother had been taking medication to help her deal with the shock, and she had been so out of sorts that she had lost her balance at the graveside and almost fallen into the hole with the coffin. Mandy also said she’d been buried with a silver bracelet and a fluffy yellow ball. Her mother remembered the existence of the bracelet and the yellow ball, but she only remembered the former being in the casket. Nevertheless, when questioned, an older sibling confessed to having slipped the yellow ball under the dead baby’s body.
One other interesting aspect of this case is that, when Mandy was six, she asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” When her mother thought back, she realized that she had in fact noticed a star out over the garden, unusually bright and low, and had mentioned it to someone else at the time. Mandy continued, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.” This is the only case I’ve come across in which a child remembered using a sign or synchronicity to communicate after death in their previous life.
Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.
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