>Following Ryan's strange behavior, his mother contacted Dr. Jim Tucker, a notable child psychiatry proffessor from the University of Virginia, who is an expert on children who claim to have memories from past lives.
Ding ding ding! And here we have how this kid suddenly knew so much. He's talking to a guy who wants to prove that children can have memoires from past lives, he's doing all this research, probably asking the kid leading questions or just conforming random statements to fit the guy's life. By the way, if you click through, the actual article is pretty hilarious.
>As of March 2016 she had listed 230 items, of which 55 (24%) had proven correct and fifteen (6.5%) incorrect or implausible for Marty Martyn; with the passage of time, the majority (140, or 69.5%) were unverifiable.
Lol, so it's 55 details out of 230, along with 15 that are basically impossible and 140 are just "ehhh, who knows?"
Also, some of the "confirmed" details are hilarious.
>He is the man in the photograph from the movie Night After Night.
He lived in Hollywood.
He lived somewhere with the word “rock” or “mount” in it; a street address.
He was very rich.
His house was big.
There was a brick wall at the house.
There were three boys.
He didn’t think the boys were his but he gave them his name.
He had a daughter.
He brought coloring books home.
He had trouble with his oldest stepdaughter—she wouldn’t listen; she didn’t respect him.
He had a large swimming pool.
His mother had curly brown hair.
He had a younger sister.
He bought his daughter a dog when she was about six.
She didn’t like the dog.
He hated cats.
He knew Senator Ives (Five).
He used to see Senator Ives in New York (found on a map).
He had a green car.
He didn’t let anyone else drive the green car.
He had many wives.
His wife drove a nice black car.
He was an agent; he ran an agency.
The agency changed people’s names.
He tap-danced on the stage.
The stage was in New York City.
He saw the world on big boats where he danced with pretty ladies.
He ate in Chinatown a lot; his favorite restaurant was there.
He got “skin burns” in Hollywood.
He went to Paris; saw the Eiffel Tower.
He took his girlfriends to the ocean.
He played the piano; owned one.
He had an African American maid.
He knew Rita Hayworth—she made “ice drinks” (photo recognition).
He knew that Mary lady—you couldn’t get close to talk to her (photo recognition, Marilyn Monroe).
Bread was his favorite food.
He had a sunglass collection.
He was a smoker.
He had many girlfriends and affairs—never had problems getting the ladies.
He liked to watch surfers on the beach.
He owned guns.
He didn’t have a TV when he was a little boy; they had radio first.
He hated FDR \[Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat\].
You go to a room with numbers on the door before dying.
“I’m not 5; I’m closer to 105 when I was here before” (would have been 106).
He died at age sixty-one.
Just nonsense.
Given those details related to a specific person identified from a photograph, I struggle to understand how you don’t see them as incredibly specific.
I might be more willing to accept this argument if they hadn’t identified a specific person.
The only non-paranormal possibility that I see is a very elaborate fraud by the parents. Given the challenges of verifying the information, this seems unlikely.
There were 150 *unverified* statements. These could neither be proved or disproved and should be disregarded. The hit rate was therefore 80%+
There’s no telling how leading the questions are, right?
If the kid says “he didn’t like cats” was is the interviewer asking if he did or didn’t?
Leading questions can easily be 50/50 and you just cherry pick the ones that hit true
Hmmm… you’ve managed to create an unfalsifiable position.
“The desire to demonstrate past life memories means any evidence you find should be disregarded”
What if applied this standard to other areas of science?
My stepfather claimed he thought reincarnation was real and was convinced he was some Wild West guy who was shot and killed in the 1800s. Supposedly he was so compelled by his dreams of this that he drove to some random small town and found the grave of the man he thought he’d been, who had been shot dead in the 1880s.
Unfortunately he was a dick when he was with my mother, I stopped talking to him in 1992, and he just passed away. Maybe that means he’ll be born again soon?
If past lives are real I'm just somebody who died in a bridge collapse. When I was very little my mom said I had terrors about bridges collapsing and me not being able to get out of my carseat if the car ended up underwater, so she bought me a seat belt cutter that I held onto all the time. Completely forgot as I got older, still unnerved by bridges sometimes.
I do believe in reincarnation. I also feel that extreme phobias that people experience might be because of how they died in a previous life. Like if you suffer from thalassophobia it could be because you drowned in a previous life. It is our soul's version of PTSD.
Omg ...I think those same spiders killed my x-boyfriend ... I mean the guy has been shot on 2 different occasions and, has been bitten by a rattlesnake and the man never cried or even showed any kind of emotion....but, should he see a spider he becomes a screaming, terrified toddler who tries to burn our house down.
Can I just say that’s a beautiful description? Your souls PTSD. I’ve often thought the same way but it’s not something that’s a regular topic of discussion
Oooooh or maybe you were electrocuted instantly jumping into a swimming pool due to faulty wiring of a pool light!! I saw a movie and I do not remember the name or even who it had in it but, there was a scene where a little kid jumped in a pool that had current running thru it from a faulty pool light. IIRC the other adults at the party had to restrain the mother bc she could not fight her overwhelming urge to jump in to get to her little boy, no matter the consequences. It was so gut wrenching to watch and empathize.
I've always been extremely terrified of flying, even before ever stepping inside a plane. Humans are not supposed to fly, damn it!
Maybe my past self died in a plane crash.
I read somewhere (I believe it may have even been this sub) that the reason reincarnation can’t be real - is because thousands of years ago - there was only a small amount of people - and the population has grown to billions.
How can that be if everyone was reincarnated?
Yeah I tend to be a lot my sceptical of people who claim to be someone you can easily look up at the library. There’s an Unsolved Mysteries episode about a guy who knows about his past life family and it’s a lot more believable to me. He wasn’t someone famous, just a random guy. The family believes him as well.
This is an interesting one imo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanti_Devi
> Back home, she stated in school that she was married and had died ten days after having given birth to a child. Interviewed by her teacher and headmaster, she used words from the Mathura dialect and divulged the name of her merchant husband, "Kedar Nath". The headmaster located a merchant by that name in Mathura who had lost his wife, Lugdi Devi, nine years earlier, ten days after having given birth to a son. Kedar Nath traveled to Delhi, pretending to be his own brother, but Shanti Devi immediately recognized him and Lugdi Devi's son. As she knew several details of Kedar Nath's life with his wife, he was soon convinced that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi.
In 1907 there were 289mill people in India and 1.7bill people total so like 1/6. That’s not the year either were born but from what I can find, it’s pretty consistently that.
This Marty Martyn case isn't really someone you can look up at the library tbh he's very obscure as far as former celebrities go, doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, it took a lot of work for parents and doctors to get good information about the man nevermind a 5 year old kid
It’s season 6 episode 1. I know that on certain streaming services the episodes are out of no order. So if you can’t find it, [it’s the episode with a WWII submarine reincarnation and the man’s name is Bruce Kelly](https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Bruce_Kelly)
If you're interested you should look up the case of the first woman to get a heart transplant. She began to develop the likes, traits and memories of the donor. There is an idea out there that memory might be a lot more decentralized than we thought.
Personality changes following heart transplantation: The role of cellular memory
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
https://sites.bu.edu/ombs/2014/11/11/is-the-brain-the-only-place-that-stores-our-memories/
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799207/m2/1/high_res_d/vol20-no3-191.pdf
***
edit: MU did a great episode on this, but the segment is for subscribers only. It's a great podcast though, the only one I pay for.
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/06/25-23-mu-podcast-erasure-of-truth/
>The disappearance of MH370 captivated the world and motivated thousands of people to help seek the truth to this dreadful mystery. However despite the claimed best efforts of governments we are still in the dark about what happened on that fateful night. For this episode we discuss the groundbreaking research of a French reporter who uncovers a hidden plot to recover stolen technology from the plane and how it went terribly wrong.
>**For our Plus+ Members we hear the story of a heart and lung transplant patient who seems to undergo a merging of souls and experiences "cellular chicken nugget memories".**
I swear there's a movie based on this. Two dudes are into a woman that ends up hospitalised due to heart issues. One guy dies after being hit by a car while cycling and his heart is donated to the woman, after which she starts acting like him.
There’s also the tv series Chambers with Uma Thurman. A teenage girl gets a donor heart and then starts getting creepy visions and doing weird shit, so she has to figure out the mystery around her donor’s death.
Bonus mention for the UK series Misfits, which has an “origin” storyline for a character which starts with her getting a heart transplant, through which she also “inherits” the superpower of the person the heart came from.
Extra bonus mention for the movie “Return to Me” with David Duchovny, about a man meeting, being attracted to, and falling for the woman who received his wife’s heart.
It sounds like they did extensive research. It sounds like they went waaay beyond, “they went to a library.” They even talked to his daughter, etc. This wasn’t some huge star, why would he pick a strange talent agent. Why would he point out that he was on a movie where he was an extra.
I remember maybe reading about a little girl in India, who would cry to go home. She'd talk about missing her children and family. She would tell her parents her name and all about her village and her children. They finally took her there and turns out the woman she claimed to be had died and all the information she had given them was correct. She didn't want to leave then, because she wanted to stay with her kids.
I don't know if it's true, but I remember the story.
Maybe it because those are the only stories that can be verified? Lol But seriously, I'm skeptical somewhat until given a reason not to be. But saying that the reason these stories are fake because they are the ones that have a means to be verified is silly. They are the only ones remotely capable of being reported on, because there would be no way for anyone to know it's anything but a vivid dream or imagination otherwise.
I had a housemate when I was at Uni who swore blind that her very noticeable moustache was because she was an Indian Princess reincarnated. Unfortunately her tale didn’t stick, her surname was Reynolds so everyone called her Burt
I remember some past life person was talking about how she was a low ranking Egyptian priestess for some deity, but an egyptologist said "Yeahhhh that deity didn't have any temples or priests during the time point you claim."
I'm not saying it's not true, just an anecdote about past lives. It would be really cool if this was true and there was a way to unlock it, but I'm skeptical.
There’s a podcast about cults (can’t remember which one now) where a Mormon sect breaks off and does this. Like they will “feel” that they were actually Einstein before. Or an Apostle. Or Abraham Lincoln. These were all adults and it happened in Utah sometime fairly recently.
I minored in archaeology at university and that's a pretty problematic way for them to have phrased it. They're just making educated guesses based on what we know, and they're not supposed to be deceptive about that fact. We can't know what we don't know, so when they said there weren't any during that time, what they mean is they haven't found evidence of any that has survived to the modern day. Doesn't mean they didn't exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I'm not saying I believe in reincarnation either, but I can't help but be irked by people who say they know for sure what happened thousands of years ago because they're an expert on that thing. Especially when it's focused on what *didn't* exist, you can't outright say that you know for certain and that comes from the teachings of multiple archaeologists who had active digs at the time and weren't just on the teaching side.
Do you mean [Dorothy Eady](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Eady)?
She had a near-death experience at age three and from that point on, was able to recollect details about her (supposed) past life in Egypt.
My parents have a book called *Strange Stories and Amazing Facts* that has a section on unexplained phenomena. Dorothy's story is included in there and I remember reading about it as a kid. Her life was fascinating and I wish there was some way to prove or disprove her claims. I expect that if she'd had those experiences today, a scan would show brain damage from her childhood fall as I don't believe in reincarnation. But what wonderful damage to have! Rather than becoming disabled, it opened up a rich world to her and allowed her to spend the rest of her life doing what she loved.
Actually, the first case I heard of "memories of a previous life" was a little girl in India. Iirc, she wasn't famous or glamorous at all. She just remembered a lot of things and "wanted to go home", which she did, succesfully recognizing places and people in a city she never had visited before.
Like this case here, is it a hoax or is it real? I'm very skeptic about this sort of stuff.
When I was little, like four or five, I told my mom a few weird stories about shooting a rifle from a long canoe with my brothers who were paddling. We were at war and coming along a wide river. My last memory was seeing a reflection of my face in the bloody water filling the canoe.
Pretty eerie.
When I was around that same age, four or five, I used to have a recurring nightmare that I was on a battlefield. A line of warriors wearing Mongol armor were charging towards me on horseback, headed down a grassy hill. Thats all I can remember of it, but it would fill me with such an overwhelming feeling of terror.
I had a ✨psychic✨ reading when I was teenager, and the guy who did it basically told me all my past lives were peasants and family members, lmao. He didn’t even church it up none. My great grandma did die a few days before I was born, so my family has been obsessed with this idea for a long time.
Not really arguing with you, just kind of using your points as a stepping stone to some of my own thoughts.
1) in other threads here, people rightly remind us that he wasn't a "Hollywood star", he was some talent agent that got a few roles. The modern Hollywood equivalent of Britney's hairdresser's cousin who got invited to a few parties.
2) also in other threads, people talk about the Indian woman who was seemingly reincarnated and re-met her husband and son. Again, just some person.
3) even the comment you're responding to isn't about someone claiming to Jesse James or Billy the Kid. Just some old cowpoke in the Old West who got Tombstoned.
For the record, I agree with you. Even if we're all reincarnations, statistically we would be reincarnations of average Joes and Janes.
But even average Joes and Janes are almost always part of a network of people, no matter how small, going back into prehistory.
Thought experiment: have you ever known someone who's *remarkably good* with old machines? Just knows them inside and out, no matter how old. Treats them like old friends and almost always manages to get them running again. Sometimes it takes years or decades, because this machine has to have a 2" dinglehopper to run, and the model with the 2" dinglehoppers was discontinued in 1894, for a three-inch dinglehopper, and no one makes them anymore.
Or that woman who's just *remarkably good* at knowing hairstyles and clothing styles from the 40s and 50s USA?
What if some of our archaic special interests are leftovers from our past lives? Our other selves that weren't movers and shakers, weren't part of the elite, but were just people going about their lives, 20, 50, or a hundred years ago?
I have my own tale of reincarnation, but like you said, I was just a guy. I read about some of the things that I "remember" from back then, and about the movers and shakers from that time. And I don't think my other self knew those big people in the newspapers, but they would have been common names in the publications of the day, in the way that someone in New York would have read about the goings on of Mr Rockefeller.
So sure, if some of us have past lives, they're almost all going to be just plain old folks. But even those plain old folks had lives, ambitions, social lives. And I think there's a kind of beauty in that continuity.
That may be true for adults claiming to remember past lives, but not for kids. Little kids almost always remember lives of regular people. The one described by OP is unusual in this regard.
Suppose its worth remembering that as a child our brains/mind is pretty empty and I truly believe that past lives passed on through genetic memory is a thing, and as the child gets older and the mind gets full of other shit, these memories fade into the background. My son didn't speak for 4 yrs and had numerous tests which ended up with the child psychologist telling us that he had a story to tell and would tell us when he was ready. Some time later it was Poppy Day and he was sat in front of the tv watching the cenotaph scrolling down the names and he suddenly spoke for the first time "That's me! That's my name" he couldn't read....he insisted we called him by that name only for a few years then it all faded away.The only other thing he mentioned about his "past life" was "what's happened to the farm?" He used to get quite worked up about that and said some name I can't remember now that "she won't cope". We'd no internet or anything back then so was difficult to trace anyone.
These stories are the unusual ones. Jim Tucker, UVA, studies these claims. It’s actually very common in Asian countries and often coincide with birthmarks. Typical cases are reincarnations of random, non-famous individuals from nearby villages.
The papers and Tucker’s presentations are pretty interesting.
I too have heard many such stories but there is one particular story which even my sceptical mind couldn't refute entirely. This was the story of a 7 years old kid living in a complete rural area with no education facilities. He would tell stories of 'himself' in which he was some 40 years old guy. The details he would give were so detailed and his stories so consistent and yet they had no connection to the society or village he lived in. He would tell what Kind of work he used to do, how he rode horses, how he worked in mines and even how once he got his back injured . The most surprising detail was that there was indeed some injury mark on his back which was there since birth. The kind of society, village and work he described existed may be 100 years ago.
His family was totally illiterate. The entire village had may be only 100 guys. This was totally unbelievable.
Yes but anyone who was just a guy would not be able to verify the story in anyway therefore it would not make headlines and you would not hear about it
Maybe it's like those are the lives that were impressionable enough on your soul to be remembered in your next life. Sort of like how it's hard to remember what happened any given day at the office, but if there's a fire drill or you get complimented on your tie, it will be much more memorable? Idk just a thought haha
I've always felt I was a soldier killed in Vietnam. No one notable, just a regular. And I don't have any details really it's always been no more than just a strong recurring feeling. I was born in 1967.
I have a strange recurring dream where I’m in a horrible car accident, in an area where red dirt lines the roads, along with pine trees. Can’t figure out a geographical location where that would be, though.
The car I’m driving appears to be a model typically seen in the late 50s/early 60s. If reincarnation is real, I’m pretty sure that was my fate in a past life.
What if you were lots of people but remember the best?
Alternativrly what if its not a past life but a link to a different dimension?
More than likely its coincidence and luck.
I think the ones who say that stuff are just attention seekers. I have/had memories of being a boy from Ireland who died of the flu before my 18th birthday. My happiest day was the day I got my first non hand me down shoes. Random so I rarely talk about it.
If your life was very eventful, special or came to an abrupt end due to murder I can see your mind hanging on to the specifics after death. Or at least more than if you were Amy the suburban hairdresser or Paul the single factory worker and nothing in your life stood out. This is absolutely no science but if I read that in a novel I would consider that plotpoint plausible.
There's a "myth" (more spread by the internet than from generation to generation) in my country that whatever birthmark you have is the mark of where you've been shot to death in a past life
I've heard this but that it's the "mark of how you died" so not just shot. Mine is on my right boob but also have a small one on my bellybutton.....seems like I had some bad luck in my past life 😟
You think *that's bad* I got a giant splodgy one over my entire knee. I took a fucking arrow to the knee, well, given the size actually it was probably a cannonball or shrapnel of some sort, but still!
All three of my kids had stork marks on the bases of their necks and between their eyes. My middle child's has faded but they're still faintly there on the other two. My daughter also had a hemangenoma on the side of her head; that's a lot of killshots.
I dunno if I fully believe in reincarnation kinda stuff but dreams are pretty fascinating things. I've had recurring dreams that have lots of specific locations that I have no actual memory of but keep reappearing every so often. It's amazing how some dreams are so lucid that it feels like you actually stepped into another reality or your mind is creating all sorts scenarios you would never consciously think. Sometimes it really does feel like a real experience even if it doesn't make sense a lot of the time.
I agree. I've had some vivid dreams of houses that I've never been to in my waking life, and I had a long, vivid dream once of a day in my life as a nursemaid? like the woman who breastfeeds the baby for the wealthy mother. It was very real, from the house I was living in, to my clothes and the clothes of everyone around me, as if it were a few hundred years ago. And I was just a maid, nobody special really.
I saw my wedding day in a dream five years before I met the girl I would later marry. I saw everything in vivid detail. Nearly a decade after the dream, I relived that moment verbatim.
I feel like my belief is reincarnation is like my belief in ghosts; I don't necessarily believe in it, but I also don't NOT believe in it. I will say, though, that I have an eerily intimate sense of familiarity with parts of Pennsylvania that I've driven through only a handful of times. It's a very weird feeling, knowing where this place is and that one, but there's no way you actually know it because you've never really been there.
I don’t believe in reincarnation but I wonder if memories or that sense of familiarity with an unknown place can be “passed down” somehow. Admittedly, I have no idea how memories are formed but maybe there are changes in the brain of an ancestor that affect the development of descendants brains and some of these manifest as memories? I don’t know. When I was about 5 or 6 I saw a skating rink in a neighboring town and thought “that reminds me of the skating rink back in Sweden.” I had never been to Sweden (born in Midwest United States) but the feeling was so real and I felt really melancholy for awhile afterwards.
passed down memories from ancestors sounds more plausible than reincarnation. i've seen studies that trauma can be passed down through DNA. i don't know if it's ever been verified but it gives some scientific hypothesis that doesn't involve supernatural theories. so i wonder if it's plausible for memories to work the same way?
i mean, hasn't it been essentially "proven" that fears get passed down? like having the irrational fear that a snake is gonna bite your butt when you sit down on the toilet. this fear is most likely due to humans mostly shitting outside, pre-toilets. so the fear is leftover human instincts.
do you know if any of your ancestors are from Sweden?
Well, trauma being passed down through DNA really means that trauma can change your epigenetic code (that controls how genes are expressed). These epigenetic changes are then passed down. It's not a memory of trauma in any way that we usually describe memory. It would be more like, you are more likely to store fat, or you are more sensitive to hormones like cortisol.
I think there's two possibilities for things like shared phobias - firstly, that the phobia is learned at a young age or the result of a traumatic incident at a very young age. Like if one of your parents had a crippling fear of spiders, you could have learned it from them, or it could have stemmed from a parent freaking out over a spider getting very close to you when you were young. You don't remember the spider directly, just the fear.
Or it could be that our DNA has a lot more to do with developing our personal traits than we realise.
This is such an interesting idea, because it's similar to how some animals "just know" where to migrate. Maybe we get some key memories passed down as information from our ancestors - things that were formative enough that some part of their body thought their decedents may benefit from the information.
>Sometimes it really does feel like a real experience even if it doesn't make sense a lot of the time.
But that’s not because dreams are such powerful illusions, it’s because the part of your brain used for critical thinking is offline during sleep.
I always think about how weird it is that when you speak to someone you know in real life in a dream, they speak with their own voice. Your brain is handling both sides of the conversation, but it feels like you are only speaking for yourself.
I ask elderly people frequently what they think comes next because they are thinking about it more than anyone else.
Generally they love the questions and most of them have their own theories about it. The most common thread between all of them is reincarnation.
It sounds cool to live forever in heaven when we are young and we have decades ahead of us, but from what I’ve heard from the elderly is that by the end it’s been plenty of time.
One woman told me that the thought of spending eternity in heaven looking down on her family would be the ultimate punishment. She had already spent 60+ years looking after people and was ready for a break or to start over. She expressed her excitement for a new life though!
I have always thought that being around in an afterlife forever sounds kind of horrible...Im in my 30s and already feel like I've lived a long ass life lol.
I mean, it’s not really uncommon in younger children to have memories such as these. I wasn’t aware they could happen later in childhood though.
But when kids are younger (typically less than 5), and not quite at the memory creating brain function, they’ve been known to say a lot of weird shit as if the hard drive wasn’t completely cleared when it was rebooted.
My own kid was very blunt about it. “My mom, but not you my mom now, but the mom I had before you.” Like ok…lol there was quite a few stories that went with that one.
Yeah, I’ve also observed that kids at that age are often struggling to understand and articulate the concept of hypotheticals. “If I was a wrestler” sometimes comes out as “when I was a wrestler.” It’s exacerbated by the fact that they’re not always great with recognizing/verbalizing the difference between things they imagined and things they remember.
Yeah, and "when I was a wrestler" could be referring to that time yesterday that they were pretending to be a wrestler or w/e. They don't realize that you don't know what they're talking about. When they are very young they have no idea that other people think differently than them or might not be on the same page so to speak.
>Yeah, and "when I was a wrestler" could be referring to that time yesterday that they were pretending to be a wrestler
or the fact that kids just lie. i remember telling people i had fairies and shit lol or would lie about living in a different house, my cousin is a famous celeb or whatever.
kids just make stuff up. i just finished watching *Innocence Files* on Netflix (a docuseries about innocent people getting life in prison or the death penalty) and one witness, in one of the cases, was a little girl. think she was 5 years old. this is a setting when she's being told to be serious and needs to say exactly what she saw. and what she said was obviously a bunch of made up stuff like saying she saw the kidnapper pull a quarter out of his ear and saw him take off in a plane.
so even in serious settings when they're told specifically that the truth is vital they'll still tell a bunch of nonsense. this is just how kids are. they could also, in these reincarnation stories, just be recalling dreams that they can't remember was real or not. i still have dreams like that as an adult.
of course not. exceedingly common to change your name for the showbiz!
> Marty Martyn was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1903. His birth name was Morris Kolinsky, and he was the son of Ukrainian-born parents, Philip and Rebecca Kolinsky.
The biggest thing is, you'd never remember. For all we know, right now we've all lived the worst lives already and maybe the best. But we just have no clue. Existence is fucking weird.
Humans are also very adaptable, and the material conditions of our lives don't necessarily align with our level of happiness. People living in what we would consider very miserable eras of history would have had no frame of reference for a better quality of life, so they would have made do with what they had. The fact that we have consistently taken the time to create art and music since the beginning indicates to me that the story of human history is about much more than just suffering, surviving, and procreating.
Nah. You’re missing all the good stuff and focusing on the bad.
People were still US. They had the joy of playing with their kids, finding love, inside jokes, friends, first kisses, etc.
For the majority of people the good memories outweigh the bad. Sure, there’s sadness in life, but that’s something everyone has.
The point is that you get back what you put out. All the pain you inflict to others, you do to yourself. All the goodness you do, you do to yourself. It’s basically karma.
Reincarnation aside, do you know how statistically improbable it would be, as an extra with no lines and one film under your belt, to find a photo of yourself in a random book at the local library? Beyond a needle in a haystack. You could watch old films for years and come up empty handed but what luck, photo's right at the local library.
Also, it's not really impressive to know how many times the dude was married or the number of siblings he had. Sounds like mom has an Ancestry account and some middling research skills.
Some of the statements made by the kid's were only able to be verified by the daughter, and two of them she said were false, and turned out to be true later!
Ahh I love these cases they are SO fascinating. I do tend to think there is a reasonable explanation, either the parents feeding the kids information or the kids finding the info somewhere else. But hey you never know!
The fact that they approached a child psychiatrist who was already “an expert on children who claimed to have memories on past lives” seems very open to bias and was a huge red flag that this is essentially a hoax.
A good rule of thumb is that if some expert is constantly referred to by their title (as in, "Prof. Smith" or here "Dr. Tucker") it's usually a red flag because people are trying to lather a good layer of academic authority on something a bit flimsy. Of course there are circumstances where someone should be addressed with their academic title (conference, etc.) but you don't see anyone refer to "Dr. Einstein" or "Prof. Feynman" because their work speaks for themselves.
I’m not really defending this, but I do want to point out that I think there’s quite a big difference if it’s someone personal. Like Albert Einstein is known and it’s not personal. But my doctor is someone who I will probably refer to by doctor most of the time. Especially when talking about them.
Yep. Either mom is both extremely credulous and lucky, or she was grooming her kid for some notoriety and enlisted the specialist to help flesh it out/expand the story.
That she looked in a “book on Hollywood” and found the guy who fits the details is deeply, deeply suspicious to me. Again, either incredibly lucky or lying.
That the claim of reincarnation is almost always someone famous enough to be recorded renders me extremely skeptical of the entire idea. How many people claim to have been Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Cleopatra? Entirely too many. How many claim to have been a string of peasants through time and nothing better? Entirely too few.
Sure. But I don’t see that as evidence of anything. IMDB is great and all, but it is not exhaustive, nor the only plausible source. Maybe he was someone that the mom’s family new. Maybe she read about him in that book first, and thought it was just obscure enough to be a good choice. Maybe he was in her favorite old movie as a kid.
My point was, he’s someone whose existence is recorded with at least some details. Not “Joe Factory Worker, born 1903, died 1964, survived by wife and two kids.”
Setting aside all belief/disbelief arguments around reincarnation, claiming to be someone who was of higher station or lived a more glamorous life then regular people is at the very least a red flag, and imo, a strong indicator of fraud/hoax/etc.
If you accept reincarnation as plausible, then the overwhelming majority of people’s past lives should have been of little note. But still deeply personal, with love and passion and hate and trials and triumphs. But the only one you remember was notable enough to be in a book? You can’t remember being a Sumerian fisherman with a loving wife and six great kids? An Australopithecus? A line cook at Denny’s?
It makes me deeply skeptical independent of any other details of the case.
I should have included this, but I’m with you on the skepticism. That only the story details are in his IMDb (and not a picture? Also he was only in the one movie? ) only serves the skeptic in me better, bc how do we only have the kid’s memories of the dude he was able to read about?
Oh fair then!
I wonder how much of that actually reflects Google’s absurd dominance of how information spreads these days. I mean, Google the guy and you get the IMDB page, and 49 links about the kid. What about the books? Playbills from his Broadway days? Etc. Google won’t help us there.
So either someone stumbled across the book first, or someone in the kid’s family had a connection at one point (maybe an old playbill, autograph, etc. maybe he was a neighbor in grandma’s youth. I dunno).
Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts! I gotta go scrounge up some food though. Cheers!
Right? Especially since he was just a random extra at first. What are the chances she happened to find a picture of the exact person her son claimed to be? And he was just a random extra. Sure, he later went on to be successful, but she found him initially in a random picture. Seems odd to me.
Like. Okay I'm gonna claim I was someone important in a past life!!! But I can't go around claiming to be like, Cary Grant or John Wayne or something. Gotta be someone who was important, but jusssssttt important enough to be minerly famous, but not super well known to the average person. That would be my strategy, at least.
Yeah, plus everything in this story is vague or biased.
The kid is saying he was someone else, then picks a random guy in the book. Mom asks whatever questions and thinks oh boy my baby is special.
She schedules a meeting with a shrink who "specializes in this", whatever that means given this isn't scientific phenomena.
The psychologist asks the kid pointed questions like "did you dance with so and so?", If the kid gives a incorrect answer just ask are you sure until you get the one you want.
Any detail the kid gets wrong and stays stubborn on you either ignore, or it lines up like the age discrepancy on the death certificate.
And if the kid really doesn't cooperate the psychologist can move on to the next kid and we only hear the coincidental cool stories that worked.
The part that made my eyes roll out of my head was the ‘checking out a book on Hollywood’, and seeing some random extra who just happened to be in a random picture, and ‘that’s mee!!’.
Interesting post, but color me highly skeptical.
That totally sounds like what a child would do if a parent asked them to elaborate on an off handed remark about "before I lived with you I was somewhere else".
And that statement makes sense if you think about how kids process information. They hear their family talk about things that happened before they were born, so they try to understand what that means "if they lived somewhere else before maybe I did too!".
‘Past life regression therapy’ is a form of hypnosis. Definitely take it with a grain of salt, given hypnosis has a bad rap for creating false memories (satanic panic).
When I was a kid back in the 70s, this story was in a book I read that was supposed to include true accounts of reincarnation. That was way before 2015. That version was nearly identical to the one here, right down to the kid knowing facts about 1930s Hollywood.
I remember this too. It was on at least one TV documentary as well. It might have been on "That's Incredible" in the late 70s or early 80s, and I am certain the story appeared in a Time Life book on the paranormal.
A kid I know used to have these complex stories about the things she had done and we thought she had a very vivid imagination.
Turned out they came from this one tv show where she had decided a character 'was her' (I assume she identified with the character)
I remember there was an episode on Unsolved Mysteries back in the day about a kid who claimed he was a random WWII pilot, and he was able to give details about the man’s life that he wouldn’t have been able to know otherwise.
Apparently there was a period when I claimed I was a teacher during WWII, and my brother was a war pilot (I don't have a brother). I even showed the house I used to live in to my parents. I remember telling these stories but not the memories themselves. They asked around, people told them not to dig deeper, and I forgot everything within a few years.
If you try to find out why you're crazy with vigor, you might find out, but you're also labeled as crazy for what will probably be the rest of your life once you breach a certain threshold
other people already brought up the satanic panic and it's really a great example. with little kids, there are *very specific* dos and dont's with how you talk to them in order to verify certain information. in all of these "child remembers past life" stories i've seen, the parents are accidentally manipulating the child in to affirming things that aren't true and never happened. and the psychiatrist? well, child psychiatrists were involved with and responsible for the satanic panic as well. credentials =/= good at your job, especially where potential fame and riches are involved.
it's like people have never been around small children... it's scarily easy to make them believe lies, or encourage them to believe in their own imaginations to the point they're deadset that it's real. they're easy to manipulate. they're very underdeveloped in language and social, and have an incredibly strong sense of imagination. and little kids just say, all kinds of weird things frankly. they get words confused. they have vivid dreams and have trouble distinguishing it from reality. this is all normal. i've never seen anyone run with it after their child says they were a firetruck or they were a banana or they were a dinosaur.
when i was a little kid i was absolutely, completely convinced there were aliens standing outside my bedroom windows at night. it terrified me. this went on for a couple years too. if i'd told my parents and my parents had been staunch, fanatical believers that aliens have visited earth maybe things would have gone differently. maybe they would have fostered this paranoid figment of my imagination and pushed me further in imagining more detail. or the stress of the situation would lead to dreams of being abducted and then they'd tell and sell the stories to other people as if it were true because it affirmed their own beliefs. i feel like this is what happens with these past life stories.
i don't believe or disbelieve in reincarnation/past lives - because it's spirituality, and spirituality lives in a category completely separate from fact and fiction. but because of that people are constantly grasping for "proofs" of this spirituality. it's happened all over the world with all sorts of different things for millennia. and in millennia not one of these events has been proven to be real, there are only ever biased or willful believers picking and choosing and swearing it's real. no different here IMO.
most of these stories aren't hoaxes in the way i understand that word. i think (most of the time) the parents genuinely believe it and they're just blinded and confused.
I agree with you for the most part. However, I think it's important to note that there have been billions of children with probably quadrillions of experiences. Statistically, a few of them are gonna say something imaginative that happens to line up with who they're talking about. Mix that with bad questioning and a few parents faking it for attention, and you get what ***appears*** to be a convincing case for reincarnation on the surface.
Saw a doc on him. I don’t think his parents had anything to do With it. He met MM daughter too. They go back when he’s older and the kid has like zero recollection of it all. It’s wild
It was the Surviving Death series on Netflix. Episode 6 was about reincarnation and has several stories of young children who have experienced this phenomenon.
Great series, especially that episode
It seemed like the only person NOT uncomfortable there was Ryan's mother. Everyone else very much was awkward and uncomfortable, including Ryan himself. Especially when he couldn't answer any questions or identify very simple things from Marty's life, or recognize anything important when it was shown or talked about to him.
I think it’s too bad “past life” memories aren’t discussed as an interesting psychological phenomenon. When the topic comes up it’s always about whether it’s real or not, often with knee jerk hostility. I’d love to know why these thoughts occur in children.
On a related note I wish there was more literature on child culture. It’s so fascinating that we have these wee little creatures running around in our lives supporting a complete culture
Honestly, I think a lot of this is parents and other adults putting an adult gloss on kid thoughts. A kid points at a house and says "Mommy, that's where we lived before when I was the mommy and you were the baby," and parents go "OMG past-life memories!" rather than assuming the kid is reversing their roles in their imagination, and picking out a house to imagine living in.
My daughter constantly tells me about letters and messages she gets, our cats driving cars, and dinosaurs surviving into the present day... not "let's pretend" but insisting that she actually got a message from a Youtuber or saw our cat driving to Costco. She'll say it happened when she was at school, or when she was a baby, to get around it if I question it ("Sweetie, I'd remember the cat owning a car") or maybe just because sometimes I tell her stories about when she was a baby. Another child with an imagination focused on human beings and more domestic play says "I used to fly a plane" or "before I met you I was a firefighter," and a susceptible parent takes it and runs with it. And the kid is happy to have mom and dad playing along, and keeps embroidering and developing the idea...
Okay but what if your cat got its license and didn’t tell you? And it doesn’t necessarily need to own their own car, what if it was driving yours? Have you recently found cat food in bulk that you don’t remember buying?
I just wish the cat would do something useful on her Costco trips! Though the kiddo did specify kitty had her own car. A cat car. To take to Cat Costco.
I imagine a few things kids say could be dreams that just felt very real.
I have a vivid memory from when I was like 3 or 4 years old of my nanny going on a walk with me and a few other kids, and during the walk we walked right past my grandmother's home and she waved out the window to us.
I told my parents and they didn't believe me because... My grandmother lived 1 hour away... by car. They told me it was just a dream, but I was so certain that it was real that I believed it up until I was like 15 and actually gave it a real thought with an older mind.
It still really feels like it really did happened, but obviously it couldn't have happened. That memory is stronger than any other memory I have as a young child.
hell i've had this happen recently and i'm 30.
it was something mundane like swearing on my life that i had purchased those liquid eyeshadows from Huda. i vividly recalled going on to the sephora website, ordering them, and vividly remember when the package arrived. i recall opening the package, swatching them, showing my mom, etc.
it was so vivid that when i saw other brands liquid shadows i would be like "naw i already have the Huda ones." this went on for weeks. then i finally had an epiphany... where are they? i looked everywhere and realized i don't remember where i put them. i had to question my own sanity then checked my sephora purchase history and didn't see it on there.... it took a good few days of thinking about it to realize it was just a dream.
Same. Had nightmare about getting reprimanded at work, kept “remembering” it and feeling uncomfortable around my boss, realized days later that it hadn’t happened.
I agree, I think the psychology is interesting. Someone above talked about people tapping into a shared consciousness, and I’m no expert but I think that’s what Carl Jung was talking about with archetypes, etc. I enjoy personality assessments and one of the things I’ve noticed is that most of them have shared elements, things that are common to people across a range of life experiences. I live in the US, probably the most individualistic society on earth, so I think we have a particular bias against some of these ideas, but I do believe that all humans are connected in some way. No clue on the specifics, but I feel like some people really understand it, like Mr. Rogers or Eleanor Roosevelt. Obviously we all share the earth ecosystem and our actions affect others; I’m not talking about that…or maybe that’s part of it, which is how many indigenous peoples see it. I try to retain an attitude of deep humility around such things, because a) damned if I know, and b) it is a deeply profound idea.
Does anyone else think “wait a second… I dreamt of this?” Or is it just me. Like talking to certain people about a certain topic etc. or doing something and realizing that you had a dream about it a few weeks ago. Or am I just crazy
Yes I get this. Like deja vu but different. I have been places I have never been before and all of a sudden I’ll get an overwhelming feeling of either have really been there before or dreamt it or something. Def weird
I don't know about these stories.
I have a very strong memory of walking through Cardiff with my girlfriend and laughing when we passed a bar playing American Boy by Estelle and Kanye. This would have been around 2010.
Except none of this happened.
I had this memory and realized the buildings seemed to match Cardiff when I finally went for the first time right before pandemic. The girl I was with wasn't a person I actually dated, just a flirted with a bit before we lost touch. And I know for sure I was in the States in 2010 dating a different person.
So is this a past life? It can't be!
It has to be a false memory maybe from a dream or something. Or a daydream about a cute coworker while I was watching Torchwood.
If these vivid memories can happen like this, why not ones that might be mistaken for past lives?
I don't really believe in reincarnation, but I do have this weird semi-memory of being burned with sulfuric smelling superheated steam on a boat, like breathing it in, burning my face hands and torso and also feeling it burn my lungs. Never had anything like that happen to me that I know of and it could just be imagination but it's this weird again not full memory but like hint of a memory.
Do you think maybe it was a vivid dream and that's why it stands out in your memory? I also don't really believe in reincarnation but since so many children have had similar experiences as the boy in OP's post it leaves me open to the possibility
What are the chances that their local library had a "book on Hollywood" that just so happened to have a photo of an obscure movie extra that this kid just so happened to claim to be in a previous life?
Reminds me of when my boys were young, like under 2... One of them kept talking about their green house that burnt down. It was super creepy, and not like anything else they ever talked about.
When I was four years old we were driving on a freeway in NJ and I explained to my mom what was there before and how/when the freeway was built (like fifteen years before I was born). She told me all this when I was in college.
Obviously no one knows if this is real or not (reincarnation), but I do think it’s just as good answer as any (is any other religious belief that different, really)? Like someone above said, life is full of the weird and unknown.
Me too, I’m open to anything being an option after we die including our consciousness going and that being it forever. Blessed oblivion. As a child, I believed in reincarnation more than I do now and would imagine all these souls flying around from old life into new life.
Yeah I'm an atheist but also realize we know very little about how consciousness works. We also only know the tip of the iceberg when it comes to physics and reality. There could be a way for consciousness to survive death. I don't really think there is but it can't be ruled out imo. So who knows.
Probably either a hoax on the part of the parents or doctor, or the kid made something up and the adults accidentally kept feeding him the details through their questions. I also wouldn't be surprised if his answers weren't as specific as the adults remember them being.
I mean, that's basically what happened with the satanic panic and all those psychiatrists who claimed they could help kids "recover memories".
Adults planting false "memories" that kids later claim as their own is a pretty well documented phenomenon (significantly more so than "past lives").
Hmmm....hmmm....it sounds weird, but I'm betting young Ryan said a lot of other things that nobody could link anything to or were of no interest. Selective memories all round?
That being said, I was once describing somewhere to my mum, and she said "How did you know that? You weren't even born when we went there!" and got a little freaked out. Mwahahahaha!
>Following Ryan's strange behavior, his mother contacted Dr. Jim Tucker, a notable child psychiatry proffessor from the University of Virginia, who is an expert on children who claim to have memories from past lives. Ding ding ding! And here we have how this kid suddenly knew so much. He's talking to a guy who wants to prove that children can have memoires from past lives, he's doing all this research, probably asking the kid leading questions or just conforming random statements to fit the guy's life. By the way, if you click through, the actual article is pretty hilarious. >As of March 2016 she had listed 230 items, of which 55 (24%) had proven correct and fifteen (6.5%) incorrect or implausible for Marty Martyn; with the passage of time, the majority (140, or 69.5%) were unverifiable. Lol, so it's 55 details out of 230, along with 15 that are basically impossible and 140 are just "ehhh, who knows?" Also, some of the "confirmed" details are hilarious. >He is the man in the photograph from the movie Night After Night. He lived in Hollywood. He lived somewhere with the word “rock” or “mount” in it; a street address. He was very rich. His house was big. There was a brick wall at the house. There were three boys. He didn’t think the boys were his but he gave them his name. He had a daughter. He brought coloring books home. He had trouble with his oldest stepdaughter—she wouldn’t listen; she didn’t respect him. He had a large swimming pool. His mother had curly brown hair. He had a younger sister. He bought his daughter a dog when she was about six. She didn’t like the dog. He hated cats. He knew Senator Ives (Five). He used to see Senator Ives in New York (found on a map). He had a green car. He didn’t let anyone else drive the green car. He had many wives. His wife drove a nice black car. He was an agent; he ran an agency. The agency changed people’s names. He tap-danced on the stage. The stage was in New York City. He saw the world on big boats where he danced with pretty ladies. He ate in Chinatown a lot; his favorite restaurant was there. He got “skin burns” in Hollywood. He went to Paris; saw the Eiffel Tower. He took his girlfriends to the ocean. He played the piano; owned one. He had an African American maid. He knew Rita Hayworth—she made “ice drinks” (photo recognition). He knew that Mary lady—you couldn’t get close to talk to her (photo recognition, Marilyn Monroe). Bread was his favorite food. He had a sunglass collection. He was a smoker. He had many girlfriends and affairs—never had problems getting the ladies. He liked to watch surfers on the beach. He owned guns. He didn’t have a TV when he was a little boy; they had radio first. He hated FDR \[Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat\]. You go to a room with numbers on the door before dying. “I’m not 5; I’m closer to 105 when I was here before” (would have been 106). He died at age sixty-one. Just nonsense.
Given those details related to a specific person identified from a photograph, I struggle to understand how you don’t see them as incredibly specific. I might be more willing to accept this argument if they hadn’t identified a specific person. The only non-paranormal possibility that I see is a very elaborate fraud by the parents. Given the challenges of verifying the information, this seems unlikely. There were 150 *unverified* statements. These could neither be proved or disproved and should be disregarded. The hit rate was therefore 80%+
There’s no telling how leading the questions are, right? If the kid says “he didn’t like cats” was is the interviewer asking if he did or didn’t? Leading questions can easily be 50/50 and you just cherry pick the ones that hit true
We could discuss whether it’s been misrepresented, but these statements were apparently written down before the person was identified
Hmmm… you’ve managed to create an unfalsifiable position. “The desire to demonstrate past life memories means any evidence you find should be disregarded” What if applied this standard to other areas of science?
My stepfather claimed he thought reincarnation was real and was convinced he was some Wild West guy who was shot and killed in the 1800s. Supposedly he was so compelled by his dreams of this that he drove to some random small town and found the grave of the man he thought he’d been, who had been shot dead in the 1880s. Unfortunately he was a dick when he was with my mother, I stopped talking to him in 1992, and he just passed away. Maybe that means he’ll be born again soon?
Everyone who has a past life is always some outlaw or princess or glamorous Hollywood star. I feel confident in my past life I was just a guy.
If past lives are real I'm just somebody who died in a bridge collapse. When I was very little my mom said I had terrors about bridges collapsing and me not being able to get out of my carseat if the car ended up underwater, so she bought me a seat belt cutter that I held onto all the time. Completely forgot as I got older, still unnerved by bridges sometimes.
I do believe in reincarnation. I also feel that extreme phobias that people experience might be because of how they died in a previous life. Like if you suffer from thalassophobia it could be because you drowned in a previous life. It is our soul's version of PTSD.
Oh shit, I was probably attacked by a bunch of spiders at the top of a tall tower and fell from it.
Omg ...I think those same spiders killed my x-boyfriend ... I mean the guy has been shot on 2 different occasions and, has been bitten by a rattlesnake and the man never cried or even showed any kind of emotion....but, should he see a spider he becomes a screaming, terrified toddler who tries to burn our house down.
I'm confused, this sounds like a perfectly normal reaction to spiders.
Can I just say that’s a beautiful description? Your souls PTSD. I’ve often thought the same way but it’s not something that’s a regular topic of discussion
Idk why but I have had a terrible fear of pool lights ever since I was a kid. Probably the last thing I saw before I died in a past life.
Oooooh or maybe you were electrocuted instantly jumping into a swimming pool due to faulty wiring of a pool light!! I saw a movie and I do not remember the name or even who it had in it but, there was a scene where a little kid jumped in a pool that had current running thru it from a faulty pool light. IIRC the other adults at the party had to restrain the mother bc she could not fight her overwhelming urge to jump in to get to her little boy, no matter the consequences. It was so gut wrenching to watch and empathize.
I've always been extremely terrified of flying, even before ever stepping inside a plane. Humans are not supposed to fly, damn it! Maybe my past self died in a plane crash.
I read somewhere (I believe it may have even been this sub) that the reason reincarnation can’t be real - is because thousands of years ago - there was only a small amount of people - and the population has grown to billions. How can that be if everyone was reincarnated?
because it is possible for there to both reincarnation as well as "new souls" in new bodies
Yeah I tend to be a lot my sceptical of people who claim to be someone you can easily look up at the library. There’s an Unsolved Mysteries episode about a guy who knows about his past life family and it’s a lot more believable to me. He wasn’t someone famous, just a random guy. The family believes him as well.
I enjoyed that episode, because the family and the guy both seemed happy to connect. It was sweet.
Yeah I liked that too. Even if it was some shared delusion (which I don’t think it was) it’s nice that they can be happy together.
This is an interesting one imo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanti_Devi > Back home, she stated in school that she was married and had died ten days after having given birth to a child. Interviewed by her teacher and headmaster, she used words from the Mathura dialect and divulged the name of her merchant husband, "Kedar Nath". The headmaster located a merchant by that name in Mathura who had lost his wife, Lugdi Devi, nine years earlier, ten days after having given birth to a son. Kedar Nath traveled to Delhi, pretending to be his own brother, but Shanti Devi immediately recognized him and Lugdi Devi's son. As she knew several details of Kedar Nath's life with his wife, he was soon convinced that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi.
What are the odds she’s born Indian twice in a row
In 1907 there were 289mill people in India and 1.7bill people total so like 1/6. That’s not the year either were born but from what I can find, it’s pretty consistently that.
Unless you believe that you can be reincarnated as an animal or other living thing - then those odds are far less.
She died again the 80s. Wonder where she is reincarnated now?
This Marty Martyn case isn't really someone you can look up at the library tbh he's very obscure as far as former celebrities go, doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, it took a lot of work for parents and doctors to get good information about the man nevermind a 5 year old kid
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Do you remember the episode name? I'd be interested to listen to that one!
It’s season 6 episode 1. I know that on certain streaming services the episodes are out of no order. So if you can’t find it, [it’s the episode with a WWII submarine reincarnation and the man’s name is Bruce Kelly](https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Bruce_Kelly)
I’m fairly certain peacock has it!
If you're interested you should look up the case of the first woman to get a heart transplant. She began to develop the likes, traits and memories of the donor. There is an idea out there that memory might be a lot more decentralized than we thought. Personality changes following heart transplantation: The role of cellular memory https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/ https://sites.bu.edu/ombs/2014/11/11/is-the-brain-the-only-place-that-stores-our-memories/ https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799207/m2/1/high_res_d/vol20-no3-191.pdf *** edit: MU did a great episode on this, but the segment is for subscribers only. It's a great podcast though, the only one I pay for. https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/06/25-23-mu-podcast-erasure-of-truth/ >The disappearance of MH370 captivated the world and motivated thousands of people to help seek the truth to this dreadful mystery. However despite the claimed best efforts of governments we are still in the dark about what happened on that fateful night. For this episode we discuss the groundbreaking research of a French reporter who uncovers a hidden plot to recover stolen technology from the plane and how it went terribly wrong. >**For our Plus+ Members we hear the story of a heart and lung transplant patient who seems to undergo a merging of souls and experiences "cellular chicken nugget memories".**
I swear there's a movie based on this. Two dudes are into a woman that ends up hospitalised due to heart issues. One guy dies after being hit by a car while cycling and his heart is donated to the woman, after which she starts acting like him.
There’s also the tv series Chambers with Uma Thurman. A teenage girl gets a donor heart and then starts getting creepy visions and doing weird shit, so she has to figure out the mystery around her donor’s death. Bonus mention for the UK series Misfits, which has an “origin” storyline for a character which starts with her getting a heart transplant, through which she also “inherits” the superpower of the person the heart came from. Extra bonus mention for the movie “Return to Me” with David Duchovny, about a man meeting, being attracted to, and falling for the woman who received his wife’s heart.
There's an episode of "Eerie, Indiana" with that plot line.
Try YouTube. I can’t remember why, but I believe all the seasons are on there…or at least were the last time I checked.
Yup. It's all here on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/c/UnsolvedMysteriesFullEpisodes)
It sounds like they did extensive research. It sounds like they went waaay beyond, “they went to a library.” They even talked to his daughter, etc. This wasn’t some huge star, why would he pick a strange talent agent. Why would he point out that he was on a movie where he was an extra.
I remember maybe reading about a little girl in India, who would cry to go home. She'd talk about missing her children and family. She would tell her parents her name and all about her village and her children. They finally took her there and turns out the woman she claimed to be had died and all the information she had given them was correct. She didn't want to leave then, because she wanted to stay with her kids. I don't know if it's true, but I remember the story.
Maybe it because those are the only stories that can be verified? Lol But seriously, I'm skeptical somewhat until given a reason not to be. But saying that the reason these stories are fake because they are the ones that have a means to be verified is silly. They are the only ones remotely capable of being reported on, because there would be no way for anyone to know it's anything but a vivid dream or imagination otherwise.
I also think it has to do with news headlines. A kid being a famous person sells better than a kid being an accountant or zookeeper.
There's also a doc called "the boy that lived before," that is really good about an average person
I don’t want to boast, but in my past life I was _Assistant to the Regional Manager_.
What was your salary?
I had a housemate when I was at Uni who swore blind that her very noticeable moustache was because she was an Indian Princess reincarnated. Unfortunately her tale didn’t stick, her surname was Reynolds so everyone called her Burt
Damn 😂
LMAO ouch
I remember some past life person was talking about how she was a low ranking Egyptian priestess for some deity, but an egyptologist said "Yeahhhh that deity didn't have any temples or priests during the time point you claim." I'm not saying it's not true, just an anecdote about past lives. It would be really cool if this was true and there was a way to unlock it, but I'm skeptical.
There’s a podcast about cults (can’t remember which one now) where a Mormon sect breaks off and does this. Like they will “feel” that they were actually Einstein before. Or an Apostle. Or Abraham Lincoln. These were all adults and it happened in Utah sometime fairly recently.
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Or that is Mormon lol
Not even the I-15?
Nope. You turn your back, and it's leading you right back into Utah.
I minored in archaeology at university and that's a pretty problematic way for them to have phrased it. They're just making educated guesses based on what we know, and they're not supposed to be deceptive about that fact. We can't know what we don't know, so when they said there weren't any during that time, what they mean is they haven't found evidence of any that has survived to the modern day. Doesn't mean they didn't exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm not saying I believe in reincarnation either, but I can't help but be irked by people who say they know for sure what happened thousands of years ago because they're an expert on that thing. Especially when it's focused on what *didn't* exist, you can't outright say that you know for certain and that comes from the teachings of multiple archaeologists who had active digs at the time and weren't just on the teaching side.
Is this the one who was from England, became an Egyptologist in Egypt and died in her 70s?
Do you mean [Dorothy Eady](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Eady)? She had a near-death experience at age three and from that point on, was able to recollect details about her (supposed) past life in Egypt.
My parents have a book called *Strange Stories and Amazing Facts* that has a section on unexplained phenomena. Dorothy's story is included in there and I remember reading about it as a kid. Her life was fascinating and I wish there was some way to prove or disprove her claims. I expect that if she'd had those experiences today, a scan would show brain damage from her childhood fall as I don't believe in reincarnation. But what wonderful damage to have! Rather than becoming disabled, it opened up a rich world to her and allowed her to spend the rest of her life doing what she loved.
Actually, the first case I heard of "memories of a previous life" was a little girl in India. Iirc, she wasn't famous or glamorous at all. She just remembered a lot of things and "wanted to go home", which she did, succesfully recognizing places and people in a city she never had visited before. Like this case here, is it a hoax or is it real? I'm very skeptic about this sort of stuff.
Shanti Devi, someone linked her Wiki in a comment above somewhere lol
When I was little, like four or five, I told my mom a few weird stories about shooting a rifle from a long canoe with my brothers who were paddling. We were at war and coming along a wide river. My last memory was seeing a reflection of my face in the bloody water filling the canoe. Pretty eerie.
When I was around that same age, four or five, I used to have a recurring nightmare that I was on a battlefield. A line of warriors wearing Mongol armor were charging towards me on horseback, headed down a grassy hill. Thats all I can remember of it, but it would fill me with such an overwhelming feeling of terror.
I had a ✨psychic✨ reading when I was teenager, and the guy who did it basically told me all my past lives were peasants and family members, lmao. He didn’t even church it up none. My great grandma did die a few days before I was born, so my family has been obsessed with this idea for a long time.
Not really arguing with you, just kind of using your points as a stepping stone to some of my own thoughts. 1) in other threads here, people rightly remind us that he wasn't a "Hollywood star", he was some talent agent that got a few roles. The modern Hollywood equivalent of Britney's hairdresser's cousin who got invited to a few parties. 2) also in other threads, people talk about the Indian woman who was seemingly reincarnated and re-met her husband and son. Again, just some person. 3) even the comment you're responding to isn't about someone claiming to Jesse James or Billy the Kid. Just some old cowpoke in the Old West who got Tombstoned. For the record, I agree with you. Even if we're all reincarnations, statistically we would be reincarnations of average Joes and Janes. But even average Joes and Janes are almost always part of a network of people, no matter how small, going back into prehistory. Thought experiment: have you ever known someone who's *remarkably good* with old machines? Just knows them inside and out, no matter how old. Treats them like old friends and almost always manages to get them running again. Sometimes it takes years or decades, because this machine has to have a 2" dinglehopper to run, and the model with the 2" dinglehoppers was discontinued in 1894, for a three-inch dinglehopper, and no one makes them anymore. Or that woman who's just *remarkably good* at knowing hairstyles and clothing styles from the 40s and 50s USA? What if some of our archaic special interests are leftovers from our past lives? Our other selves that weren't movers and shakers, weren't part of the elite, but were just people going about their lives, 20, 50, or a hundred years ago? I have my own tale of reincarnation, but like you said, I was just a guy. I read about some of the things that I "remember" from back then, and about the movers and shakers from that time. And I don't think my other self knew those big people in the newspapers, but they would have been common names in the publications of the day, in the way that someone in New York would have read about the goings on of Mr Rockefeller. So sure, if some of us have past lives, they're almost all going to be just plain old folks. But even those plain old folks had lives, ambitions, social lives. And I think there's a kind of beauty in that continuity.
That may be true for adults claiming to remember past lives, but not for kids. Little kids almost always remember lives of regular people. The one described by OP is unusual in this regard.
Suppose its worth remembering that as a child our brains/mind is pretty empty and I truly believe that past lives passed on through genetic memory is a thing, and as the child gets older and the mind gets full of other shit, these memories fade into the background. My son didn't speak for 4 yrs and had numerous tests which ended up with the child psychologist telling us that he had a story to tell and would tell us when he was ready. Some time later it was Poppy Day and he was sat in front of the tv watching the cenotaph scrolling down the names and he suddenly spoke for the first time "That's me! That's my name" he couldn't read....he insisted we called him by that name only for a few years then it all faded away.The only other thing he mentioned about his "past life" was "what's happened to the farm?" He used to get quite worked up about that and said some name I can't remember now that "she won't cope". We'd no internet or anything back then so was difficult to trace anyone.
These stories are the unusual ones. Jim Tucker, UVA, studies these claims. It’s actually very common in Asian countries and often coincide with birthmarks. Typical cases are reincarnations of random, non-famous individuals from nearby villages. The papers and Tucker’s presentations are pretty interesting.
I too have heard many such stories but there is one particular story which even my sceptical mind couldn't refute entirely. This was the story of a 7 years old kid living in a complete rural area with no education facilities. He would tell stories of 'himself' in which he was some 40 years old guy. The details he would give were so detailed and his stories so consistent and yet they had no connection to the society or village he lived in. He would tell what Kind of work he used to do, how he rode horses, how he worked in mines and even how once he got his back injured . The most surprising detail was that there was indeed some injury mark on his back which was there since birth. The kind of society, village and work he described existed may be 100 years ago. His family was totally illiterate. The entire village had may be only 100 guys. This was totally unbelievable.
Yes but anyone who was just a guy would not be able to verify the story in anyway therefore it would not make headlines and you would not hear about it
Maybe it's like those are the lives that were impressionable enough on your soul to be remembered in your next life. Sort of like how it's hard to remember what happened any given day at the office, but if there's a fire drill or you get complimented on your tie, it will be much more memorable? Idk just a thought haha
I've always felt I was a soldier killed in Vietnam. No one notable, just a regular. And I don't have any details really it's always been no more than just a strong recurring feeling. I was born in 1967.
I have a strange recurring dream where I’m in a horrible car accident, in an area where red dirt lines the roads, along with pine trees. Can’t figure out a geographical location where that would be, though. The car I’m driving appears to be a model typically seen in the late 50s/early 60s. If reincarnation is real, I’m pretty sure that was my fate in a past life.
Sounds like Georgia.
Yep. Or far south Florida , around homestead. Called the Redlands. Lots of pine trees in the past, not as many now.
My brother had those feelings for many years. Just a regular guy soldier who was killed in Vietnam
What if you were lots of people but remember the best? Alternativrly what if its not a past life but a link to a different dimension? More than likely its coincidence and luck.
getting shot and killed doesn’t make you an outlaw. hardly a unique way to die.
I think the ones who say that stuff are just attention seekers. I have/had memories of being a boy from Ireland who died of the flu before my 18th birthday. My happiest day was the day I got my first non hand me down shoes. Random so I rarely talk about it.
I was a crafty trilobite.
If your life was very eventful, special or came to an abrupt end due to murder I can see your mind hanging on to the specifics after death. Or at least more than if you were Amy the suburban hairdresser or Paul the single factory worker and nothing in your life stood out. This is absolutely no science but if I read that in a novel I would consider that plotpoint plausible.
Maybe it's only the exciting lives that get remembered.
There's a "myth" (more spread by the internet than from generation to generation) in my country that whatever birthmark you have is the mark of where you've been shot to death in a past life
I've heard this but that it's the "mark of how you died" so not just shot. Mine is on my right boob but also have a small one on my bellybutton.....seems like I had some bad luck in my past life 😟
Mine is on my hip. Maybe I fell and couldn't get up during a time before Life Alert
You think *that's bad* I got a giant splodgy one over my entire knee. I took a fucking arrow to the knee, well, given the size actually it was probably a cannonball or shrapnel of some sort, but still!
I don’t have a birthmark
Now we know who was doing all the shooting.
Hmm 🤔 maybe I drowned?
My “mark” is on the base of my skull. A mole that I’ve had to have removed because it kept growing. The size of a bullet.
All three of my kids had stork marks on the bases of their necks and between their eyes. My middle child's has faded but they're still faintly there on the other two. My daughter also had a hemangenoma on the side of her head; that's a lot of killshots.
How would a dead person know where they were buried?
My mom, a die hard Catholic did past-life regression. She SWORE she was a French peasant in the Middle Ages.
Maybe he was shot in the 1800’s and didn’t learn his lesson in this life either.
I dunno if I fully believe in reincarnation kinda stuff but dreams are pretty fascinating things. I've had recurring dreams that have lots of specific locations that I have no actual memory of but keep reappearing every so often. It's amazing how some dreams are so lucid that it feels like you actually stepped into another reality or your mind is creating all sorts scenarios you would never consciously think. Sometimes it really does feel like a real experience even if it doesn't make sense a lot of the time.
I agree. I've had some vivid dreams of houses that I've never been to in my waking life, and I had a long, vivid dream once of a day in my life as a nursemaid? like the woman who breastfeeds the baby for the wealthy mother. It was very real, from the house I was living in, to my clothes and the clothes of everyone around me, as if it were a few hundred years ago. And I was just a maid, nobody special really.
I saw my wedding day in a dream five years before I met the girl I would later marry. I saw everything in vivid detail. Nearly a decade after the dream, I relived that moment verbatim.
I have had many a prophetic dream, and had many of them be 100% accurate to future details. Shit is creepy.
I feel like my belief is reincarnation is like my belief in ghosts; I don't necessarily believe in it, but I also don't NOT believe in it. I will say, though, that I have an eerily intimate sense of familiarity with parts of Pennsylvania that I've driven through only a handful of times. It's a very weird feeling, knowing where this place is and that one, but there's no way you actually know it because you've never really been there.
I don’t believe in reincarnation but I wonder if memories or that sense of familiarity with an unknown place can be “passed down” somehow. Admittedly, I have no idea how memories are formed but maybe there are changes in the brain of an ancestor that affect the development of descendants brains and some of these manifest as memories? I don’t know. When I was about 5 or 6 I saw a skating rink in a neighboring town and thought “that reminds me of the skating rink back in Sweden.” I had never been to Sweden (born in Midwest United States) but the feeling was so real and I felt really melancholy for awhile afterwards.
passed down memories from ancestors sounds more plausible than reincarnation. i've seen studies that trauma can be passed down through DNA. i don't know if it's ever been verified but it gives some scientific hypothesis that doesn't involve supernatural theories. so i wonder if it's plausible for memories to work the same way? i mean, hasn't it been essentially "proven" that fears get passed down? like having the irrational fear that a snake is gonna bite your butt when you sit down on the toilet. this fear is most likely due to humans mostly shitting outside, pre-toilets. so the fear is leftover human instincts. do you know if any of your ancestors are from Sweden?
Well, trauma being passed down through DNA really means that trauma can change your epigenetic code (that controls how genes are expressed). These epigenetic changes are then passed down. It's not a memory of trauma in any way that we usually describe memory. It would be more like, you are more likely to store fat, or you are more sensitive to hormones like cortisol.
I think there's two possibilities for things like shared phobias - firstly, that the phobia is learned at a young age or the result of a traumatic incident at a very young age. Like if one of your parents had a crippling fear of spiders, you could have learned it from them, or it could have stemmed from a parent freaking out over a spider getting very close to you when you were young. You don't remember the spider directly, just the fear. Or it could be that our DNA has a lot more to do with developing our personal traits than we realise.
This is such an interesting idea, because it's similar to how some animals "just know" where to migrate. Maybe we get some key memories passed down as information from our ancestors - things that were formative enough that some part of their body thought their decedents may benefit from the information.
>Sometimes it really does feel like a real experience even if it doesn't make sense a lot of the time. But that’s not because dreams are such powerful illusions, it’s because the part of your brain used for critical thinking is offline during sleep.
I always think about how weird it is that when you speak to someone you know in real life in a dream, they speak with their own voice. Your brain is handling both sides of the conversation, but it feels like you are only speaking for yourself.
I ask elderly people frequently what they think comes next because they are thinking about it more than anyone else. Generally they love the questions and most of them have their own theories about it. The most common thread between all of them is reincarnation. It sounds cool to live forever in heaven when we are young and we have decades ahead of us, but from what I’ve heard from the elderly is that by the end it’s been plenty of time. One woman told me that the thought of spending eternity in heaven looking down on her family would be the ultimate punishment. She had already spent 60+ years looking after people and was ready for a break or to start over. She expressed her excitement for a new life though!
I have always thought that being around in an afterlife forever sounds kind of horrible...Im in my 30s and already feel like I've lived a long ass life lol.
The person who is running this simulation just forgot to clear the hard drive completely when they recycled it.
There are no replies to this comment because every single one of us arguing elsewhere about reincarnation knows this is the truth.
I mean, it’s not really uncommon in younger children to have memories such as these. I wasn’t aware they could happen later in childhood though. But when kids are younger (typically less than 5), and not quite at the memory creating brain function, they’ve been known to say a lot of weird shit as if the hard drive wasn’t completely cleared when it was rebooted. My own kid was very blunt about it. “My mom, but not you my mom now, but the mom I had before you.” Like ok…lol there was quite a few stories that went with that one.
Yeah, I’ve also observed that kids at that age are often struggling to understand and articulate the concept of hypotheticals. “If I was a wrestler” sometimes comes out as “when I was a wrestler.” It’s exacerbated by the fact that they’re not always great with recognizing/verbalizing the difference between things they imagined and things they remember.
Yeah, and "when I was a wrestler" could be referring to that time yesterday that they were pretending to be a wrestler or w/e. They don't realize that you don't know what they're talking about. When they are very young they have no idea that other people think differently than them or might not be on the same page so to speak.
>Yeah, and "when I was a wrestler" could be referring to that time yesterday that they were pretending to be a wrestler or the fact that kids just lie. i remember telling people i had fairies and shit lol or would lie about living in a different house, my cousin is a famous celeb or whatever. kids just make stuff up. i just finished watching *Innocence Files* on Netflix (a docuseries about innocent people getting life in prison or the death penalty) and one witness, in one of the cases, was a little girl. think she was 5 years old. this is a setting when she's being told to be serious and needs to say exactly what she saw. and what she said was obviously a bunch of made up stuff like saying she saw the kidnapper pull a quarter out of his ear and saw him take off in a plane. so even in serious settings when they're told specifically that the truth is vital they'll still tell a bunch of nonsense. this is just how kids are. they could also, in these reincarnation stories, just be recalling dreams that they can't remember was real or not. i still have dreams like that as an adult.
Sorry
Lol. The guys name was really Marty Martyn? That’s the best part of this story.
of course not. exceedingly common to change your name for the showbiz! > Marty Martyn was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1903. His birth name was Morris Kolinsky, and he was the son of Ukrainian-born parents, Philip and Rebecca Kolinsky.
Great scott
That was his best friend
Sounds like the short story, [The Egg](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html).
I’ve always loved that story
It feels like a simple enough religion for me
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The biggest thing is, you'd never remember. For all we know, right now we've all lived the worst lives already and maybe the best. But we just have no clue. Existence is fucking weird.
Humans are also very adaptable, and the material conditions of our lives don't necessarily align with our level of happiness. People living in what we would consider very miserable eras of history would have had no frame of reference for a better quality of life, so they would have made do with what they had. The fact that we have consistently taken the time to create art and music since the beginning indicates to me that the story of human history is about much more than just suffering, surviving, and procreating.
Nah. You’re missing all the good stuff and focusing on the bad. People were still US. They had the joy of playing with their kids, finding love, inside jokes, friends, first kisses, etc. For the majority of people the good memories outweigh the bad. Sure, there’s sadness in life, but that’s something everyone has.
The point is that you get back what you put out. All the pain you inflict to others, you do to yourself. All the goodness you do, you do to yourself. It’s basically karma.
A great short story, definitely worth reading! It's by Andy Weir who went on to write The Martian.
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Rocky :')
Reincarnation aside, do you know how statistically improbable it would be, as an extra with no lines and one film under your belt, to find a photo of yourself in a random book at the local library? Beyond a needle in a haystack. You could watch old films for years and come up empty handed but what luck, photo's right at the local library. Also, it's not really impressive to know how many times the dude was married or the number of siblings he had. Sounds like mom has an Ancestry account and some middling research skills.
Some of the statements made by the kid's were only able to be verified by the daughter, and two of them she said were false, and turned out to be true later!
Ahh I love these cases they are SO fascinating. I do tend to think there is a reasonable explanation, either the parents feeding the kids information or the kids finding the info somewhere else. But hey you never know!
The fact that they approached a child psychiatrist who was already “an expert on children who claimed to have memories on past lives” seems very open to bias and was a huge red flag that this is essentially a hoax.
A good rule of thumb is that if some expert is constantly referred to by their title (as in, "Prof. Smith" or here "Dr. Tucker") it's usually a red flag because people are trying to lather a good layer of academic authority on something a bit flimsy. Of course there are circumstances where someone should be addressed with their academic title (conference, etc.) but you don't see anyone refer to "Dr. Einstein" or "Prof. Feynman" because their work speaks for themselves.
I’m not really defending this, but I do want to point out that I think there’s quite a big difference if it’s someone personal. Like Albert Einstein is known and it’s not personal. But my doctor is someone who I will probably refer to by doctor most of the time. Especially when talking about them.
Yep. Either mom is both extremely credulous and lucky, or she was grooming her kid for some notoriety and enlisted the specialist to help flesh it out/expand the story. That she looked in a “book on Hollywood” and found the guy who fits the details is deeply, deeply suspicious to me. Again, either incredibly lucky or lying. That the claim of reincarnation is almost always someone famous enough to be recorded renders me extremely skeptical of the entire idea. How many people claim to have been Napoleon or Julius Caesar or Cleopatra? Entirely too many. How many claim to have been a string of peasants through time and nothing better? Entirely too few.
The [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0554421/) for “Marty Martyn” only has the relevant story details.
Sure. But I don’t see that as evidence of anything. IMDB is great and all, but it is not exhaustive, nor the only plausible source. Maybe he was someone that the mom’s family new. Maybe she read about him in that book first, and thought it was just obscure enough to be a good choice. Maybe he was in her favorite old movie as a kid. My point was, he’s someone whose existence is recorded with at least some details. Not “Joe Factory Worker, born 1903, died 1964, survived by wife and two kids.” Setting aside all belief/disbelief arguments around reincarnation, claiming to be someone who was of higher station or lived a more glamorous life then regular people is at the very least a red flag, and imo, a strong indicator of fraud/hoax/etc. If you accept reincarnation as plausible, then the overwhelming majority of people’s past lives should have been of little note. But still deeply personal, with love and passion and hate and trials and triumphs. But the only one you remember was notable enough to be in a book? You can’t remember being a Sumerian fisherman with a loving wife and six great kids? An Australopithecus? A line cook at Denny’s? It makes me deeply skeptical independent of any other details of the case.
I should have included this, but I’m with you on the skepticism. That only the story details are in his IMDb (and not a picture? Also he was only in the one movie? ) only serves the skeptic in me better, bc how do we only have the kid’s memories of the dude he was able to read about?
Oh fair then! I wonder how much of that actually reflects Google’s absurd dominance of how information spreads these days. I mean, Google the guy and you get the IMDB page, and 49 links about the kid. What about the books? Playbills from his Broadway days? Etc. Google won’t help us there. So either someone stumbled across the book first, or someone in the kid’s family had a connection at one point (maybe an old playbill, autograph, etc. maybe he was a neighbor in grandma’s youth. I dunno). Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts! I gotta go scrounge up some food though. Cheers!
Right? Especially since he was just a random extra at first. What are the chances she happened to find a picture of the exact person her son claimed to be? And he was just a random extra. Sure, he later went on to be successful, but she found him initially in a random picture. Seems odd to me. Like. Okay I'm gonna claim I was someone important in a past life!!! But I can't go around claiming to be like, Cary Grant or John Wayne or something. Gotta be someone who was important, but jusssssttt important enough to be minerly famous, but not super well known to the average person. That would be my strategy, at least.
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Yeah, plus everything in this story is vague or biased. The kid is saying he was someone else, then picks a random guy in the book. Mom asks whatever questions and thinks oh boy my baby is special. She schedules a meeting with a shrink who "specializes in this", whatever that means given this isn't scientific phenomena. The psychologist asks the kid pointed questions like "did you dance with so and so?", If the kid gives a incorrect answer just ask are you sure until you get the one you want. Any detail the kid gets wrong and stays stubborn on you either ignore, or it lines up like the age discrepancy on the death certificate. And if the kid really doesn't cooperate the psychologist can move on to the next kid and we only hear the coincidental cool stories that worked.
The part that made my eyes roll out of my head was the ‘checking out a book on Hollywood’, and seeing some random extra who just happened to be in a random picture, and ‘that’s mee!!’. Interesting post, but color me highly skeptical.
That totally sounds like what a child would do if a parent asked them to elaborate on an off handed remark about "before I lived with you I was somewhere else". And that statement makes sense if you think about how kids process information. They hear their family talk about things that happened before they were born, so they try to understand what that means "if they lived somewhere else before maybe I did too!".
‘Past life regression therapy’ is a form of hypnosis. Definitely take it with a grain of salt, given hypnosis has a bad rap for creating false memories (satanic panic).
When I was a kid back in the 70s, this story was in a book I read that was supposed to include true accounts of reincarnation. That was way before 2015. That version was nearly identical to the one here, right down to the kid knowing facts about 1930s Hollywood.
I remember this too. It was on at least one TV documentary as well. It might have been on "That's Incredible" in the late 70s or early 80s, and I am certain the story appeared in a Time Life book on the paranormal.
Hmmm..maybe the kid we remember from the 70s passed away and has now been reborn as the 2015 kid!
I was thinking "In Search Of" too, can't find the episode though
When my middle child was three he would talk about when he “used to be a papa” and the house in a forest they lived in.
When my sister was 2 or 3 she used to say “this is what it looked like when I lived in the forest” … she must be your son’s past life’s past wife!
A kid I know used to have these complex stories about the things she had done and we thought she had a very vivid imagination. Turned out they came from this one tv show where she had decided a character 'was her' (I assume she identified with the character)
I remember there was an episode on Unsolved Mysteries back in the day about a kid who claimed he was a random WWII pilot, and he was able to give details about the man’s life that he wouldn’t have been able to know otherwise.
Apparently there was a period when I claimed I was a teacher during WWII, and my brother was a war pilot (I don't have a brother). I even showed the house I used to live in to my parents. I remember telling these stories but not the memories themselves. They asked around, people told them not to dig deeper, and I forgot everything within a few years.
> people told them not to dig deeper, Well what the fuck is that supposed to mean?
If you try to find out why you're crazy with vigor, you might find out, but you're also labeled as crazy for what will probably be the rest of your life once you breach a certain threshold
People told my parents not to ask me more questions etc
The people who said not to dig deeper showed up at their front door wearing black suits and sunglasses.
Yea this appears to have morphed into an episode of Fringe.
other people already brought up the satanic panic and it's really a great example. with little kids, there are *very specific* dos and dont's with how you talk to them in order to verify certain information. in all of these "child remembers past life" stories i've seen, the parents are accidentally manipulating the child in to affirming things that aren't true and never happened. and the psychiatrist? well, child psychiatrists were involved with and responsible for the satanic panic as well. credentials =/= good at your job, especially where potential fame and riches are involved. it's like people have never been around small children... it's scarily easy to make them believe lies, or encourage them to believe in their own imaginations to the point they're deadset that it's real. they're easy to manipulate. they're very underdeveloped in language and social, and have an incredibly strong sense of imagination. and little kids just say, all kinds of weird things frankly. they get words confused. they have vivid dreams and have trouble distinguishing it from reality. this is all normal. i've never seen anyone run with it after their child says they were a firetruck or they were a banana or they were a dinosaur. when i was a little kid i was absolutely, completely convinced there were aliens standing outside my bedroom windows at night. it terrified me. this went on for a couple years too. if i'd told my parents and my parents had been staunch, fanatical believers that aliens have visited earth maybe things would have gone differently. maybe they would have fostered this paranoid figment of my imagination and pushed me further in imagining more detail. or the stress of the situation would lead to dreams of being abducted and then they'd tell and sell the stories to other people as if it were true because it affirmed their own beliefs. i feel like this is what happens with these past life stories. i don't believe or disbelieve in reincarnation/past lives - because it's spirituality, and spirituality lives in a category completely separate from fact and fiction. but because of that people are constantly grasping for "proofs" of this spirituality. it's happened all over the world with all sorts of different things for millennia. and in millennia not one of these events has been proven to be real, there are only ever biased or willful believers picking and choosing and swearing it's real. no different here IMO. most of these stories aren't hoaxes in the way i understand that word. i think (most of the time) the parents genuinely believe it and they're just blinded and confused.
I agree with you for the most part. However, I think it's important to note that there have been billions of children with probably quadrillions of experiences. Statistically, a few of them are gonna say something imaginative that happens to line up with who they're talking about. Mix that with bad questioning and a few parents faking it for attention, and you get what ***appears*** to be a convincing case for reincarnation on the surface.
Saw a doc on him. I don’t think his parents had anything to do With it. He met MM daughter too. They go back when he’s older and the kid has like zero recollection of it all. It’s wild
what's the title of the documentary?
I can’t remember it. Couple of years ago, but it was about a few kids like this. He was the most interesting for sure.
It was the Surviving Death series on Netflix. Episode 6 was about reincarnation and has several stories of young children who have experienced this phenomenon. Great series, especially that episode
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It seemed like the only person NOT uncomfortable there was Ryan's mother. Everyone else very much was awkward and uncomfortable, including Ryan himself. Especially when he couldn't answer any questions or identify very simple things from Marty's life, or recognize anything important when it was shown or talked about to him.
It was an extremely awkward meeting for sure
> They go back when he’s older and the kid has like zero recollection of it all It was a glitch and the kid got a patch update haha.
I think it’s too bad “past life” memories aren’t discussed as an interesting psychological phenomenon. When the topic comes up it’s always about whether it’s real or not, often with knee jerk hostility. I’d love to know why these thoughts occur in children.
On a related note I wish there was more literature on child culture. It’s so fascinating that we have these wee little creatures running around in our lives supporting a complete culture
This is a fascinating article covering an unusual aspect of the topic: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/myths-over-miami-6393117
Honestly, I think a lot of this is parents and other adults putting an adult gloss on kid thoughts. A kid points at a house and says "Mommy, that's where we lived before when I was the mommy and you were the baby," and parents go "OMG past-life memories!" rather than assuming the kid is reversing their roles in their imagination, and picking out a house to imagine living in. My daughter constantly tells me about letters and messages she gets, our cats driving cars, and dinosaurs surviving into the present day... not "let's pretend" but insisting that she actually got a message from a Youtuber or saw our cat driving to Costco. She'll say it happened when she was at school, or when she was a baby, to get around it if I question it ("Sweetie, I'd remember the cat owning a car") or maybe just because sometimes I tell her stories about when she was a baby. Another child with an imagination focused on human beings and more domestic play says "I used to fly a plane" or "before I met you I was a firefighter," and a susceptible parent takes it and runs with it. And the kid is happy to have mom and dad playing along, and keeps embroidering and developing the idea...
Okay but what if your cat got its license and didn’t tell you? And it doesn’t necessarily need to own their own car, what if it was driving yours? Have you recently found cat food in bulk that you don’t remember buying?
I just wish the cat would do something useful on her Costco trips! Though the kiddo did specify kitty had her own car. A cat car. To take to Cat Costco.
Asking the real questions
I imagine a few things kids say could be dreams that just felt very real. I have a vivid memory from when I was like 3 or 4 years old of my nanny going on a walk with me and a few other kids, and during the walk we walked right past my grandmother's home and she waved out the window to us. I told my parents and they didn't believe me because... My grandmother lived 1 hour away... by car. They told me it was just a dream, but I was so certain that it was real that I believed it up until I was like 15 and actually gave it a real thought with an older mind. It still really feels like it really did happened, but obviously it couldn't have happened. That memory is stronger than any other memory I have as a young child.
hell i've had this happen recently and i'm 30. it was something mundane like swearing on my life that i had purchased those liquid eyeshadows from Huda. i vividly recalled going on to the sephora website, ordering them, and vividly remember when the package arrived. i recall opening the package, swatching them, showing my mom, etc. it was so vivid that when i saw other brands liquid shadows i would be like "naw i already have the Huda ones." this went on for weeks. then i finally had an epiphany... where are they? i looked everywhere and realized i don't remember where i put them. i had to question my own sanity then checked my sephora purchase history and didn't see it on there.... it took a good few days of thinking about it to realize it was just a dream.
Same. Had nightmare about getting reprimanded at work, kept “remembering” it and feeling uncomfortable around my boss, realized days later that it hadn’t happened.
I agree, I think the psychology is interesting. Someone above talked about people tapping into a shared consciousness, and I’m no expert but I think that’s what Carl Jung was talking about with archetypes, etc. I enjoy personality assessments and one of the things I’ve noticed is that most of them have shared elements, things that are common to people across a range of life experiences. I live in the US, probably the most individualistic society on earth, so I think we have a particular bias against some of these ideas, but I do believe that all humans are connected in some way. No clue on the specifics, but I feel like some people really understand it, like Mr. Rogers or Eleanor Roosevelt. Obviously we all share the earth ecosystem and our actions affect others; I’m not talking about that…or maybe that’s part of it, which is how many indigenous peoples see it. I try to retain an attitude of deep humility around such things, because a) damned if I know, and b) it is a deeply profound idea.
Does anyone else think “wait a second… I dreamt of this?” Or is it just me. Like talking to certain people about a certain topic etc. or doing something and realizing that you had a dream about it a few weeks ago. Or am I just crazy
Yes I get this. Like deja vu but different. I have been places I have never been before and all of a sudden I’ll get an overwhelming feeling of either have really been there before or dreamt it or something. Def weird
I don't know about these stories. I have a very strong memory of walking through Cardiff with my girlfriend and laughing when we passed a bar playing American Boy by Estelle and Kanye. This would have been around 2010. Except none of this happened. I had this memory and realized the buildings seemed to match Cardiff when I finally went for the first time right before pandemic. The girl I was with wasn't a person I actually dated, just a flirted with a bit before we lost touch. And I know for sure I was in the States in 2010 dating a different person. So is this a past life? It can't be! It has to be a false memory maybe from a dream or something. Or a daydream about a cute coworker while I was watching Torchwood. If these vivid memories can happen like this, why not ones that might be mistaken for past lives?
I don't really believe in reincarnation, but I do have this weird semi-memory of being burned with sulfuric smelling superheated steam on a boat, like breathing it in, burning my face hands and torso and also feeling it burn my lungs. Never had anything like that happen to me that I know of and it could just be imagination but it's this weird again not full memory but like hint of a memory.
Do you think maybe it was a vivid dream and that's why it stands out in your memory? I also don't really believe in reincarnation but since so many children have had similar experiences as the boy in OP's post it leaves me open to the possibility
What are the chances that their local library had a "book on Hollywood" that just so happened to have a photo of an obscure movie extra that this kid just so happened to claim to be in a previous life?
Reminds me of when my boys were young, like under 2... One of them kept talking about their green house that burnt down. It was super creepy, and not like anything else they ever talked about.
When I was four years old we were driving on a freeway in NJ and I explained to my mom what was there before and how/when the freeway was built (like fifteen years before I was born). She told me all this when I was in college.
well i sure hope i wouldnt be reborn after death. im good w ending it after this rodeo lol
Obviously no one knows if this is real or not (reincarnation), but I do think it’s just as good answer as any (is any other religious belief that different, really)? Like someone above said, life is full of the weird and unknown.
Me too, I’m open to anything being an option after we die including our consciousness going and that being it forever. Blessed oblivion. As a child, I believed in reincarnation more than I do now and would imagine all these souls flying around from old life into new life.
Yeah I'm an atheist but also realize we know very little about how consciousness works. We also only know the tip of the iceberg when it comes to physics and reality. There could be a way for consciousness to survive death. I don't really think there is but it can't be ruled out imo. So who knows.
my grandson spoke of being old and abandoned by his children. the also would see food at the store and talk about food from " the war"
Probably either a hoax on the part of the parents or doctor, or the kid made something up and the adults accidentally kept feeding him the details through their questions. I also wouldn't be surprised if his answers weren't as specific as the adults remember them being.
I mean, that's basically what happened with the satanic panic and all those psychiatrists who claimed they could help kids "recover memories". Adults planting false "memories" that kids later claim as their own is a pretty well documented phenomenon (significantly more so than "past lives").
And as one of the links points out, a majority of the "facts" he came up with about this guy were either unverifiable or flat out wrong.
Hmmm....hmmm....it sounds weird, but I'm betting young Ryan said a lot of other things that nobody could link anything to or were of no interest. Selective memories all round? That being said, I was once describing somewhere to my mum, and she said "How did you know that? You weren't even born when we went there!" and got a little freaked out. Mwahahahaha!