Welcome to our paranormal afterlife.

This is episode 195 of paranormal stories.

This week I'm talking about birth marks that relate to children's past life memories.

Imagine a four-year-old boy in rural India who insists that he remembers being shot in the chest.

His parents are baffled until they notice a large, discoloured birthmark in the very spot he points to.

Later, researchers discover that a man in a neighbouring

village died years earlier from a gunshot wound in exactly the same place. Stories like this

sound like the stuff of folklore, but for more than half a century they've been the subject of

painstaking research at the University

of Virginia. The late psychiatrist, Dr. Ian Stevenson, and his successor, Dr. Jim B. Tucker,

have collected over 2,500 cases of children who claim to remember previous lives.

Among the most striking of these reports are the children born with

birth marks or birth defects that appear to match the injuries, wounds or distinctive features

of the individuals they claim to have been. This is not fringe material from an obscure

paranormal society. Stevenson, a respected academic, spent decades documenting and cross-checking witness

testimonies, medical records and photographs.

His goal was not to prove reincarnation outright, but to argue that these cases warranted

serious scientific attention.

Ian Stevenson was not a mystic or guru.

Trained in psychiatry and deeply steeped in the language of science,

he came to the question of reincarnation reluctantly.

What first interested him was not metaphysics,

...