Surviving death cases: Rawlette excerpt #20

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness—Memories of contact with the living during the intermission period aren’t limited to apparitions and dreams, either. I’ve come across two cases where people remembered being involved in poltergeist phenomena, both of them from India. In the first case, a child in Uttar Pradesh reported that, after his death in a previous life, he hung out near his previous family’s house and sometimes took their food. The family in question confirmed that they noticed food inexplicably disappearing during that time. In the other case, a boy named Veer Singh reported that, after dying, he stayed in a tree outside his former family’s home. One day, he got annoyed at two women who were playing in a swing hanging from a branch of his tree. Realizing he might kill them if he broke off the branch the swing was attached to, he waited until the swing was low in its arc and then caused the wooden seat to break. His father from his previous life remembered an accident like this occurring after his son’s death.

Encountering Other Spirits of the Deceased

Another important element found in both NDEs and intermission memories is memories of meetings with others who have died. There are many accounts of young children reporting familiarity with relatives who died before they were born, and these claims can sometimes be independently verified.

In a case that Jim Tucker investigated alongside Ian Stevenson, a boy named Patrick Christenson had some memories of his deceased half-brother’s life and also had three scars in locations where his half-brother had been deformed. Furthermore, Patrick said that, while in heaven, he spoke with a relative of the family named “Billy the Pirate” who told him he’d died in the mountains after being shot at close range. Patrick’s mother had never heard of anyone like this in her family, but afterward she learned of a cousin with the nickname “Billy the Pirate” who had died just as Patrick reported.

There’s also the case of James Leininger, the boy who remembered being James Huston, a World War II pilot shot down in the Iwo Jima operation. Between ages three and six, James received three G. I. Joe dolls as presents, and he gave them the names Billie, Leon, and Walter. His family was surprised by the unusual names, and when they asked him about it, he said he gave them those names because that was who met him in heaven. It turned out that only 10 men from James Huston’s squadron on Natoma Bay were killed prior to his own death. Three of them were named Billie, Leon, and Walter, and their hair colors matched those of James’s G. I. Joe dolls, with Billie’s hair being brown, Leon’s blond, and Walter’s red.

Cases like this provide not only first-person evidence for the prebirth existence of the child who has the memory but also third-person evidence for the continuing, disembodied consciousness of the deceased person they remember encountering in the intermission period. 

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.