Hi there, I'm K-Town, and on this edition of Mysterious Radio. Well, sure. Well, I've been a journalist for 40 years pretty much, and I was a magazine editor in Miami, Florida. And I came across a psychiatrist named Brian Weiss, who was a very well-respected psychiatrist in Miami Beach, Florida. and he began talking about these patients that he had regressed to an attorney and he had regressed them to what he believed were their past lives and these were people who were having trouble with you know neurosis or other psychological symptoms and he found that when they went back to what he thought were their past lives they got better so he started he wrote a few books about that. And I thought it was real interesting because here was a serious scientist who was saying that he believed that these were real past lives that these people were remembering. So I did a story on that. And what I found was that there wasn't anything really convincing about the past life memories that would make me think that they were real past lives. They didn't have any information about people that couldn't have come from books or magazine articles or something like that. And, you know, they didn't know anything that it seems like they couldn't have known in a normal way. And in fact, sometimes they said things that contradicted themselves, like sometimes somebody would go back to a past life and say that, you know, he was a Miller in in 1815. But then in another session, he'd say that he was like a midwife during the same period of time. So, you know, I wasn't convinced. But in doing research for that story, I came across a man named Dr. Ian Stevenson, who is the head of psychiatry at the University of Virginia. And his cases were very different. What they were, were small children, very small children, who as soon as they could speak in some cases, remembered or started talking about what sounded like past lives. And he got very interested in this phenomenon. And, you know, one thing that was intriguing to him was the fact that since they were so small children, that when they had information, when they gave information about their alleged past lives, It was very easy to rule out that, OK, they weren't reading historical novels or going to the movies because they were like three and four years old. Yeah. So what he did was he started going around the world when he ever heard reports of cases like this and and basically going and interviewing the family and the kids and the people who knew them and trying to sort of approach it almost like an investigative journalist would approach it to try to assess the veracity of what these kids were saying. And he found that in a number of cases, the items that the kid was saying, sometimes they'd come up with names and family names and names of children, names of husbands and wives and names of towns that they lived in. And sometime all this information, it turned out they matched an actual deceased person who had lived. And usually it wasn't like a long time ago, like in ancient Egypt or something, but it was basically in the previous generation. And he started and he collected like thousands of these cases around the world. And and he began writing them up and in a scientific way. And I thought this was far more persuasive and far more interesting than the hypnosis cases. So it took me two years, but I ultimately, because he didn't want any publicity, because he wanted to be taken serious in mainstream science. And he felt that getting popular accounts in newspapers or magazines would only make real scientists sort of more leery of him, thinking he was a publicity hound or something. So he actually tried to avoid publicity. But after two years of trying to persuade him, he finally let me accompany him on some field trips he was making. We spent a month in Lebanon together and a month in India tracking down some old cases he had done and reinterviewing people and finding some new cases as well. And, you know, I didn't know when I went whether this was going to be an obvious fraud, because like the easiest explanation for this is that parents were lying about the kids or they were putting the kids up to stuff or they were feeding them information. But it became very easy to see as soon as I got involved that that was not the case. I mean, there were some cases where the parents really didn't were embarrassed by the whole thing and they were trying to shut the kids up. But the kids wouldn't. I mean, there was one case where where a milkman came to through a village every once in a while. And this little girl would run up to him and say, can you please take me home to my village? These people are my are my real parents. And they get mad whenever I say anything about it. And it turned out that this little girl had been telling her parents that she wanted to go, quote, home to her real village and her real parents. And she named them. And the parents beat her when she said this. So this milkman had a friend in the village the little girl was talking about. And he talked to her about it. And she said, you know, there was a family by the name she's saying in this village. And they had a 12 year old daughter who was killed, who was hit by a car and killed just about the time that this girl was born. Um, so then what happened was the family of the dead girl heard about this and they came, you know, all the way to this village unannounced to see, to check this out and see if this little girl was claiming to be their dead daughter. And when and they went in a group and when they walked up, she walked right up to the father of the little girl and he was sitting down and she sat on his lap and put her arms around him and says, can you take me home? But that's just one case. There are dozens and dozens of cases with similar kinds of facts. Wow. OK. All right. All right. So you said so much. Now I want to go back to Dr. Stevenson for a moment. Now, he was – when you met him, he was already working on cases like this, right? Oh, yeah. He'd been doing it for 30 years. How did he come – did he tell you how he came across the first case? Yeah. He was a psychiatrist, but he was also – his mother had been very interested in the occult and things like that. So he kind of had grown up sharing that interest, and he read widely. He was a brilliant man, very well educated, and he loved reading all sorts of things. And he noticed in his reading that there were very – a collection of things that he kind of came across that were all about reincarnation, alleged reincarnation in one way or another. And they were from different kinds of sources. They were told from different perspectives. But he realized that there was an interesting connection between them. And that was that in a lot of these cases that the past life was first mentioned by a small child And that really intrigued them So he wrote an essay and it intrigued them for the reasons that I mentioned that small children are not going to pick up all these fantasies from reading novels or seeing movies, etc. I mean, very small children. And he thought that that was really interesting. So he wrote an essay and he was saying somebody really ought to go look at some of these cases and investigate them and see how they hold up to scrutiny. And he meant somebody other than himself. He wasn't really thinking he was going to do it. But there is this organization called the American Psychical Society who was interested in the scientific study of occult phenomenon. So somebody from that society called him up and said, we read your essay. We think that's a great idea. Why don't you do it? And so he decided, well, OK, I'll do it. And so he collected a few accounts of cases that had sort of come to light in the Western media, either through newspaper stories or various things like that. And he so he kind of figured out that there are a lot of these stories coming out of India. Not surprisingly, since, you know, they have a culture that believes in reincarnation. And so he took a trip to India and he started. And like me, he was expecting these cases to fall apart as soon as he looked at them. And he was shocked that not only, you know, how how sort of consistently they held up to scrutiny, but that there were many people knew about cases like this all over everywhere he went. People were saying, well, I know, you know, my friend has a daughter who did this or my, you know, my uncle said his son was doing this kind of thing. And talking about a previous life. So suddenly he realized that this was a much more he was thinking these cases were going to be exceedingly rare when, in fact, they were ubiquitous. So he began to study these and to collect case reports and to investigate them. And he actually got himself in trouble at the University of Virginia because they were sort of embarrassed that one of their serious psychiatrists was investigating something that most people in our culture disparage. And so he kind of was forced out of his role as the head of the Department of Psychiatry. But then the guy who invented Xerox, Chester Carlson, was really interested in the subject. And he read some of Stevenson's work. So he funded an institute for Stevenson so that he can have a place. So he kind of donated a million dollars, I think, to the University of Virginia on the condition that Stevenson would have this endowed chair to do his work. Oh, that's awesome. Good for him. Okay, so, all right, so Dr. Stevenson, okay, let me ask you this, because I do want to know if he shared your thoughts on this. Did he tell you whether or not he believed in reincarnation before he took this on? Well, before, no. He was more open-minded than most scientists would be. But he felt that these were intriguing cases and he really was skeptical. But I think that over time, he began to think that this was a genuine phenomenon. And the way he would put it was he would say, first of all, you can't nothing is ever proven except in mathematics. In other words, in science, you can collect evidence and you can have a hypothesis that's supported by the evidence and you keep collecting the evidence. But you're never absolutely 100 percent certain that it's been proven because there always can be a new set of facts that change your opinion. just like you know we thought that the earth was the center of the universe until we didn't anymore and then we thought you know that the sun was the center of the universe until we realized no it's just another star so science things keep changing as new facts come up so that's what his point was but he did say that it was reasonable to think that reincarnation was possible based on evidence based on the evidence of these children and what they said and the kinds of behaviors that they exhibited. And the correlation between the things that the children seemed to know about dead strangers they couldn't have possibly known anything about, where they knew way too many details about their lives, it turned out to be accurate when you did the research. Okay. All right. So I do want to talk about some of these cases. Now, I know that he went out and he he talked to as many people as he possibly could. So tell us how he went about verifying. Well, I'll give you an example, actually, that might be. This is a case. This was a very interesting case where a little girl in a middle class family in India from the time before she could even really form complete sentences. she would grab the phone and and start babbling into it and calling and they reckon the parents could understand that she was saying a name Layla and she kept saying Layla Layla and she seemed really upset and then as she got older she began saying you know I'm you know my my name is this isn't my real name. And she'd say what her real name was. And she says, and my husband, she said, I have a husband and I have seven children. And she named the husband and she named the seven children in birth order. And, and she says, and this is my phone number. And this was before she had even learned numbers. So she wrote down this number and they called it and there was no answer anything but um she did mention a town so when they when they said they had a like this in so many cases they knew somebody in that town and they asked around and they said well those names you're giving that's the name of a family that lives in this town um well it's in in the city in Beirut, actually. And they had a, this man had a wife who died during heart surgery. She had gone to the United States, to Virginia, to have heart surgery, and she died on the operating table. And it turned out that before she had died on the operating table, one of the last thing she did was she tried to call her daughter who was living in South America and couldn't get through. And her daughter was named Layla. So that was one sort of odd thing. And then it turned out that their phone number was the same as the phone number that the little girl had given them, except that there was one digit transposed. So this was very eerie to begin with. And so the now grown daughters of the dead mother heard about this, heard there was a little girl claiming to be their mother. So they made an unadvanced visit to the house. And they were from a very sort of upper class family and who kind of thought that reincarnation was nonsense. And so almost as a lark and kind of, you know, a little bit suspiciously because they thought maybe this family was going to try to get money from them. Anyway, they show up unannounced at the little girl's house. And the little girl sees them and says, my daughters. And she greets them by name. And then one of the first things she says to them is, did your uncle distribute my jewelry to you as I asked him to? Whoa. And they were completely flabbergasted because they were expecting this was a fraud But they knew that only their family knew that on her deathbed or before she went in for the surgery that killed her she had told her brothers that you know she didn make it. She wanted them to give her jewelry to her daughters and, you know, give this jewel to that daughter and the other necklace to the other daughter, et cetera. And that they'd never spoken of this to anybody. so that this little girl came up to him and asked them that, completely convinced them that she was real. And then there were some other things that she would say. And not only that, but she began, the little girl began calling their father, who remarried and sort of saying, you know, and sort of treating him almost as if she were his wife and, you know, wanting to come see him and all that. And, you know, they made the kind of an uncomfortable situation. And then eventually the other members of the family, the uncles, other uncles who were wealthy and did a lot of business in Saudi Arabia, where reincarnation is against their religion. So they said, look, you got to shut this up. I don't want to hear anything more about this because it could embarrass us and cause this problem. So they were actually trying to repress it rather than, you know, to get famous out of it or something like some Westerners might think. So anyway, so Stevenson went and he interviewed the daughters. He interviewed the husband, the former husband. He interviewed the parents and he interviewed the little girl who had now, you know, when he first talked to her, she was like nine or ten. And then when I was with him, she was 20. and she still remembered it. And in fact, she still called the old man that she felt was her husband in her previous life. And the daughters didn't want to talk to us, but they said, you know, but they said, look, everything this girl told us was true. So we believe that she really did have some connection to our mother. and so that's the kind of thing he did was he went if the child was said to have made you know to recognize people or made statements he looked for anybody who was present witnesses he looked for documentation sometimes people wrote it down there was a tape recording of the little girl when she was doing one of her things when she was calling Layla in the phone for instance and sometimes he looked at medical records too you know, to find. Some people actually had birthmarks that corresponded to wounds that the person whose life they said they remembered had gotten before they died. And he would like check the medical records of the autopsy and compare them to the birthmarks that these children had. And in many cases, they were like, you know, like somebody, a man remembered that he had been shot by basically a crazy man and that the bullet had entered his jaw on one side and exited on the other. And the now grown man who had remembered this as a child had birthmarks on the left and right jaw. And, you know, presumably corresponding where the bullet entered and exited. And so we went to the hospital to check the autopsy report on this man who he said he remembered being. And, you know, and indeed, it showed that that's where the bullet entered and exited in almost the exact same spots where the birthmarks were. That's unbelievable. Now, I just want to clarify something here, Tom. Dr. Stevenson would not leave until he could verify whether or not these cases were authentic, correct? Well, I mean, he did whatever he could to try to verify the state. You know, his method was he went and interviewed the family of the child and the child, him or herself. And he got a list of claims that the child had made, you know, and the circumstance, who had witnessed the claims, the statements that the child had made, if anything had been written down or recorded. So he had a whole list of statements that the child had made. And then if the connection had been made to an actual person who had died, you know, if they'd already, quote, figured out who the child had been talking about. Then he went to that family and began checking off all the things that the child was documented to have said about the life of the previous life to see if it was true about the person that they were talking about. Okay. previous personality's family for the first time and to be able to sort of record the interactions between them. Yeah. Now, were you ever present for any of those first-time meetings? I was not ever present for a first-time meeting, no. But I was present with some children who were talking about things when they were still young And still, you know, because usually what happened was after children talked about this in their early years, about the time they became sort of social creatures, you know, like at seven to nine, these memories started to fade and they stopped talking about it. But, you know, I was definitely there for when children were making these claims before they had found out who the personality was. And I was present when I heard people recounting the first meetings. multiple sources were all sort of confirming that the recognition was made or whatever. Okay. Tom, let's talk about some more of these cases now. Did he ever come across cases, and I'm assuming he did, where the child was of a different gender? Yes. I mean, and he kept records of all, you know, mostly they were the same gender, but sometimes sometimes they were there, you know, in a minority of cases, and I forget what the percentage was, but it was this relatively small minority that a boy would remember the life of a girl or vice versa. And he also, of course, came across cases where cross religion, you know, where a Muslim would remember the life of a Hindu or a Christian would remember the life of a Buddhist or something like that. So those kind of things happened. And, you know, in most of these cases, it wasn't the lives remembered were not – were relatively close geographically. And as I said, most of these were in the immediate previous generation. They weren't like hundreds of years ago either. OK, you know what? Stop right there, because that's something I'm going to ask you now. You said that normally I guess these children were showing signs of reincarnating pretty quickly But was it always in the same general area like maybe you know in the next city over or something like that That what I trying to say It was often close, geographically close, you know, but, you know, maybe 50, 100 miles in some cases. And sometimes it was in the next village and sometimes it was in the next neighbor, you know, the neighbor's house. Wow. In one case. And then there were also cases where people remembered lives of, you know, like somebody in India would remember the life of a Japanese person. And there were a bunch of interesting cases he did where, you know, that in World War II, Japan invaded China and they were very brutal and they raped a lot of women, et cetera, et cetera. And so the children of these Japanese invaders after the war who were born in China were treated very badly because they were sort of seen as being the children of the brutal invaders. So there were some of those children who remembered the lives of Japanese people in China. And sometimes there were some language, not all the time, but sometimes in rare cases, there were some language abilities that were kind of mysterious where somebody, for instance, the Chinese child who remembered the life of a Japanese soldier would be able to speak some Japanese. Okay, okay. And then in India, I did see a case and personally interviewed these people. There was a woman in a peasant village, you know, far from any cities who should have been illiterate, but she remembered the life of an upper class woman in a city. And she actually, and this was the weirdest one we've done. She actually was normally going about her life as a peasant woman in India when she suddenly collapsed and people gathered around her and they thought she was dead. And this went on for like 15 minutes. And then she revived suddenly and she revived saying she was somebody else. She was another person. And her whole diction changed. She suddenly was speaking in a much more educated way and et cetera. So that was a very strange thing where she and she had said she had remembered the life of a, as I said, an upper class woman from a city who had been married, you know, in an arranged marriage and had and what her memory was, was that her in-laws had killed her with the bricks. So did he tell you why he thought that some of these children were reentering their lives, remembering who they were previously? Yeah, well, we had some interesting discussions about that because, you know, even in areas where the cases were fairly common, I mean, they were only relatively common because, of course, you know, there were hundreds and hundreds of people who didn't remember their lives and only a few did, even in areas where these were very common. So, like, why was that? What was it? And, you know, he thought, well, was it people who died violently? Well, more people died violently in the memories of these children than in the general population. population. In other words, you know, if you took all the children who remembered previous lives and the ones who remembered, not everybody remembered, talked about how they died, but the ones that did talk about dying, a higher proportion of those memories were of violent deaths than you'd expect to find just in a general population. But not all of them. A lot of them either didn't remember how they died or they died of illness or whatever, or drowning or something like that. And so, you know, you couldn't really say, oh, maybe the people who die violently, you know, are the ones who remember it because that wasn't always the case. And then he said, you know, my best theory is, is that we're supposed to forget and that not forgetting is a defect, something screwed up in the system to so that you don't completely forget. So that's, you know, that's the closest thing. Based on these hundreds of cases I'm looking at, there doesn't seem to be any reason, any rhyme or reason why some people remember and other people don't. Okay. Now, is anyone still studying this phenomena that you know of? Yes. Yeah. He has at the University of Virginia, his institute is still, still exists and they still have people who are studying these kind of cases. And they've kind of shifted their focus now because one of the things that critics said was, how come there are no North American cases? You know, these cases all seem to be, you know, they're in India, they're in Lebanon, they're in Brazil, in places where reincarnation is accepted. So maybe they're just sort of like manufacturing the cases to support their cultural beliefs. But in fact, there are North American cases. It just turned out that many of them, the children's claims were vaguer. They didn't include last names. They didn't include place names. So you couldn't really find the people that they were talking about. But otherwise, they were identical because they'd be small children. Who, you know, who, you know, who from a very early age would be saying things like, well, when I was a daddy and things like that, or, you know, or my real father, you know, was much bigger than you or, you know, whatever. Same kind of statements, only they just didn't seem to have the detail. But the other feature of the American cases was that kids were told, oh, don't be silly. You know, they weren't listened to seriously. So you can see why, you know, if in fact that was a real phenomenon, why it might be suppressed here. However, recently, since I wrote Old Souls, there have been some American cases that were very detailed and just like the ones where the statements that the child made were documented. And then they made some connection between the names the child was giving and the information he had and a dead person who had lived in a immediate previous generation where the child seemed like one child remembered being a fighter pilot in World War II. And he gave the names and parts of planes. You know, this is like a little tiny child and he's talking about the the details of a of a World War Two fighting, fighting aircraft. And he he was like and then he gave a name of who he was and who he flew with. And they found records of a pilot who died where this kid said his plane went down. And it turns out that his co-pilot had the name that the child had given. So there have been some really interesting American cases that were as high quality. And when I say high quality, I mean were as persuasive as cases in India or elsewhere. Okay, very good. Tom, I've really enjoyed this conversation with you. Why don't you take a moment to tell my listeners where they can find more information about you in your books? Okay, well, this book we're talking about is called Old Souls, and I've written some other books which you can find on my website, which is TomSchroeder.com. My last name is S-H-R-O-D-E-R. That's TomSchroeder.com. To find out more about our guest and all others, please visit our website at MysteriousRadio.com.
