Hello. II've been listening to the show for years and finally come around to register on these forums to post "my story". I wrote a comment to the Jim Tucker interview a few months back and maybe one or less people that know me as "Polterwurst" from the Paracast forums.
Anyway, here goes. How I came to consider that Reincarnation research could be more than wishful thinking.
As a kid, more than 30 years ago, I watched a documentary about a case of alleged reincarnation here in Germany. A little boy with a strange birthmark on his neck was uttering cries in his dreams that sounded like a foreign language. A psychologist made a tape of this and sent it to a language expert who thought it was Thai. The boy then began to talk about what seemed to have been a former life, ended by a brutal murder (a knife to the neck). Eventually, his family went to Thailand, where they (allegedly) found the boy's former family members.
A sceptic even at that age (I must have been around 10), and not knowing anything about the work of Prof. Ian Stevenson, I thought that was all wishful thinking, because if something like that really occured, there should be a lot more babies with strange, woundlike birthmarks.
Fast forward approx. 10 years. Accidentally, I step into a room where a mother is changing the diapers of an infant and I notice a big red birthmark (not an injury or something) on his chest, under the left ribcage, looking very much like blood seeping from a wound. I'm kind of astonished but I'm told that the doctors had said these birthmarks would occur more often than one would think and that they tend to become less prominent over the years (during a garden pool party I found out that that's true, the boy in question is now over 20 years old and the mark now looks like a straight white line or a scar, although, as I said, it hadn't been caused by an injury).
Of course, that didn't make me reconsider my opinion. I'm not a religious person and until recently I tended not to think about subjects like what happens after death. For me, it was quite obvious, that all theories about that, again, were nothing but wishful thinking.
But as soon as this boy could speak, he would make some very strange remarks and show some unusual behavior (like calling his mother by her first name and at times stating that she was not even his real mother), eventually telling me (when he was about six years old) that he had been murdered in what he called his former life.
That got my attention. But unfortunately, I couldn't find out much. His family has decided to keep all this under wraps and not to stir things any further, I guess for fear of being ridiculed. Even showing an interest in strange phenomena can seriously endanger your social status where I live, so that was that.
So now I started looking into reincarnation and soon I found the work of the late Prof. Ian Stevenson, which I find just remarkable and not at all esoteric (although on the library bookshelves here you will find his books with the usual psychedelic covers in the esoterics department). I read of the 2000 + cases he investigated, mostly in Asia, but many also in America and Europe. Some cases involve the soon-to-be mother having a dream in which a dead relative seems to announce his rebirth in her child. Which at that point I found rather unconvincing.
A few years ago, a very dear sister-in-law died of cancer at the age of 47. I had known her before she had become family and I had always felt a little more for her than is usual among relatives. I won't go into details, but we always were kind of close. Shortly after her burial, my sister, who was a few weeks pregnant (and with whom I had stood before the grave that day), told me of a dream she had had of the deceased. She could not remember any details, but she had woken up with a feeling like "wouldn't it be cool if she reincarnated in my daughter?"
Now, I had never told my sister about my interest in the subject, she had never felt an interest in that either and she knew nothing of the earlier case I had stumbled upon (as I said, the boy's family kept it a secret and I sure didn't tell anybody back then) or about my feelings regarding my sister-in-law (that was obviously a well-guarded secret too).
I decided to still say nothing, but as you can imagine, I watched the kid from the first day on (it was indeed a girl). Which was kind of difficult because my sister lives an hour's drive away. EDIT: I did make it a point not to let her sense that I was somehow expecting her to do or say anything unusual, just in case you wondered. I talked to her and acted just as I would have with any other kid.
Okay, to make a long story short, the girl soon showed an unusual affection with me (whereas she was utterly shy with others). Often, since she started to talk, she will whisper like we have a secret. And then, one day when she wasn't more than three years old, she looks at me as if she wants to say "Now pay close attention, this is important". And she comes up to me and whispers "I am forever here".
At that point I'm thinking, well, that's probably her lining up words, learning to talk. So I ask "What do you mean, here? Here at our place?"
And she shakes her head, frowning like she wants to say "Man, don't you get it". Gets a little closer and puts her hand on my chest "Here," she says, "here with you."
There were other, even more baffling "statements" by both children, but most of them even more personal and embarrassing, so I can't really write them down here.
EDIT: I don't expect anyone to believe a word I'm saying. Heck, if anyone had told me that story a decade or so ago, I myself would have thought, "of course, he's misinterpreting or over-interpreting perfectly explainable remarks and behaviours of kids, who have no idea what they're talking about and just throwing words around." But the thing is, in both cases, the kids seemed to be unusually aware of things concerning life and death. They absolutely did seem to have an idea, what they were talking about.
I guess you really have to experience something like that yourself to begin to believe it. I know that in my case, it was against everything I have learned (in a western materialistic upbringing) about the brain generating consciousness and the world not being a paranormal place in general.
After years of thinking, I decided that I would feel more self-deluded or like a kook, as the debunkers would have it, if I went on denying the direction in which the evidence is pointing, than if I started to accept it. It's not always been easy to talk about it, some people who I had hoped would know better, have written me off as a kook, but I guess it comes with the territory.
And I'm still not religious, just a bit more spiritual, I guess.