Case 1

This incident occurred in the southernmost state of Brazil. A young girl named Maria, but whom everyone called Sinha (or even more affectionately, Sinhazinha), grew up on her father's beautiful, but isolated farm. Requiring company, she often visited a village twelve miles away to visit a friend named Ida. Maria (or Sinha) fell in love twice, but her father violently rejected both suitors. One despondent suitor committed suicide. Maria fell into depression and her worried father arranged a trip to the seaside. Maria purposely neglected herself by inviting exposure to the cold, damp weather and performing exhausting activities. Shortly she was ill, and a throat infection set in, spreading to the lungs and contracting tuberculosis.

Before she died Sinha confessed to her friend Ida that her illness and imminent death were intentional. Sinha/Maria then predicted that she would be reborn as Ida's daughter (Ida was then pregnant), and that when she reached an age where she could speak she would, "in the body of the little girl who will be your daughter, relate many things of my present life and thus you will recognize the truth." Both Ida and her husband decided to remain quiet about Maria's prediction, saying nothing to any others.

Some months after Sinha died, Ida gave birth to a daughter they named Marta. Save for character similarities, the first inclination that the girl may have been Sinha reborn is an incident around one year of age when several friends visited to meet her. Ignoring the others who paid close attention to her, the one year old Marta went to the forbidding, unwelcome father of Sinha, stroked his beard and said, "Hello, papa." Sinha's father ignored the comment, supposing it to be mere baby's talk.

However, one day, when Marta was two and one half years old, she was walking with her sister, Lola, and asked to be carried on Lola's back. Lola refused, stating the little girl could walk well enough on her own. To this Marta replied, "When I was big and you were small, I used to carry you often." Lola laughingly remarked, "When you were big?" Then the little girl answered that at the time, she had not lived there [with Lola or in this place]. "I lived far from here where there are many cows, oxen and oranges where also there were animals like goats, but they were not goats." She thus described the farm of dead Sinha's parents, along with the many sheep, which Marta had never yet seen.

When related to her parents, they questioned Marta about her strange ideas, and insisted they had never lived anywhere else. To which Marta replied that at the time to which she was referring, she had had other parents, and another name; Sinharinza. Marta's mother, Ida, inquired, "In what manner did you, as Sinha, greet me when I used to visit you on your father's ranch?" Marta correctly replied that she would prepare coffee and wait outside for her arrival, playing a phonograph while she sat on a stone. Ida also inquired how Sinha had spoken to her the last visit before she died. Marta whispered in her mother's ear and pointed to her throat, saying that her voice was gone. This fact was known only to Ida.

Stevenson was present at the cross examination of the child, and much of the material emerged at that time, the parents having had no real inclination or serious consideration of the reincarnation possibility, and thus had never probed or pursued a line of questioning. Stevenson also went on note that Marta, for the remainder of her life, remained susceptible to colds and bronchial troubles, an apparent karmic repercussion of her suicide through self-neglect. Stevenson further reports that no others in the family had this trouble, and he considered it a kind of "internal birthmark."

Case 2

An especially important case for Dr. Stevenson arose in Lebanon in 1964. He had been informed of a number of cases, and one in particular involved a five year old boy who had been, "incessantly talking about his past life since the age of one." Stevenson was startled to find the natives so accepting of the fact, and discovered that they were all Druse (see under Sikh religion in previous section) and the incidence of reincarnation is among the highest in the world. The only thing unusual about this particular boy is the veracity with which he spoke.

Stevenson was able to drop in unexpectedly on the family so there was no opportunity for anticipating his arrival. Also, the two families involved (the present family of the boy and the "past life" family) as yet had no knowledge of each other's existence. Consequently, before bringing the two families together for verification and contact, Stevenson was able to record over fifty items the boy said regarding his previous life. The boy, Imad, began to speak at about age one, and his first words were the names Jamileh and Mahmoud (not family names). As he gained fluency he spoke of people he knew, property he owned and some events of his previous life. He recalled being a member of a family from a village approximately 25 miles away via a windy mountain road. Among his present family, only his father had ever visited the village, and that was but once, for a funeral.

Imad would talk to himself about the people whose names he had mentioned and wonder how they were getting along. He also spoke of things in his sleep. He cited the names of over fourteen people, but his biggest preoccupation was with Jamileh. He raved about her beauty and spoke of the red clothes he had bought for her and the fact that she wore high heels. Imad's mother said her son's longing for Jamileh reached its height one day when lying on a bed with her, and he suddenly asked her to behave as Jamileh would under such circumstances.

Among his other memories were a fondness for hunting, and a troubling incident where he remembered beating a dog. The thing that most bothered him was a serious accident in which he was run over by a truck and both legs were crushed. Imad's mother and grandmother both noted that when Imad began to walk as a young child, he constantly exclaimed, "how wonderful it was to be able to walk again." Imad's father considered the boy a liar, and for a time he did not talk of things except to his mother and grandmother. However everyone took notice when the two year old suddenly stopped in the street one day in front of a complete stranger and asked, "Do you know me?" The startled man looked for a moment and then exclaimed, "Yes. You were my neighbor." The stranger turned out to be a native of the village Imad remembered.

The parents of the boy pieced together many incorrect conclusions: that the boy was Mahmoud and Jemileh was his wife; and that Mahmoud had been killed being run over by a truck. Stevenson took the boy and his father to the village where they met a member of the family whose name Imad remembered, but the house did not match Imad's description, nor did the rest of the facts fit. There was a Mahmoud in the family, but he was still alive, and his wife's name was not Jemileh.

Stevenson returned the next day on his own to do some further investigating. He located a man in the family whose father had been run over by a truck and had both legs crushed, dying from the incident. However, the rest of the facts did not fit...until the man suddenly remembered that his father had had a cousin who was deeply attached to him and had been devastated by the accident and death of his good friend. This cousin had been nephew to a man named Mahmoud, who had a mistress named Jemileh who scandalized the town with her modern dress and behavior. This Mahmoud had contracted tuberculosis and been bedridden for a year before his death, which explained Imad's exclamation upon being able to walk again.

To Stevenson, the family's misconceptions about the identity and circumstances only vouched for the evidence of their honesty, for if they had been trying to prove a point, they would have provided an accurately researched story. Stevenson now took Imad to the house he had once lived in and he correctly identified his sister by name, revealed the hidden closet where his gun was kept (it was illegal to own firearms at the time) and in all made fifty one direct and verifiable claims that were proved correct, much of the information unknown to anyone outside the family.

Case 3

This case was first documented in 1944 in Sri Lanka, then more or less a province of India. Due to the long occupation by the British as a colonial state, the Anglo's were hated by many. A boy named Ranjith was born into the de Silva family, and the father, though a gentle and devout Buddhist, hated the English fervently. Thus he became greatly distressed when Ranjith began exhibiting Anglo Saxon characteristics. A "certain attitude underlay [his behaviors] which made him an outsider to the family." The boy had a certain aloofness; also he disliked much of the native foods, including rice, and disdaining the chili's and spices common to many of their dishes. He skillfully manipulated knife and fork in the British way, while even the older children struggled over their mastery.

At the age of four, Ranjith announced to his parents: "You are not my mother, brothers and sisters. My mother, father and others are in England." The parents said nothing, but as the boy continued his aloofness, began to question him. Ranjith could not recall his own or his parents' name, but was quite clear about having two brothers, Tom and Jim, and a sister Margaret. He said they lived on a hill, apart from other houses, and that in the mornings it was often so cold that ice formed outside and they would sit close to a fireplace. Wagons pulled by horses would come to remove ice from the roads. (As it is easy to forget, I remind you here that this is a four year old boy from Sri Lanka who had never seen such things as ice or horse wagons, nor even heard about them.) He also said that they were very rich, that he was a Christian and not a Buddhist, and that he remembered taking his siblings to church on the back of his motorcycle.

On Ranjith's fourth birthday, his father arranged for the local British station to announce his birthday on the air. His sisters, to please him, told him his "mother" would speak to him from England. Ranjith sat next to the radio and waited as an English accented voice announced his birthday. Ranjith spoke to the radio, "Mother, I am staying in a Sinhalese family's house. Take me there [meaning England]." A British version of "Happy Birthday" was sung, which includes the word "darling." Ranjith announced, "It is my mother. She calls me "darling" and sometimes she calls me "sweetheart." When asked how he recognized his mother's voice, he said, "My mother speaks softly like that." Stevenson reports that this usage of the word "softly" was incongruent to the boy's and the family's language. The de Silvas had not known of its particular usage until they learned it from Ranjith.

Rather than joy, Ranjith became depressed after the Birthday message. Through the years he felt discomfited and out of place, eventually dropping out of school and going to work at a garage where he showed great aptitude and rapidity in learning to drive and repair autos and motorcycles. His state was such that when Ranjith turned 18, his father suggested he might try going to England for a while. Without consulting anyone, Ranjith booked passage the very next day and spent two years in England, where he instantly fell into the rhythm and culture. It was Ranjith's belief that he would remember more of his life if he lived in Europe, and possibly find his old home and family. However, this never happened. Stevenson remarks on such international cases of reincarnation that a generalization exists in which "the greater cultural distance between the subject and the life he seems to remember, the less likely he is to recall specific, verifiable details." Especially in Ranjith's case, there appears to be an even greater pulling or longing to return to the other life, perhaps as a result of feeling "out of culture" and uncomfortable.

Stevenson did a follow up interview with Ramjith many years later, when he had returned to Sri Lanka to care for his aging parents. The man still yearned to live in England, but the family situation prevented it. At that time, Ranjith remarked to Stevenson that he believed he had been a British air pilot during World War II who had crashed near Ceylon. In his present life he had a deep yearning to fly, but could not afford it.

While the case does not provide such specific statements and incidents verifiable that offer evidence toward reincarnation, Stevenson imparts its importance because of the excellent quality of a type of case that presents itself more often than do the others. That is, strong feelings and desires that transcend or even defy normal cultural influences.