Children Who Remember Their Past Lives

‘That is the field where I died’, a five-year-old boy tells his parents.

‘I remember because the mud was so deep it went over my gaiters’, he says serenely while pointing across a former historic battlefield in southern England.

In addition to being shocked by their son’s claim to have been reincarnated, his parents were shocked to hear that despite his lack of historical knowledge, he had mentioned his gaiters, which were protective leg coverings worn by troops from 1700 to the conclusion of World War I.

He is not alone. An American university has compiled a database of more than 2,200 children who have been haunted by ‘carry-over of memories’ of past lives since the 1960s.

Opponents contend that these stories are either the product of a child’s active imagination or are based on knowledge from other sources, such as TV, the internet, and family stories.

Yet, a recent research by the University of Virginia School of Medicine discovered that in two-thirds of those cases, there was sufficient information to identify the dead person the youngster thought they could have been.

These children, generally aged between two and six, either had the epiphany of having experienced déjà vu when visiting a certain place – or it came to them in lucid dreams.

Cameron Macaulay, the young child who starred in the 2006 documentary Extraordinary People: The Boy Who Lived Before, was the most well-known example in Britain.

From the age of two, he had perfectly described his home on a beach in the Outer Hebrides – including the death of his father in a car crash and his pet black-and-white sheepdog – despite never visiting the Scottish island and nor had any of his Glaswegian family.

‘I have to go to Barra, I have to go to Barra, my family are missing me’, he would tell his parents.

He recalled swimming in rock pools and playing with friends on the beach where small planes would land.

Cameron’s visions of life there were so real to him that on occasion he would need to be collected from nursery as he was crying for his parents on Barra. Eventually, his family relented and visited, and found a home on the beach there exactly as he described it.

And there are more cases like it. 

In the North East, a father was shocked to hear his two-year-old daughter talking about ‘Her other father who died a long time ago.’

The father told MailOnline: ‘The assumption at the time was that she had an imaginary friend called Charles because she would often be appearing to talk to him or about him.

‘In the end, we asked her more about Charles and she said ‘he was my other father who died a long time ago.

‘Little by little more details started to come out. She said he lived in a house with a black door and described an iron staircase that went upwards in circles.

‘It was a bit creepy but I was intrigued enough to look into whether the houses in our suburb were likely to have had spiral staircases and discovered that it was a fairly common feature of some of the older properties.

‘It was very strange and lasted only a few months, in time she stopped talking about Charles, which I must admit was a relief.’

The family of a little girl on holiday in the UK claimed she had pointed to a pair of graves in a rural church and declared that was where she had buried her parents, even reeling off their names on the stones and the dates they died as well as the epitaph: ‘They were dearly loved and in God’s arms’.

‘I used to come here when I was a boy’, she said and started to describe the inside of the church in great detail. Her parents told her she had a ‘a really good imagination’ but found ‘she was spot on with every single detail’, one family friend said.

A fourth child, aged three, told his parents ‘many times’ that he had drowned in a ‘speedboat accident’ when he was a ‘much older man’.

Focus on these tales has been reignited after an academic study in the US raised the possibility that reincarnation could happen – because hundreds of children have told them so.

These are common occurrences, and it seems that youngsters are more prone than adults to have these déjà vu moments.

When my son was younger I could hide something while he was out and then pretend I couldn’t find it when he got back in, and he would find it straight away. Not quite the same thing as déjà vu, but it did make me wonder how on earth he even knew when he wasn’t even in the same house when I hid the item. As he’s got older and grown up he seems to have lost the ability to do this.

Children are very perceptive but very unaware of themselves.

None of us know the truth about what happens when we die, perhaps we’re not supposed to. I like to keep an open mind because the fact that we’re here at all is a miracle in itself and we should never rule anything out. Perhaps we bring past lives with us when we’re born.

Sadly, not everyone will believe in reincarnation because some people feel threatened by the things they don’t understand. I always retain an open mind because a closed mind learns nothing new.