The story of James Leininger is the best American case of a child’s past life memory I’ve ever seen. I’ve been looking for a case this good for twenty years. It’s extraordinary because little James remembered names and places from his past life that could be traced to real people and actual events—facts that could be verified. He was even re-united with some of the people who knew him as an ace World War II pilot in his former life.
I believe this is the story that will finally open the minds of skeptical Westerners to the reality of children’s past life memories. And it will demonstrate how children’s past life memories can have profound emotional and spiritual benefits for both the child and family.
In some ways, James’s story is not unusual. Many children all over the world have past life memories. It’s a natural phenomenon. I know this because I began collecting and researching these cases more than twenty years ago after my own two children had their own vivid past life memories. My son remembered dying on a Civil War battlefield; my daughter remembered dying as a child in a house fire. I was astonished when I observed that just by talking about their memories they were both cured of phobias relating to their past life deaths.
Surely, this had happened to other families, too. But when I searched through books to understand what happened to my own children, I couldn’t find any that addressed the healing effects of children’s past life memories, only books about adults being healed through past life regression therapy. I decided to fill in the gap and wrote Children’s Past Lives as a guidebook for other parents who might encounter these memories in their own children.
After the publication of my first book in 1997 and the launch of my website,
www.ReincarnationForum.com , I received thousands of emails from parents whose very young children had spontaneous past life memories. With so many cases, I began to see recurring patterns in the phenomenon. I saw that some children begin to speak of these memories as soon as they can talk—some still in diapers! They surprise their parents with comments such as “when I was big before”, or “when I died before”. Or they exhibit unusual behaviors: phobias, nightmares, unlearned talents and perplexing abilities, or uncanny insight into adult affairs they couldn’t possibly know about in their two or three years of experience. Some memories manifest as strong emotions, such as profound sadness as they recount lonely deaths on battlefields, fond memories of a particular horse, or longing for their other families, their wives, their husbands, their own children.
The cases that came to me were rich in drama, full of amazement and compelling emotions for the families. But one thing was lacking: there weren’t any cases that could be factually verified, that offered objective proof that the memories are real. My children, and none of the other children whose memories I investigated, could remember their former names, or where they had lived, or any other hard facts that could be traced or validated. That’s why the case of James Leininger is so unusual.
But James’s case is not unique. There is a large body of verified cases of past life memories in young children in non-Western cultures. Dr. Ian Stevenson, former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, researched children’s spontaneous past life recall for forty years, beginning in the early 1960s. By the time of his death in 2007, he had rigorously investigated and meticulously documented nearly 3,000 cases, mostly in Asia. In nearly 700 of these cases young children, usually under the age of five, have such vivid past life recall that they remember their former names, where they had lived, the names of relatives, and very specific yet mundane details of their former lives, details that Dr. Stevenson proves they couldn’t possibly know by normal means. Using the child’s statements, Dr. Stevenson establishes the child’s identify in his previous life and validates the memories with former family members and friends of the deceased. He matches each child’s statements, behaviors, personality quirks, and even physical attributes (he wrote an entire work on birthmarks and birth defects relating to past lives) to the facts of the actual person the child remembers being. The similarities go far beyond mere chance or coincidence.
Yet as amazing as Dr. Stevenson’s findings are, the great majority of his cases are from cultures in which reincarnation is a dominant belief: India, Burma, Thailand, Turkey, Lebanon, West Africa, and some indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. This makes it easier for skeptics to dismiss his findings, no matter how rigorous the proof, because these cultures already believe in reincarnation. I knew it would take a highly detailed and verifiable case from a Judeo-Christian family to open Western minds to this reality. But neither Dr. Stevenson, his international colleagues, or I had found any American or European cases as richly detailed as the Asian cases. This was puzzling, and more than a little frustrating.
