I have the opener this week.
In true Chelsea fashion, this is not going to be a regular opener.
I wanted to put this into an actual episode, but there wasn't enough to make in an episode,
but it's like a fun little cryptid-y weird oddity opener that I'm making it just now,
I've declared.
So let us just read the article.
This comes from the Daily Herald.
May 22, 2011 is a date that most people around the town of Joplin, Missouri remember very
well.
It is said that an F5 tornado destroyed 900 homes, killed 161 people and left a landscape
behind that resembled a foreign landscape on a barren planet.
What you wouldn't see reported in the mainstream media about this event were the descriptions
of the butterfly people.
These stories were mainly told by small children to parents in hospital waiting rooms standing
in line for water or donated food, and to the Red Cross councillors.
Multiple children of varied ethnicities and socioeconomic status told eerily similar stories
of seeing beautiful humanoid creatures with wings hovering over certain children and parents
in that storm in a protective manner.
They were described as colourful and pretty, so children called them butterfly people.
Most of these stories had common elements.
The tornado hit their home, often parents were praying, the roof was ripped off, children
saw a butterfly person descended down from the sky and covering them with wings.
Those particular children usually emerged from the wreckage in good condition.
Another version states that children saw butterfly people carrying other kids and adults up into
the heavens, the ones who didn't make it out alive, presumably their souls.
About one half of the children were counselled at Joplin Child Trauma Treatment Centres,
set up in the schools afterwards.
The clinical director, Donniel Robinson, heard these stories first hand from many different
children.
Many of these children stated that they somehow knew these butterfly people were there to
calm them and help keep them safe.
Really cool little story, it took place a while ago.
This basically summarizes everything that happened with it.
Basically there's a tornado, kids saw butterfly people carrying people to safety or up into
the sky.
Wouldn't make for a whole episode.
I'm actually suspecting that this came up in your Mothperson research.
It didn't actually come up on a Reddit thread.
Okay.
Yeah, but I can see why you would think that.
I also think that the population that is telling us this is a little bias in how the butterfly
people were helping them in the sense that only the people who survived the tornado will
believe that the butterfly people were there to protect them, not the people who died.
So who may have been in fact killed by the butterfly people.
Okay, this might be a much more alarming article of killer butterfly people.
Tornadoes are now equipped with killer butterfly people.
Yes.
Which is...
Only target some people.
They save some kill others.
Like a remarkably large amount, 161 people.
And with that, we all have a new fear of tornadoes unloading butterfly people to wreak havoc
and steal our souls.
And with that, I think we can get into this episode.
Yeah, let's do it.
From the unexplained to the mundane.
Come join us on a Journey to the Fringe.
Hello, and welcome to Journey to the Fringe.
Some may say the most important media ever created by humanity.
Which is why it's important to look at qualifying words in promotions.
We are your fringy hype team, Taylor and Chelsea, and today we are here talking about that little
recurring theme of reincarnation.
Not recurring with us, just with nature, as it is, if you believe in it.
It's probably recurring with us.
Let's lay it out.
I'm going to look at some of the researchers that have been looking at this.
I'm going to talk about their process, and then we're going to look at some examples
that they've looked at around the world.
I am going to say a few things right off the bat that I think need to be addressed.
Small cases I could find are reincarnation examples of people reincarnating as people.
Which is only a small sect of people who believe in reincarnation believe that it's exclusively
in that way.
The second part, we're going to be talking about reincarnation.
There are definitely downsides to groups of people who believe in reincarnation out there.
I specifically want to make note of the Indian people's belief in the caste system, where
the lowest group of people are born into that caste because they did bad things in their
previous life.
The untouchables are treated absolutely awful because the people who believe in the caste
system believe that they deserve that awful treatment from what they did in past lives.
It is absolutely terrible and not something that should be done.
We are just going to be looking at this as a fun thought and nothing outside of that.
Do not treat people like shit because you think that they deserve it from what they
did in past lives.
I just need to get that out there right off the bat.
You're not allowed to do your own karma.
That's up to the universe.
Just a quick note, I have read Dolores Cannon.
I do like her.
She has a lot of books.
She talks about one of the things she has in her books is about reincarnation.
She does talk about and have people who go back through regression, I believe it is.
It's been a lot of years now since I read the convoluted universe and there's many,
many other books after this.
She does talk about people reincarnating from animals.
People who have memories of it.
Yeah, no.
That is actually something I'm going to talk.
Well, I don't really talk about, but I should have touched on.
We'll talk about it now.
I am only talking about at this point, non-regressed memories.
These are ones that children have of their previous life or what they state is their
previous life.
Past life regression is a completely different category as well as adult reincarnation memories,
which is a completely different category that we could talk about at a later date.
I'm glad we clarified that.
All we're talking about right now is children who believe they're born and reincarnated
from somebody else.
Okay.
I like these regressions or not regressions.
These stories.
These non-regressive stories.
I love the children's stories.
I think they're really cool.
Yeah.
There are some interesting ones.
At the end, we're going to talk about some interesting research that's gone on in this
area as well.
Nice.
Without further ado, there have actually been quite a few researchers who have looked into
the subject.
I'm going to be focusing on just a select few of them.
The most important one we're going to be talking about is Ian Stevenson.
He received his bachelor in science in 1940.
He then enrolled in McGill Medical School and he completed a four-year program in three
years and graduated the top of his class in 1943.
He was a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 50 years and he was
a chair of their department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson professor of psychiatry
from 1967 to 2001 and research professor of psychiatry from 2002 until his death in 2007.
As a founder and director of the University of Virginia School of Medicine's division
of perceptual studies, which investigates the paranormal, Stevenson became known for
his research into cases he considered suggested of reincarnation.
The idea that emotions, memories, and even physical bodily features can be passed on
from one incarnation to another.
In the course of his 40 years doing international field work, he researched 3,000 cases of children
who claimed to remember past lives.
His position was that certain phobias, filias, unusual abilities, and illnesses could not
be fully explained by genetics or the environment.
He believed that in addition to genetics and the environment, reincarnation might possibly
provide a third contributing factor.
Stevenson helped to found the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1982 and was the
author of around 300 papers and 14 books on reincarnation including probably his most
prominent book which is called 20 cases suggested for reincarnation written in 1966.
And I should say right off the bat, I pulled a lot of my research from a website called
Psy Encyclopedia, PSI Encyclopedia.
They have absolutely excellent articles.
It's basically the Wikipedia for the psychic and paranormal phenomena.
So if you are looking to do more research into this or you find these stories interesting,
there are so many more to look at that I just like, I couldn't include everything and I
had to look at just a select group.
Well of course.
We're also going to be talking about James Matlock who earned his English Bachelor of
Arts from Emory University in 1977.
In 1983, Matlock began postgraduate work in library sciences at the University of Maryland
concentrating in archives.
He received his Masters of Library Sciences in 1985 and was offered this job of librarian
and archivist at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York.
In 1989, he was commissioned to organize the collection of J.B.
Ryan's Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
For his library science work, Matlock wrote a survey of archival collections and parapsychology,
which was later published.
While working as ASPR's librarian and archivist, he began writing papers on the history of
parapsychology and drawn reincarnation.
He published the introduction to his inventory of Ryan's Parapsychology Laboratory records
in 1991.
Jim B. Tucker was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina on January 1, 1960.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology in 1982 and completed
his MD training in 1986, both at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill.
He then took a postgraduate training in general psychiatry and child psychiatry at UVA, become
board certified in both in 1992.
He stayed in the town of Charlottesville to begin a successful psychiatric practice.
Currently, Tucker serves at UVA as Bonner Lowry Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral
Sciences and Director of DOPS, where he and the DOPS research team continue investigating
along the same lines as Stevenson, but with an emphasis on American cases.
He oversees the ongoing computerization of the 2,500 cases recorded by Stevenson and
other researchers using Stevenson's protocols.
And last, Carol Bowman's cases.
She has two books that are important for this, Children's Past Lives and Return from Heaven
about reincarnation.
And she has been published in more than 23 languages.
However, she seems to be like, she would be the one who shows up on daytime TV as the
expert on this thing.
Whereas these other people actually seem to be like professors on the subject.
So I actually give her the least credence, but she just comes up in a few of the cases
we're going to talk about.
Yeah, I mean, you could still get legitimate things.
Oh, you can.
It's just, I found her the least credible of everybody we're going to be.
All those investigators.
Yeah, the other ones seem fairly decorated.
They have several degrees and they are coming from it with a very systematic point of view.
After that, I want to give you an overview of what they describe reincarnation to be.
So reincarnation cases share many common features and patterns.
The common features include dreams announcing rebirth, birthmarks and other congenital physical
traits, behavioral traits and past life memories.
There also may be memories of intermission periods between lives during which the parents
may be chosen.
Some children recall being a member of the opposite sex.
The previous lives generally passed in the same region, ethnic and religious group as
the present life only occasionally were they in any other country.
Also most of the recalled lives ended not long before the present life began.
Stevenson reports a median of only 15 months in a series of 616 child cases, predominantly
from Asia and the Middle East.
However, there are cultural differences on some variables, particularly on the length
of the intermission and the relative frequency of different types of relationships, be it
their family, acquaintance or strangers that were being reincarnated, between the case
subject and the person whose life is recalled.
Several kinds of behavior memories figure in children's reincarnation cases.
Not infrequently, the children's subjects show the sort of emotional attachment and
reactions that one would expect from the person whose life they recall.
Some enact that person's avocation or death in their play.
They may also display intense fears or phobias concerning people, places or things related
to the way the previous life ended.
Erlander Herladsen, who conducted psychological tests on children with past life memories,
discovered that many who recalled dying violently displayed symptoms of what looked like post-traumatic
stress disorder, the sort of reaction one might expect from persons who had survived
the experience.
Children who recalled dying as adults often act as if they are much older than they are.
Many children show precocious interest in cigarettes, alcohol or sex, which is the whole
other thing.
Yeah.
Curiously, in reincarnation cases, there may be behavioral differences between twins who
grow up together, contrary to what many psychologists expect.
Once they have a case they want to actually look at for reincarnation, this is their process.
So researchers of past life memories cases usually start out by interviewing the child
and the child's family.
They learn about the statements the children have made about a past life.
They also inquire about any possible connection between the child's family and the deceased
individual, whether that person has been identified and whether the child has had any opportunity
to learn about the previous life.
In cases that include birthmarks or birth defects, additional work is required.
The child is examined and the marks or defects are photographed.
The family is asked when they were first noticed, whether there are other family members with
similar ones and whether the mother and fetus were exposed to known causes of defects.
The researchers then interview the deceased individual's family.
They judge how well the child's statements match the previous life and whether the family
knows of any access the child might have had to the material regarding the deceased person.
In the cases with birthmarks and birth defects, they attempt to determine with as much precision
as they can what wounds the previous person suffered in order to assess how well they
correspond to the child's marks or defects.
Researchers obtain autopsy records when possible, though often there are unavailable or nonexistent.
Stevenson reported that he had obtained an autopsy report in 49 out of 210 cases.
When no report is available, researchers interview first-hand eyewitnesses who saw the wounds
on the body of the deceased.
So that's just a little overview of everything.
Stevenson did a lot of work in non-Western countries, specifically India, Bangladesh,
Sri Lanka.
I'm trying to keep it as much in the Western world as I can.
So we are going to talk about a few of Stevenson's cases, but for the most part, it's going to
be other cases that are going to come up.
He's also researching it in countries that that's predominantly their belief.
Yeah, that comes up a lot in their culture.
Not that it doesn't come up here, as I'm sure you'll tell us, like you said, but...
One thing I found interesting that did come up, it is so common in their culture that
reincarnation does happen, that you might actually mark a body with ash or ink so that
it forms a birthmark or a mark on a baby so that you know who they're reincarnating as,
which is super weird.
That is super weird, but I mean, if that's such a part of your belief system, you've
got to be willing to try anything.
We just hope they're not mangling bodies.
We're going to cut off his arm so that the body reincarnates and doesn't have its arm.
Simple as that.
But with that bit of overview, we're going to go over some cases, a lot of them really
short.
Carol Bowman investigated this return of a woman as her great-granddaughter seven years
after her death.
Oh, in the family.
Yes, it is the case of Dee Klepper.
Dee's mother and her grandmother had a contentious relationship.
After her grandmother's death, Dee's mother dreamed several times of her grandmother,
but each time the woman was going away from her.
Then when she became pregnant with Dee, she began to dream of the woman coming towards
her.
When she was about seven months into her pregnancy, she started to sense her presence.
She considered the possibility of reincarnation, but had read that there was invariably a lengthy
period between lives and so dismissed it.
When she first held Dee, she was overwhelmed with a feeling of familiarity.
Still, reincarnation was so far from her expectation that she did not credit the sensation for
long.
But when Dee reached two years of age, she began to behave more and more like her great-grandmother
and to recognize places and people her great-grandmother had known.
When a friend gave her three cats, she named them Jenny, Layla, and Lester, which her mother
later found on a family genealogy.
Jenny Layla was Dee's great-grandmother's sister and Lester was her brother.
At this point, Dee's mother could no longer doubt that Dee was her great-grandmother come
back.
That's the story.
And that's why I give Carol Bowman kind of the least credit of all of the people that
we were talking about.
Oh, that was a Carol Bowman story?
Yeah, that's a Carol Bowman story.
So that's a- I could see why you said that about her.
And it relies on a very odd coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.
Yes.
That's what I was going to say.
It doesn't seem like something you can scientifically, like it's just a neat little story.
This next case is known as Bobby Hodges and was independently investigated by both Jim
Tucker and Carol Bowman.
Bobby's first word was cousin.
He talked frequently about wanting to live with his cousins.
The significance of this began to emerge when he was four years old.
One night after his bath, he asked his mother if she remembered when he and his younger
brother Donald had been in her tummy together.
She replied that they had not been in her tummy together, but he insisted that they
had, although they had not been born.
Gradually it became clear that he was referring to a miscarriage his aunt had suffered when
she was carrying twins seven years before his birth.
Oh, creepy.
Bobby said that he had tried to return to his aunt, but found her womb already occupied.
Indeed, she had become pregnant shortly after the miscarriage with one of Bobby's cousins.
Bobby accused Donald of causing the miscarriage and demanded to know why, at which Donald
took his dummy out of his mouth and yelled, I wanted daddy.
Bobby also correctly described his parents' wedding, which had occurred while his mother
was pregnant with him.
He wanted to know why he had been born by cesarean section.
His mother explained that this was because he had been in a face up occipital posterior
position.
Had he turned over, he could have been born normally.
Oh, I didn't know that said Bobby.
I would have turned over, but I thought they were trying to push me back in.
Like I just found that one so weird.
That one is super creepy and hilarious.
And he's fighting with his cousin.
He wanted to be born into that family.
I really like that story.
That's good.
I want his dad.
That is super creepy, but I like that.
That's a, I like that one.
This next one is a child by the name of Chad Luke, and it was independently investigated
by Carol Bowman and then Jim Tucker and Ian Stevenson together investigated this one.
James had been in good health until at 18 months, his cancer took hold.
He began to have trouble walking and fell fracturing his tibia and afterwards walked
with a limp.
The neuroblastoma was confirmed by an autopsy taken from a swelling in his scalp above his
right ear.
His left eye protruded and was thought to have bled slightly because he was having trouble
eating.
Doctors placed an intravenous tube in his throat, leaving a linear scar across the right
side of his neck.
By the time of his death, seven months later, James was blind in his left eye and his facial
features were distorted.
This is the original life.
I had a feeling.
I feel like it's going to come as a birth defect or birthmark.
Chad was born blind in his left eye with his, and his face was asymmetrical.
He had a linear birthmark resembling a surgical scar across his neck.
He also had a cyst on the right side of his head behind his ear in the place the biopsy
had been performed on James.
When Chad began to walk, it was with a limp, although no physical reason could be found
for it.
Starting when he was about four and a half years old, he related many memories of James.
He gave an accurate description of the flat in which he had lived as James and wanted
to return there to play with James' toys.
He also accurately described the biopsy on James' scalp and recalled not being able
to drink without vomiting.
He identified a picture of James as one as himself.
His mother and others who knew James noticed that Chad had a personality very similar to
James'.
This is one of Bowman's advice to acknowledge this link to James, after which Chad developed
some sight in his left eye.
At age six, he began to talk less about his memories of James.
This is James Leninger.
James Leninger is the subject of what may be the most famous child reincarnation case.
His parents documented his memories and their successful efforts to verify them in a book,
Soul Survivor.
The case was investigated by Jim Tucker and the story features in several documentaries,
no doubt in part because James' memories were verified and the case has received much
attention from skeptics, most recently philosopher Michael Sudiff.
When he was 22 months old, James' father Bruce took him to an aircraft museum in Houston,
Texas, where they resided.
Not long after, James corrected his mother about the nature of an appendage on the bottom
of a toy airplane.
She remarked that it was a bomb, but he said no, it was a drop tank, a drop tank being
an external fuel tank.
Two months later, he began to have nightmares during which he would cry.
Plane on fire, little man can't get out.
Gradually, he began to talk about his memories of dying when his corsair came under fire.
He said he had flown off a boat named Natoma.
He drew pictures of boats and planes, signing them as James 3.
He named G.I.
Joe dolls Billy, Walter and Leon because that's who met me when I got to heaven.
James was so insistent with his apparent memories, Bruce said about their verification.
To his surprise, he was able to trace them to a flyer named James Huston Jr. who had
died when his plane flown off the Natoma Bay during World War II had been downed by Japanese
fire off the island of Iwo Jima.
Three squadron mates who had pre-deceased Huston were named Leon Connor, Walter Devlin
and Billy Peeler.
The step at goal interpretation starts with suggestions that James' memories were prompted
by a corsair he saw at the flight museum.
However, there was no corsair on display at the time of James' and Bruce's visit.
The museum's corsair had been lost in an air show six months prior to the visit and
replaced only after it.
As Tucker learned when he rang the museum, the plane in which Huston died actually was
not a corsair, although Huston had flown corsairs in training.
This sort of confusion sometimes appears in past life memories according to James Matlock.
In any event, the error cannot be attributed to a plane he did not see, nor would the museum
visit account for the many details James related correctly such as his past life name, the
name of the aircraft carrier and the names of Huston's squadron mates.
It is kind of creepy how accurate that one is.
I was just going to comment, it is really creepy how accurate it is because we look
in the Satanic Panic episode and kids were like, yeah, the daycare teacher was definitely
flying.
Flying, he flushed us down the toilet, down to the tunnels.
And then there's this kid giving very specific memories about aircraft and names.
These dolls are going to be named these guys because that's who I met in heaven.
There's definitely something to it and I've heard this story before, it's a very famous
reincarnation, probably one of the most famous ones.
Next is the case of Christian Haupt.
Christian Haupt may have been the baseball player Lou Gehrig, who's disease is named.
But like all claims to have been famous people, this identification is controversial.
Christian's mother, Kathy Byrd, told his story first in an article for her local newspaper
then in a book.
But reincarnation researcher KM Wirstein has pointed out discrepancies in these accounts.
Jim Tucker visited the family and briefly interviewed Christian, but was not impressed
enough to carry out a full investigation.
Nonetheless, the case includes behavioral features along with memories that suggest
that if Christian was not Lou Gehrig, who was another major baseball player who knew
Gehrig well and the Gehrig identification cannot be ruled out conclusively.
If it is valid, the intermission would be 67 years between lives.
Without doubt, Christian was a prodigy at baseball.
He loved the sport and from an early age had an incessant drive to practice his skills.
At the age of two, he was given a cameo role in Adam Sandler's movie, That's My Boy.
No idea what movie that is.
Never heard of it.
I've never heard of it too, which is strange.
In September 2012, three weeks after his fourth birthday, he had the honor of throwing out
the ceremonial pitch at the LA Dodgers game on a nightly basis.
He shared with his family his memories of having been a tall baseball player.
He said he had played for the New York Yankees, which is where Gehrig played, and that his
favorite position was first base, which is what Lou Gehrig played.
He said that he traveled between cities on trains and stayed in hotels.
He expressed a long disdain for Babe Ruth, another famous Yankee player with whom Gehrig
did not get along.
However, none of the details are exclusive to Lou Gehrig.
Apparently a lot of people didn't like Babe Ruth.
They would apply to other baseball players as well.
The principal controversy is over whether Christian self-identified as Gehrig or whether
the identification was imposed by his mother.
In her book, Kathy Bird says that when she showed him a team picture with Gehrig in it,
he picked out Gehrig and said, that's me.
But she doesn't mention that in her earlier newspaper article.
Instead, she says that Christian responded to a picture of Gehrig and Ruth with comments
disparaging Ruth.
In fact, it would appear that on that occasion, he avoided identifying Gehrig as himself.
Christian said that Kathy was the reincarnation of his mother.
If that is so, then a past life connection would convert this from a case with a stranger
relationship to one with a family relationship.
This would be true if he were recalling the life of another player, however, and so provides
no support for the Gehrig identification.
I do like that these investigators who are actually trying to do the work in this are
keeping their investigation work at the highest echelon.
I mean, you got it.
Yeah, exactly.
You got to take it serious.
Yeah.
You want your work to be taken seriously, you have to use, you know, good thing, good
stuff.
This is a 1917 case out of Cuba.
Eduardo Esplugas Cabrera.
It's a nice name.
It is a hard name to say.
That is for sure.
Esplugas.
I like the splugas in it.
It was first reported in a Puerto Rican paper, but concerned a Spanish family residing in
Cuba.
Their four year old son claimed to remember having lived before at a certain address elsewhere
in Havana.
He gave the name of his parent and two brothers.
His own name had been Pancho, he said.
He used to purchase medicine at an American chemist not far from his house.
Eduardo described his memories in such detail as parents decided to test him by taking him
to the address he cited.
He appeared to recognize the building and went in.
They'd returned Crestfallen to his family.
The flat, he recalled, was now occupied by people he did not recognize.
Upon inquiry, his father learned that a family of the complexion and name given by Eduardo
had resided there until 1903, when their youngest son Pancho had died.
An American drug shop still stood nearby at the time.
And here's the story of Steven Stein.
Shortly before she became pregnant with Steven, his mother dreamed about a boy with Latino
features very different from her family's American stock.
During her pregnancy, she had a craving for hot, spicy foods, particularly traditional
Mexican dishes.
Steven had the appearance of the boy in his mother's dreams and, as it turned out, was
fond of Mexican cuisine.
On his first visit to a Mexican restaurant, he stood for a long period before a map that
decorated the back wall, then pointed to a town and said that that was where he was from.
He made no more mention of his previous lives, though, until he watched a television documentary
about the Siege of Alamo, in which the Mexican army had defeated American settlers in 1836.
He pointed to a spot in front of the compound as the spot where he had been shot and killed.
Around this time, he began to experience chronic retinal migraines.
At 30, Steven had a drop seizure and lost all motor function in the lower part of his
body for several hours.
He's the only member of his family to suffer from retinal migraines.
The only one with poor vision and the only one to have suffered seizures.
If the Mexican soldier was shot in the head, this might be the origin of Steven's symptoms,
for which no physical cause had been found.
With that one, there was no actual description of how that previous life ended, so it can't
actually be confirmed that that's where that came from.
I was going to ask, are we sure that Steven has the same father as the rest of the family,
if he looks so different?
Also that it was a super big case, yeah.
This one is super in detail.
This is the one I said to go deep in detail on.
It's going to be long and is the story of Kumkum.
Kumkum Verma.
Where's the story coming from?
This is in India.
Thanks, okay.
Kumkum Verma was born in 1955, the third child of BK Verma and his wife Subhadra.
They lived in Bahera, a village in Northern Bihar near the city of Darbhanga.
Aged three and a half, Kumkum began speaking of a previous life in a family of blacksmiths
in Urdu Bazar.
Gradually, other details emerged.
She had a son named Misri Lal.
Also a grandson, Gauri Shankar.
She said that she had died because of an altercation poisoned by a daughter-in-law.
She has to be called Sundari, which in Matheli, the local dialect of Bihari means beautiful.
Later it was realized that she was trying to say Sundari.
Kumkum's parents did not encourage her to talk of a previous life and ignored her request
to be taken to Urdu Bazar.
They were alarmed at the strength of her feelings and feared the excitement of tracing the former
family would make her ill.
However, they did not try to suppress her talk.
An aunt took an interest and made written notes of many of these details when Kumkum
was about three and a half years old.
This was before an attempt at verification took place a few months later when she was
four.
Kumkum's father mentioned her statement to a friend, Harish Chandra Mishra, a senior
official in the estate of Maharaja of Darbhanga.
Harish Chandra Mishra sent an employee to try to find a blacksmith named Gauri Shankar.
The family was successfully traced and Gauri Shankar's father, Misri Lal, confirmed that
Kumkum's statements and behavior accurately conformed to facts in the life of his mother
Sundari.
Kumkum's parents would not allow Misri Lal to meet the child nor let her visit family
in Urdu Bazar.
However, her father went to Urdu Bazar once to meet members of the previous family and
photograph people and objects he thought she might recognize.
In 1961, a journalist visited both families and wrote a detailed report of interviews
that he carried out with them.
Two years later, P. Pal, an Indian investigator and field assistant of Ian Stevenson, conducted
his own interview and was furnished abstracts from Kumkum's aunt's notebook, although
the notebook itself was later lost when the aunt loaned it to a friend who did not return
it.
I don't like that part of the story, but nonetheless, apparently it is documented.
Most documented as it is.
Steven Sim himself became involved in the case in 1964 when he re-interviewed Kumkum's
parents and the aunt who had written down Kumkum's recollections.
Four interviews were carried out by Stevenson's team in 1965 and 1966.
Stevenson returned in 1969 and carried out additional interviews with all main informants.
And to note, Kumkum by this time had lost nearly all the memories of the previous life.
Stevenson's notes about the case in the first volume of this case of reincarnations, Type
Series, published in 1975.
Darbhanga is a large city near India's northern border with Nepal.
Sundari's family lived in the Urdu Bazar quarter of the city.
Being members of a low class of small businesses and artisans, their past would not have crossed
with those of educated Vermaas who lived in Bahira, a large village in the same district,
about 40 kilometers from Darbhanga.
The Vermaas farmed land and Kumkum's father also practiced as a homeopathic physician
and wrote books.
Sundari's family, by contrast, had little or no formal education.
Dr. Verma said he had never been into Urdu Bazar.
The friend in Darbhanga who helped trace the family did not know much about Urdu Bazar
and had not heard of Misri Lal mystery.
Dr. Verma said he did not discover any friend he and the other family had in common.
Misri Lal said he never went to Bahira until doing business there in 1968 and did not visit
the Vermaas.
His son Gauri Shankar said he first went there in 1959 to visit Kumkum after hearing that
she was talking about the life of his grandmother.
So pregnancy experiences in this one.
Kumkum's mother had some unusual experiences while she was pregnant with Kumkum.
She liked milk, fruit, and salty food more than was common for her or what she had experienced
during pregnancies with her other five children.
After Kumkum was born, she was especially fond of those foods.
Super interesting fact on the last two, I think, that the mothers took on the cravings
of what the people had in their past lives.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And that other one, there wasn't enough information about the father to actually know anything
about that.
Yeah.
But in this one.
Still an interesting point that has been made a couple of times now.
If, I mean, once is interesting enough if it's a legitimate case, but it's been twice.
Just like a super strange kind of thing because it's not them.
Exactly.
It seems to be coming through that it's so strong and maybe that's why the kids still
remember memories.
Maybe it's just really strong with them.
I also find that interesting that in the interviews, the mother found it important to say this.
Like, this was different about this birth and I had five other children.
That's true.
I mean, I guess I would find it weird if I was like, oh, I like crave this one thing
that I never craved and then my kid loved it.
I actually, I don't know if I'd bring it up, but they do.
So here we are talking.
Yeah, I know.
Exactly.
Sundari, it turned out, also was specifically fond of salty foods, though she was not noted
for liking milk or fruit.
So weird cravings that didn't necessarily correspond during her pregnancy.
Kumkum's mother also dreamed of a girl surrounded by snakes.
She had no dreams involving snakes with her other children.
Given that Sundari had a pet snake, this dream qualifies as an announcing dream, a dream
which heralds a reincarnation.
Physical traits at her birth, Kumkum was noticed to have marks on the loaves of her ears in
the place where earrings would have been attached.
These markings correspond to Sundari's pierced ears.
Kumkum's complexion was unusually fair for her family.
As a child, she was slim and taller than other girls her age.
Sundari had been tall, slim and fair in complexion.
Of 15 statements included in the excerpts from Kumkum's aunt's notebook, how it was
provided, all proved to be true or partially true of Sundari.
These 15 statements are only part of Kumkum's memories recorded by investigators, however.
Stevenson's list of 56 different statements attributed to Kumkum, who was never taken
to Dambala and had no contact with any member of the Sundari family, except for the brief
encounter with Sundari's grandson, Gauri Shankar, when he visited Bihara.
Kumkum's statements that were verified as true for the life of Sundari include the following.
My house was built of brick and had tiles, unusual as people usually lived in houses
of clay or mud, and the house was on the road with a guava tree on the side and plum, jelabi
and date trees around the other side.
These details were all verified.
There was a pond outside the house that I helped to create, having paid the workers
who dug it out.
The presence of a pond was not unusual, however Sundari's son and wife confirmed that Sundari
had sometimes paid the laborers.
There was a temple of Shiva near the house.
This was derrotied by Stevenson.
There was a cinema near the house where I went with the daughter-in-law.
The cinema was 400 meters from the house.
Sundari went there, often to see religious themed dramas.
There was a safe at my house on the northern side of the house.
The safe was in the room where Sundari slept, which was on the northern side of the house.
My daughter-in-law had a gold chain.
It's probably referring to one of the ornaments Sundari's owned and lent to her daughter-in-law.
Kumkum compared it to her mother's gold chain and said her chain was better, Sundari's
chain.
Kind of a dick move by a kid.
Yeah.
I had a sword hanging near my bed.
Sundari had a sword on her bedroom wall, which would have been unusual for most Indians,
although less so for a blacksmith.
Kumkun said to never have seen or heard of a sword before making this statement.
A snake stayed near the iron safe.
It had a hood and the end of its tail was missing.
Sundari had kept a black kofra as a pet in her room and it was still living in 1959.
I fed the snake milk and zala.
The meaning of zala could not be determined, but Sundari had fed it milk and cooked rice.
A window of her home had iron bars.
Misery-law said that her mother's bedroom had iron bars.
And I'm going to skip through these just because there's a lot, but those are all, she made
a ton of statements that kind of are in that light.
Most kind of, they all are confirmed to be true.
And these were all made before they'd made contact with the family.
She also had behaviors that match up very well with this family.
Kumkun showed great emotions in narrating her previous life and often appeared distressed.
She showed a strong impulse to go to Urdu Bazar in Darbranga.
And once when her family were visiting the city, left the group walking determinedly
along the road there.
It was some time before her absence was noted and she had to be forcibly brought back.
Kumkun told her siblings that if they would accompany her to her previous home, she would
give them money.
She showed anxieties about the welfare of Gaurish and Kaur.
On a holiday when gifts are customarily exchanged, she asked for money to purchase gifts of clothing
for her grandson and her daughter-in-law.
Several of Kumkun's statements were triggered by incidents such as cooking or objects.
For instance, her reference to her having a pond dug out and paying the laborers came
when her father helped in an archeological dig.
The memories were often voiced as comparisons with the previous life as when she complained
she had less money than previously.
Kumkun showed an unusual interest in snakes.
She was also fearless of them.
Once when she was six, a cobra fell from her tree causing panic among other children.
But Kumkun went up to the snake, patted it gently and it crawled away.
Kumkun's parents found her notably more religious than their other children, seemingly to know
the proper procedures for religious ceremony at a very early age.
Kumkun was more mature for her age than other children, willingly doing housework, feeding
small children and looking after sick persons.
She would also tend to a child of lower caste that other family members would not touch.
She preferred the company of adults and sometimes adopted adult mannerisms, apparently speaking
with the authority that she felt she retained from the previous life.
Kumkun's family noted that she also spoke Matheli with a different accent from that
of her family, which appeared related to the lower class speech used by Muslims in Darbanga.
Occasionally, her phrasing of certain expressions also showed this influence.
Just crazy what she was able to come up with and just like everything involved in this.
At what point is not coincidence?
Well, at some point it's just hard to give any other reason for what's going on.
Yeah, I do also like how mundane the things that she's coming like that relaying about
the life.
Like there were bars on the window of this one room and it's like, it's not one of
those ones where yeah, I was a famous person.
Like it's just like this mundane person from another village that like just a regular person
and she's just relaying like random.
From a lower caste too that you're not allowed to interact with.
So like she shouldn't know anything about that caste level.
She talks like them too.
It's super cool.
Yeah.
Stevenson argued that the considerable social gulf between Kumkun's educated parents and
humble Muslim blacksmiths made any previous contact with the two families before Kumkun
began speaking of a previous life very unlikely.
The doings of the inhabitants of Urdu Bazaar and even its existence were of little interest
to people such as the Vermonts.
Sundari led a relatively obscure life and it is unlikely that events of her life could
have become known normally to a small girl in a village 40 kilometers away.
The events Kumkun described would have happened at least eight years before she was born.
The difference in social class also makes it unlikely that the Vermonts would embellish
or invent such a connection.
Like this family would not want her to be related to this lower class.
Even after the first verification of Kumkun's statements, there was much less contact between
the two families than is usual in cases of this kind and therefore less likelihood of
cross-contamination of witness testimony.
Stevenson identified three features that he considered to strengthen the authenticity
of this case.
The written notes made of many of the child's statements six months before any verifications
were made.
The fact that Harish Chandra Mesra, the person who traced the Sundari family, was not closely
connected to the Vermonts and had no connection whatever with the Sundari family of whose
existence he was ignorant of at the start of the inquiries.
And third, that his own investigation essentially corroborated the facts revealed in two earlier
investigations.
So like this is probably one of the best cases to actually look at for investigation sense
of what happened here.
And even better than the bomb rainy Wajima because people were alive to verify these
things on both sides.
So those are the cases I wanted to look at.
Now there are definitely critiques of investigators in this area and the idea of reincarnation
in general that I wanted to go over.
Stevenson was doing this for a long time.
He had people critique him.
In an article in Skeptical Inquirer, Angel examined Stevenson's 20 cases suggested for
reincarnation and concluded that the research was so poorly conducted as to cast doubt on
all of Stevenson's work.
He says that Stevenson failed to clearly and concisely document the claims made before
attempting to verify them.
Among a number of other faults, Angel says Stevenson asked leading questions and did
not properly tabulate or account for all erroneous statements.
And this is a direct quote.
In sum, Stevenson does not skillfully record, present or analyze his own data.
If a case regarded by Stevenson to be among the strongest of his cases, the only case
of 20 that had its purported verification conducted by Stevenson himself falls apart
under scrutiny as badly as the Ahmad Elawar case does.
It is reasonable to conclude that the other cases which data were first gathered by untrained
observers are even less reliable than this one.
Skeptics have written that Stevenson's evidence has always been anecdotal and by applying
Occam's razor, there are prosaic explanations for the cases without invoking paranormal.
Science writer Terrence Hines wrote, the major problem with Stevenson's work is that the
methods he used to investigate alleged cases of reincarnation are inadequate to rule out
simple, imaginative storytelling on the part of the child claiming to be reincarnated of
dead individuals.
In the seemingly most impressive cases, Stevenson has reported the children claiming to be reincarnated
new friends and relatives of the dead individuals.
The children's knowledge of facts about these individuals is then somewhat less than conclusive
evidence of reincarnation.
There are people who do however talk in support of Stevenson.
Ian Wilson, one of Stevenson's critics, acknowledged that Stevenson had brought a new professionalism
to a hitherto crank-prone field.
Paul Edwards wrote that Stevenson has written more fully and more intelligibly in defense
of reincarnation than anybody else.
Though faulting Stevenson's judgment, Edwards wrote, I have the highest regard for his honesty.
All of his case reports contain items that can be made the basis of criticism.
Stevenson could easily have suppressed this information.
The fact that he did not speaks well to his integrity.
Almutter argued in Death in Priscilla's Barber, that Edwards had begged the question by stating
in advance that the idea of consciousness existing without the brain in the interval
between lives was incredible, and that Edwards' dogmatic materialism had forced him to the
view that Stevenson's case studies must be examples of fraud or delusional thinking.
According to Almutter, the possibility of fraud was indeed investigated in these cases,
and Edwards mentioned.
In an article published on the website of Scientific America in 2013 in which Stevenson's
work was reviewed favorably, Jesse Baring, a professor of science communications wrote,
Towards the end of his own storied life, the physicist Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf, whose groundbreaking
theories on surface physics earned her the prestigious Hain Medal from the German Society
for Material Sciences, surmised that Stevenson's work had established that the statistical
probability that reincarnation does in fact occur is so overwhelming that cumulatively
the evidence is not inferior to that for most if not all branches of science.
So this person has their lovers and haters, and I think that's just what you're going
to run into in this area.
Yeah, of course you are.
So I just have a few parting words to go over, and then you can say what you want.
And this is just talking about reincarnation in general.
We're going to talk about some weird notes that people have found.
The strongest contrasts are between European cases and Asian cases.
Most European cases are weaker phenomenologically and evidentially than our Asian cases, and
intermissions tend to be longer.
The median length of 26 solved European cases for which information is available is 24 months
longer than the global median of cases in Stevenson's collection.
The American cases are similar to the European cases in this respect.
For the 16 solved American cases for which reliable information on the intermission is
available, the median interval between lives is 9.5 years.
So it's weird that there's a cultural difference between how long it takes to…
That's super weird.
Another pattern that European and American cases have in common is that intermission
lengths are notably shorter in family and acquaintances cases than in stranger cases.
In the European cases, the median intermission for family cases is 15 months, whereas for
strangers cases it is 13 years.
In the American case the median intermission in family cases is 3 years, whereas with stranger
cases it is 40 years.
This pattern is not evident in Asian cases, perhaps because the intermission in all cases
is comparatively brief and there are fewer cases with family and acquaintance connections.
With unsolved cases, the intermission length cannot be calculated precisely, but unsolved
European cases often give the impression of having a past life many years before the present.
The apparent median intermission in these cases is about 100 years.
The apparent median intermission in unsolved American cases is roughly 30 to 50 years,
similar to the median intermission of solved stranger cases.
In accordance to the general pattern, there are a few American and European international
cases.
Of the 46 European cases, two are international, of the 35 American cases, three have an international
connection.
Reincarnation researcher James Matlock speculates that longer intermission in Western
cases would allow spirits of the deceased to meet loved ones at their death, a Western
expectation not shared by the rest of the world.
Longer intermissions means greater difference between present and previous lives, presenting
fewer cues to recall, which may help explain why European and American cases are relatively
rare.
I found this very interesting.
Tucker and a co-author investigated the relationship between gender identity and past life recall,
analyzing 469 cases.
It was found that children who remembered an opposite sex previous life were far more
likely to exhibit gender non-conforming behaviors than children who reported past lives personalities
of the same sex, suggesting that an influence on gender identity from past life memories.
The conclusion of this work are complicated by an investigation of a boy from Thailand
who was considered by family members to be a reincarnation of his maternal grandmother
on the basis of a supposedly shared birthmark.
The boy subsequently demonstrated cross-gender behavior, disraised the possibility of influence
of family and community expectations on gender identity development that may masquerade as
past life influence in some cases.
He did look into gender dysphoria and its impact from past lives, which I find super
interesting.
That is very interesting because if you're remembering a past life so vividly, you could
see it feeling wrong.
And the last thing I wanted to leave off with is this is just going to be super brief.
I'm in fact just going to give a brief statement because I want to do an episode on it later.
Xenoglossy.
Xenoglossy denotes the use of language unlearned in the present life.
It can range from influence on an accent or other aspects of speech performance to the
use of words and phrases without comprehension of their meaning to the ability to converse
in a completely unlearned language.
Stevenson did connect this to past lives just without memories being used per se.
So Xenoglossy I would like to do its own episode on because I think that would be a fun episode,
but that is where I want to leave that off.
A whole lot of cases.
There are so many more we could go over, but like we're running out of time right now.
Just don't go over the ones we did.
I wonder if I should have brought it up when you're talking about it, but I wonder if the
less time in Asian cultures between reincarnation has to do with obviously in Asian cultures,
there's much more of a belief in reincarnation.
So people are actually looking for it.
Is that what you're getting at?
I don't know.
Maybe just if you're carrying the belief forward, if it has to do with reincarnating sooner
or the expect.
You wouldn't think that that would go with a kid.
There's something there though.
There's a reason why it's the last time.
I get that.
And it's cultural.
So you would think that it has something to do with the both such a.
Yeah, no, but.
I think it's a cultural belief in reincarnation.
I did have something to say about that.
And then I just realized that I would say, yeah, that would be why it's rare, but rarity
actually has nothing to do with the amount of time it actually takes between the deceased
life ending and the new life beginning.
Exactly.
Maybe.
Yeah, it's hard to speak on it.
It wouldn't be a faux pas to talk about it just because it happened so soon.
That's the only.
Or it could be because there is that kind of like grieving period.
We actually have a fairly long grieving period.
Yeah, and that's the only correlation you can kind of make between the two.
But even then, that wouldn't impact what he called the intermission period.
That would just impact like when you would actually start talking about it or making
that correlation, not necessarily how long the time between the lives would be.
That's a super interesting little tidbit that they're able to put together.
I've never heard that before.
The other thing with the where you're seeing hundred years between lives, it's almost
like they could have fit a whole other life and they're remembering just a life that was
strong came through stronger than another one.
But nobody actually knows how reincarnation works and how long you actually have between
lives.
I assume it varies on lives how long before you reincarnate.
But yeah, those are super interesting facts.
Yeah.
And of course, I've left out, of course, the most famous reincarnation cases of Edgar Cayce
and then, oh, what's his pumpkin bowl cut head?
Pumpkin bowl cut head.
David Wilcock.
Yeah.
David Wilcock.
Of course, we covered it on a whole like,
reincarnation.
We've already done those.
Yeah, I really like that episode.
That's super interesting way that I've never heard it put together before.
And if we wanted to, like we could do an adult episode and a xyloglyph episode.
I'm sorry, I forget the word.
I always do.
Xenoglossy.
Xenoglossy episode, which I think we should do in the future, both of those.
And yeah, like weird cases.
And there's people doing research into it.
So it's interesting.
I like it.
And I will leave my opinion out until I read more about it.
Okay.
Because it does not impact my life at all.
Yeah.
And with that, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea.
We are Journey to the Fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
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