Reincarnation Research

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The cases begin with a child who has just learned to talk. Typically between two and four — in India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Burma, Thailand, less often in Europe or America — the child begins describing another life: another family, another house, and often a death, usually violent. Behaviors come attached — a phobia matching the reported manner of death, unusual skills or play, sometimes the manners of the opposite sex. By about seven it has usually faded. Since 1961 a research program at the University of Virginia has located such children and checked their statements against the documented lives of identified dead people; its files hold more than 2,500 of what the field calls cases of the reincarnation type. The doctrine of rebirth — ancient, worldwide — stands behind the cases only as background; the program studied the children, and the checking.

For most of its existence the field was one man’s design. Ian Stevenson, born in Montreal in 1918, took his medical degree from McGill in 1943, left biochemistry for psychosomatic medicine, then psychiatry and psychoanalysis; in 1957, at thirty-eight, he became Virginia’s chairman of psychiatry. The turn came in 1958, when the American Society for Psychical Research announced an essay prize, in honor of William James, on paranormal phenomena and survival after death. His winning essay, published in 1960, reviewed forty-four published cases in which the remembered person had been identified. In 1961 he went to India and Ceylon — and found, by Jim Tucker’s later account, twenty-five new cases in four weeks.

The money came from photocopying. Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, funded the field trips that followed; his support let Stevenson resign the chairmanship in 1967 and found the Division of Personality Studies — later the Division of Perceptual Studies, by its own account the only university unit in the world devoted to previous-life memories, near-death experiences, and kindred phenomena. At his death in 1968 Carlson left the university $1,000,000 to continue the work; the bequest stirred controversy, was accepted, and made Stevenson the first Chester F. Carlson Professor of Psychiatry, free of clinical duties. He spent the freedom on fieldwork, sometimes logging 55,000 miles in a year.

The method scarcely changed in forty years. Find the child early; record statements and behaviors; interview firsthand witnesses on both sides, preferably before the families have met; verify against documents — birth certificates, postmortem reports, medical records. A case where a matching deceased person can be identified is “solved.” In the birthmark cases, the child’s marks or defects are set against the dead person’s wounds. Hypnotic past-life regression was excluded as worthless — Stevenson kept a file labeled “Extravagant Claims” for the volunteered Napoleons and Mary Magdalenes. He graded his own corpus: highest weight went to cases where the families were strangers and a written record of the statements predated verification, and to medically documented birthmark–wound matches. The showcase of the first kind was Imad Elawar, a Lebanese boy whose statements Stevenson wrote down in 1964 before the previous personality was identified; in 1988 Stevenson and Samararatne could add only three Sri Lankan cases of the kind. The scarcity would become an argument.

Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation appeared in 1966 — the hedge in the title was characteristic — and was reprinted in 1974 with follow-ups on eighteen of the twenty children. Four volumes of Cases of the Reincarnation Type followed between 1975 and 1983. The flagship physical claim came in 1997: Reincarnation and Biology, two volumes and 2,268 pages presenting 225 cases of birthmarks or birth defects said to match wounds, usually fatal, on the previous personality’s body. Whether the correspondences survive scrutiny is contested. That the documentation exists, at that scale, is not.

For a moment in the 1970s, mainstream medicine looked. Reviewing the first volume for the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1975, Lester S. King found a careful, dispassionate collection of cases hard to explain on ordinary assumptions — data that would convince no skeptic but could not be waved away. In September 1977 the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease gave most of an issue to Stevenson’s work; the psychiatrist Harold Lief called him a methodical investigator, either profoundly mistaken or destined to be remembered as a Galileo of his century; the editor counted 300 to 400 reprint requests. Then, mostly, silence: the work was not so much refuted as ignored. Margalit Fox’s New York Times obituary caught the division — to supporters a misunderstood genius, to detractors earnest but gullible, while most scientists simply looked away.

The criticisms were specific, and the sharpest came from inside. Champe Ransom, a lawyer Stevenson hired as an assistant in the 1970s, wrote an unpublished review of the methods, known through the philosopher Paul Edwards’s citations: Stevenson asked leading questions, filled gaps in narratives, interviewed too briefly and too late — often years after the first recall — and published witnesses’ conclusions rather than the data beneath them. Of 1,111 cases Ransom examined, only eleven involved no contact between the families before the interviews, and seven of those he judged seriously flawed. Edwards, editor of Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy, made the book-length case in Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996): the case studies were full of holes, came nowhere near outweighing the antecedent improbability of reincarnation, and their author declined to engage opponents — the long bibliography of his 1987 Children Who Remember Previous Lives cites no opposing work. Leonard Angel went at the showcase: his 1994 re-analysis of the Imad Elawar case in Skeptical Inquirer charged loose pre-verification recording, after-the-fact alteration, leading questions, and tabulations that did not hold up — flaws he concluded reached the whole corpus. Counter-analyses dispute his reading of the tables; the exchange never closed.

Other objections concern where the cases come from. They cluster in cultures already persuaded, and C. T. K. Chari argued they are cultural artifacts — a remembered past life serving many Asian children roughly as an imaginary companion serves children elsewhere. Stevenson replied that believing societies listen where others hush, so cases surface where they are heard; the seventy-nine American cases he analyzed in 1983, largely confined within families, are data for both sides. Ian Wilson noted how often poor children remembered wealthier lives, and suggested a motive; Robert Baker invoked cryptomnesia and confabulation; Eugene Brody read the cases psychodynamically — a mother under stress recruiting the culture’s belief around a difficult child.

Stevenson’s own verdict was more hedged than either camp’s. A 1977 paper proposed reincarnation not as a substitute for genetics and environment but as a possible third factor beside them, bearing on certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities, and illnesses. He refused, colleagues recalled, to let the word “proof” near anything he had collected or hoped to collect; in 1989 he wrote that the evidence was not flawless, compelled no belief, and allowed other interpretations — yet that it was indefensible to say there was no evidence at all. His habitual formula was exact about its limits: “reincarnation is not the only explanation we have, but it is the best explanation we have for the strongest cases.” He retired in 2002, Bruce Greyson succeeding to the Carlson chair, and died in Charlottesville on February 8, 2007, at eighty-eight, leaving over 300 publications and fourteen books.

Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist, joined the program in the late 1990s, oversaw the electronic coding of Stevenson’s files, and turned the emphasis toward American cases, presented in Life Before Life (2005) and Return to Life (2013). The most prominent is now the most contested: James Leininger, born in 1998, had nightmares of a plane crash from age two and spoke of flying a Corsair from a boat called “Natoma” with a friend named Jack Larsen; a printout on the USS Natoma Bay dated August 27, 2000, and an ABC interview taped in June 2002 precede the identification of James M. Huston Jr., the only Natoma Bay pilot killed in the Iwo Jima operation. In 2021 the philosopher Michael Sudduth published a ninety-four-page re-examination arguing that the case’s chronology is “neither robust nor credible” — that the official narrative omits the boy’s exposure to ordinary sources, aviation videos and museum visits among them, and rests on parental testimony he found unreliable. Tucker’s response called the report “filled with distortions, mischaracterizations, and at times, outright misinformation,” disputing, among much else, whether the museum displayed a Corsair. The two accounts disagree fact by fact and remain in print side by side.

The program survived its founder without converting its field. The Division of Perceptual Studies remains active inside Virginia’s psychiatry department, children’s previous-life memories now one of four research areas, beside near-death experiences, psi, and altered states; a 2024 review of the literature opens by conceding that most clinicians and scientists do not know it exists. Tucker’s 2025 overview, sixty years and 2,500 cases on, still asks whether the cases bear on a mind not reducible to the brain.

Sixty years of this reads, from the editor’s chair, as an argument over priors conducted in the vocabulary of fieldwork — the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes drily that what such cases are evidence for depends on the metaphysics brought to them. Edwards began from the antecedent improbability of reincarnation, and the flaws settled his verdict; Stevenson began from the cases, and the strongest settled his. Both verdicts were drawn from one set of files. The same reading notices how little the cases would establish even at face value: no karmic pattern — as Jesse Bering noted in 2013 — no judgment, no ledger of deserts. What the strongest cases would evidence, if they evidence anything, is a bare carry-over — memory, fear, sometimes a mark — closer to Stevenson’s third factor than to any cosmology: not the wheel of rebirth but something smaller and stranger.

The children, meanwhile, grow up. In 2024 the program published its first adult follow-up of the American cases: twenty-three people, interviewed as children, asked what the purported memories had left behind — sixty-five percent said the experience had shaped their lives in some way. The files they came from remain at the University of Virginia, available to anyone prepared to examine them.

→ Related: Reincarnation · Near Death Experience · Karma