S3E1: The Boy Who Remembered Dying | The Reincarnation Records

When five-year-old Chase Bowman developed an inexplicable terror of loud booming sounds, his mother, Carol, had no idea what was causing it. Then, sitting on her lap at their kitchen table, Chase began describing another life: a soldier on a battlefield, a gun with a bayonet, a wound to his wrist, and ultimately, his own death. What happened afterward was just as startling. The chronic eczema on Chase’s wrist cleared, and his debilitating fear of loud noises disappeared. For Carol, that moment changed everything. A stay-at-home mom with no background in science or reincarnation research, she became determined to understand what had happened to her son. Were experiences like Chase’s real? Were other children having them? How common are these memories in the West, especially in Judeo-Christian families like hers? Could simply remembering and talking about these memories somehow help children heal? Her search would lead her to the work of pioneering researcher Ian Stevenson and eventually beyond her own family, as Carol began looking for other American parents whose children were describing memories they couldn’t explain. Was she uncovering something hidden in plain sight about memory, consciousness, and what survives death? Or were parents simply finding meaning in experiences that could be explained by more conventional means? _______ Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass https://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call, subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.com. https://thetelepathytapes.com/ _______ Dive into the work of those interviewed in this episode: Carol Bowman: Children's Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child. https://link.amazon/B00OX5sGk 1997, Bantam. Return from Heaven: Beloved Relatives Reincarnated Within Your Family https://link.amazon/B0e7untar. 2001, HarperCollins. Roger Woolger: Other Lives, Other Selves: A Jungian Psychotherapist Discovers Past Lives. https://link.amazon/B06ReipX5 1987, Doubleday. Healing Your Past Lives: Exploring the Many Lives of the Soul https://link.amazon/B0ckXUsDR. 2004, Sounds True. Helen Wambach: Reliving Past Lives: The Evidence Under Hypnosis. https://link.amazon/B08mwgAuR 1978, Harper & Row. Life Before Life: Is There Life Before Birth? 750 Cases of Hypnosis https://link.amazon/B0a3Vl7TB. 2020, White Crow Books. Mass Dreams of the Future. https://link.amazon/B027ijSWp 1989, McGraw-Hill, completed by Chet Snow after her death. Edith Fiore: You Have Been Here Before: A Psychologist Looks at Past Lives. https://link.amazon/B0dPqGVao 1978, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. The Unquiet Dead: A Psychologist Treats Spirit Possession. https://link.amazon/B067mw8SJ 1987, Doubleday._______ Thank you to our sponsors! Alloy http://myalloy.com/ - Try the original estrogen-powered M4 skincare from Alloy. Visit myalloy.com http://myalloy.com/ and use code TAPES for $20 off your first order! Butcher Box https://www.butcherbox.com/Ka'Chava https://kachava.com/ - Go to kachava.com https://kachava.com/ and use code TAPES for 15% off your first order. Lola Blankets https://lolablankets.com/ - For a limited time, our listeners can get 40% OFF select Lola Blankets products with code TAPES at checkout, go to lolablankets.com https://lolablankets.com/. Luminara https://www.luminara.care/ - If you’re curious about energy healing and ready to experience it for yourself, Luminara is offering 20% off your first session for listeners of The Telepathy Tapes. Just go to luminara.care https://www.luminara.care/ and use code TAPES20. Shopify http://shopify.com/tapes - Start your business today with the industry’s best business partner, Shopify. Sign up for your free trial at Shopify.com/tapes http://shopify.com/tapes. Quince https://www.quince.com/tapes - Find the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Quince. Go to Quince.com/tapes https://www.quince.com/tapes for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Zenni https://zenni.com/podcast - That scratched up pair has done its job. Upgrade today with Zenni. Got to Zenni.com/podcast https://zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off your first order + free shipping on all orders over $65! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ky Dickens?

  Hey, everyone. This is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to The Reincarnation Records from TTT Media.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I don't think a three-year-old is supposed to be having nightmares about how they died in a fiery plane crash.

• 0:10Ky Dickens?

  For millennia, young children have reported something extraordinary.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  They remember their names. They remember places.

• 0:17Speaker 03

  Oftentimes, the kids remember how they died and was something traumatic.

• 0:21Ky Dickens?

  And in some cases, these memories can be verified.

• 0:24Speaker 04

  Allowing kids to talk about it is very important. Past life memories can heal.

• 0:29Ky Dickens?

  What if memory doesn't begin at birth? What if some part of us arrives already carrying a story?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  If reincarnation is real, I don't think we're supposed to remember.

• 0:38Ky Dickens?

  This season, we step into one of the most controversial and quietly persistent ideas in human history: reincarnation.

• 0:45Speaker 05

  We are taught from a very early age in the Judeo-Christian culture that reincarnation doesn't exist.

• 0:51Speaker 06

  It's not an escape from the demands of religion.

• 0:55Ky Dickens?

  We'll meet people who speak with striking clarity about other lives and the researchers around the world who've spent decades studying these cases.

• 1:02Speaker 05

  Once you observe this in a child, and the evidence is very compelling, you have to open up to another explanation for what is going on.

• 1:14Ky Dickens?

  Welcome to The Reincarnation Records.

• 1:21Speaker 07

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• 2:51Ky Dickens?

  This is our first episode, and before we dive in, I thought it was important to give a little personal context. Reincarnation is something I never believed in. Growing up, I was Christian, and interestingly enough, my dad was an atheist. And as far apart as our beliefs were, the one thing we both thought to be certain was that when this one life ends, that's it. And beyond that, the part of my personality that loves science and logic and reason could not take seriously the idea that consciousness or a soul could choose to come back into another body because it felt so tied to just one. And then, something happened that I never expected. I stumbled into a project that would become the telepathy tapes, a six-year investigation into claims from non-speaking individuals that they could read minds. That revelation was confounding enough.

• 3:35Ky Dickens?

  It took me years to wrestle with it, test it, investigate it, and slowly come to believe that something real was happening. But along the way, another pattern kept surfacing. About a third of the non-speaking individuals that I met across different countries and cultures and belief systems brought up remembering a past life. Often, that statement stood in direct contrast to their parents' religious beliefs or even their agnostic or atheist beliefs. But these non-speaking individuals said it anyway, despite the spiritual bomb they might be dropping inside of their own families. And the first time this bomb hit me was with Mia's family. Mia was the first girl with non-speaking autism to enter my life. She lives in Mexico, and her mother, Eliana, is deeply Catholic. And when Mia first said she could read minds,

• 4:20Ky Dickens?

  Eliana was so frightened that she even asked a priest about an exorcism. And then Mia said something even more shocking. And here's a clip from that interview, and you'll also hear the translator, Rebecca.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Que ha tuvido antes de esta vida? Mia said, "I had another life before this one." Ella solamente dijo que se llamaba Carlos. So she said her name was Carlos in this previous life in Mexico City in 1856, and her name was Carlos. But her mom has never really pursued asking her more about it. And it's mostly because Eliana doesn't feel totally comfortable.

• 4:56Ky Dickens?

  When I first heard this, I remember thinking, why would Mia, who's so dependent on her family for everything, say something in exact opposition to their beliefs? It made no sense. And then the second thing I thought was, no. I mean, telepathy was already enough to deal with. I did not want to open another door that would shatter my reality even further, and especially not this door. But the more families I met, the more it happened, again and again, whether the families were Hindu, or Christian, or agnostic, or Jewish. Like Jennifer, the mother of a non-speaker named Ethan, who we interviewed for the Talk Tracks.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  He remembers all his past lives.

• 5:31Ky Dickens?

  Oh, is that what he says?

• 5:31Speaker 04

  And he wants this life to be special because he says this is his last one, and this is his hardest life. This is his first life with autism. It's unbelievable. And he knows our past lives, too.

• 5:45Ky Dickens?

  Wow.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  This is all, it sounds crazy to say, but some of it's scary. But he knows how people passed. He knows how he passed in his last life. He knows how his brother passed. And in some of the ways that we have passed, it shows the things that we're anxious about now.

• 6:02Ky Dickens?

  And of course, not all non-speakers mention reincarnation. Some have never brought it up, and some only discuss the world through a very traditional religious lens. But enough people did bring it up that it sent me on another investigation. And I want to be clear that I did not come into this wanting reincarnation to be true. My whole life, I've made serious choices, some with great regret and remorse because I believed we only got one shot at our story, one lifetime to fit everything in, and one body on this earth. So I came into this with every normal objection. Maybe these were fantasies that people were picking up, or stories from television, or books, or religion. Or maybe even more probable, in the case of children, adults were making meaning out of random things that were just meant as play or fantasy.

• 6:45Ky Dickens?

  But in this series, I'll take you on the journey I went through. What are these memories? Where could they possibly be coming from? And if any of these memories can be verified, what might that tell us about what happens after we die? And maybe even about the nature of memory, consciousness, and reality itself? But to get anywhere near those questions, we have to start where these cases usually begin, with a very young child saying something to a family member that they cannot explain.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  I went into shock, which is not unusual for parents to do when a child starts talking about a past life memory, because I knew we were in new territory.

• 7:20Ky Dickens?

  That's Carol Bowman, who started off not as a scientist or a researcher, but as a mother, trying to understand why her five-year-old son was suddenly terrified of loud booming noises.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  My son Chase, who was five at the time, started presenting phobias. He was terrified of loud booming sounds, which we were unaware of until we went to a fireworks display, 4th of July, 1987. And he lived out. He became hysterical. Took him home from the fireworks. He couldn't tell me what was wrong, and I was trying to figure out what in his short life could cause this phobia.

• 7:59Ky Dickens?

  What Carol didn't know yet, because nothing in her life had prepared her to recognize it, was that Chase was already exhibiting one of the most commonly reported patterns in past life memory cases.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Chase would cry when he heard the loud booming sounds. And then it happened again a couple of weeks later when we were in an indoor swimming pool, and people jumped on the diving board and made the booming sounds again. And again, he became hysterical. And I asked him what was wrong, and he said, "Those sounds scare me."

• 8:27Speaker 06

  I remember being unusually afraid of loud noises. And I remember even in my young age knowing that it was a fear that felt different than a normal fear.

• 8:37Ky Dickens?

  That's Chase Bowman, Carol's son, reflecting on this now as a grown adult.

• 8:43Speaker 06

  Losing your mom at a grocery store is a fear, but something about these noises felt like something deeper. And it caused me just to sort of lose control. I would try to leave. I would cry. I'd be like, can't be here. Don't want to be here.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  It was apparent that Chase had a phobia, and I didn't know where it'd come from.

• 9:01Ky Dickens?

  At the time, the Bowman's were living in Asheville, North Carolina, and there weren't a lot of resources for helping Chase through his phobias. But in a twist of luck, Carol's friend, a hypnotherapist by the name of Norman Ing, was in town, and he agreed to help.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  The kids loved Norman. He was very good with children. And we were sitting around my kitchen table, and Chase was due to start kindergarten. We didn't send him to preschool. I was home with my kids. And I was thinking, maybe he can help Chase by giving him some suggestions. So the next time he was exposed to loud booming sounds, he wouldn't have an hysterical reaction. So I said to Norm, can you work with Chase? He has this phobia. And Chase was eager to find some resolution to this. And Norman used what we call a bridging technique. He said, simply, sit on your mom's lap, close your eyes, and tell me what you see when you hear the loud noises that scare you.

• 9:58Ky Dickens?

  Here's Chase Bowman again.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  The images were there. I just needed a little encouragement. It started sort of as postcards in my mind. And then it sort of started animating and becoming live action, like remembering a vivid dream.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  And I could see his eyelids fluttering. And immediately, Chase started talking in a very matter-of-fact, serious tone, in the first-person tense. I'm a soldier. I have a uniform on. It's dirty. I have a big gun with a sword at the end. I'm crouching behind a rock. There's smoke everywhere. I can't even see who I'm shooting at. I don't want to be there. I don't want to kill other people. And Norman hadn't said anything to him. This was just coming stream of consciousness.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  I remember the first image that came to mind almost instantly was a person that I identified as myself, but it wasn't me. It looked very different than me. It was an adult, had darker skin, and I was holding a gun. And it was, just came right up.

• 10:59Ky Dickens?

  Chase Bowman, the man sitting in front of me as we do this interview, is a very light-skinned man with some freckles and strawberry blonde hair.

• 11:06Speaker 06

  I believe that I was a black man, a tall man. And it wasn't strange to me. I remember in that moment seeing that was me, even though I looked so different than, you know, a five-year-old redhead. The next thing I saw was this person whom I identified as me in battle, firing sort of indiscriminately at anything. I remember the feelings that came with that, the feelings of fear, of chaos, of wanting to leave. This was not a fun moment. It felt very visceral. The emotion of it was the most real of it all.

• 11:40Ky Dickens?

  Do you remember what your weapon looked like?

• 11:42Speaker 06

  I described as a kid as a gun with a sword at the end, not really knowing what that meant. But yeah, it was sort of an old-school bayonet.

• 11:49Ky Dickens?

  I want to quickly interject here that Carol took detailed notes, writing everything down while it was still fresh in her brain. And this detail was very interesting, because even if Chase had seen a toy gun before or wanted the same Toys R Us aisles as I did, bayonets were not exactly part of the toy store landscapes in the late 80s. So had you ever seen bayonets or like Civil War imagery?

• 12:10Speaker 06

  To my knowledge, no. My mom was always watching Sesame Street with me and keeping our media pretty tight. And, you know, there was no internet back then.

• 12:17Ky Dickens?

  And you don't remember what like the enemy looked like?

• 12:20Speaker 06

  It was actually, part of that memory was just that I didn't know who the enemy was. And that was part of the fear and confusion that came with that. There was smoke. It was hard to see. I don't even think I was making a plan. I was just kind of firing.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  He said he didn't want to be there. He didn't want to kill other people. That was the thing. It was very adult. He wasn't glorifying war at all. He thought it was awful. And all of a sudden, he said, I'm shot. And he held his right wrist. And all of a sudden, he was quiet. And then he said, I passed out. So he had that awareness.

• 13:00Speaker 06

  And I remember that was enough to have me be pulled out of battle. I remember a friend of mine grabbed me and grabbed me kind of under my arms and pulled me out and took me to this sort of makeshift hospital.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  And he said, they take me to this place, and it's a big tent with material on top.

• 13:19Speaker 06

  With poles at the end.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  And he said, they put me on a bed, but it's not like a regular bed. It's a hard bench. And they bandaged my wrist.

• 13:29Ky Dickens?

  I want to interject again, because this little moment also stuck out to me. Because raising a little boy and watching little boys play, if they're ever acting out getting shot, it's pretty epic. They're grabbing their chests, they're falling to the floor. I've yet to see it about the wrist.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  He was talking about his right wrist.

• 13:44Speaker 06

  And I remember being bandaged and resting there for a time. I remember feeling a relief from being there because I was out of the battle.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  This is nothing he saw in Mr. Rogers's Sesame Street. And I carefully monitored their intake of TV and movies.

• 14:00Ky Dickens?

  And as a mother myself, this part really hit me, because I remember being hyper-aware of what went into my kids' heads when they were little. And when Carol's kids were growing up, she was home with them. And this was before endless streaming or YouTube or any of that stuff. There were just a few basic channels, and Carol monitored what they were watching.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  And he said, they want me to go back into battle. I don't want to go. I miss my wife and family. Up until that moment, my mind was going very quickly, trying to figure out what was going on. And when he said something about his wife and family, I went into shock. It was the moment when I realized, we're in past-life territory.

• 14:38Speaker 06

  The battlefield was one of the more distinct memories that came to me. Just the shape of it. I was behind a rock, and I was firing into a valley. And the walls of the valley were high. I feel like if I came to this spot, wherever it may be, I would recognize it because that was rather vivid. In terms of my clothes, I remember it was nothing, just kind of some sort of makeshift uniform of sorts, sort of mid-tone, earth tones, something. It wasn't anything fancy, for sure.

• 15:06Ky Dickens?

  And then Chase, did you see the moment of your death?

• 15:10Speaker 06

  After being bandaged and spending some time at the field hospital, I remember walking back into battle. I remember passing a cannon that was being pulled by a horse on a cart.

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Chase was still on my lap. He said, I'm walking down a dirt road, and I see chickens on the road. I see horses pulling wooden wagons with big wheels.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  I remember walking to the top of the same place and then finding a new post there. I was firing the cannon, manning some kind of bigger arms. And then I remember being shot and realizing that I died and a point of view above the battlefield, sort of floating above. It was just like a bird's-eye view of the battlefield.

• 15:53Ky Dickens?

  And that was it. It was over. Carol's five-year-old was back at the table.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  All of a sudden, he opened his eyes, jumped off my lap, ran into the other room to play with his Legos, and he grabbed a cookie in the process off the kitchen table. I had no idea children could have past-life memories. It didn't even occur to me.

• 16:13Speaker 06

  That was kind of the full breadth of the spontaneous memory that I had.

• 16:17Ky Dickens?

  We're going to see that reincarnation research often falls into two broad lanes. One is past-life regression, where adults, often through hypnosis or psychotherapy, describe memories or scenes from what they experience as another life. And those cases can be powerful, but they're also a little complicated, because adults carry a lifetime of movies and stories and history and books and trauma with them, and often in the subconscious. But the other lane is children's memories. And those cases are different, because when a very young child starts describing a life they've never lived with historical facts and cultural knowledge they haven't been taught, and in a family that does not believe in reincarnation, it becomes harder for a parent to dismiss as childhood fantasy.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Children's memories are so close to the surface.

• 17:02Ky Dickens?

  And this will come up again and again in this series, that for children, especially younger than five, these vivid, inexplicable memories seem to be right there. There's no need to really poke or prod or ask leading questions. If they are in there, they'll come out.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  You go into a mild state of shock. Oh, my God, what just happened?

• 17:21Ky Dickens?

  But as remarkable as Chase's memory was, what's even more remarkable is what happened to him after he released it and the discovery that a wound from that battlefield may have followed him into his present life. That's coming up after this break.

• 17:38Ky Dickens?

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• 19:52Ky Dickens?

  Welcome back to the reincarnation records. So after Chase's spontaneous memory, there were a few people sitting at the table. Carol Bowman, Chase's mom, her good friend Norman, and Chase's older sister, Sarah.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  My daughter Sarah said, Mom, that place where Chase was shot on his wrist, that's where he has his eczema. Chase had a chronic severe eczema on his wrist since he was about nine months old that had not responded to medical treatment at all. And we tried everything. And he scratched it so much at night that it got to the point where I'd have to bandage his wrist.

• 20:27Speaker 06

  I remember scratching at it until it would bleed. And it seemed to be the same spot that I'd been shot. And after processing this memory, it healed.

• 20:37Ky Dickens?

  Gosh, that's wild.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Within two days, his eczema cleared up completely.

• 20:42Ky Dickens?

  This is one of the first patterns I want you to register because over this series, you're going to see versions of this again and again. Children who describe injuries or even death wounds from another life and then seem to carry a birthmark or birth defect or a scar or pain or physical symptom in that exact same place.

• 21:01Speaker 06

  The experience helped me mature and move forward in a number of ways. My eczema went away shortly thereafter, and my fear of loud noises shortly thereafter as well.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Just by remembering the past life death, his phobia just quickly disappeared. He asked for a drum kit for his sixth birthday.

• 21:24Speaker 06

  I think I was taking ownership of the booming sounds, you know, and I've been a drummer ever since. So it had an immediate benefit and long-term benefits.

• 21:32Ky Dickens?

  And this is the second pattern I want you to register. In almost all of the cases we'll be exploring this season, children don't just remember a life. They seem to carry a strong emotion from it, like a fear or phobia or often night terrors. And almost always, once the memory is heard and received and responded to, something begins to release and heal. For Chase, the booming sounds were unbearable. His body reacted to them as if he was still in danger. But after he described the battlefield and confusion and injury and moment of death, something changed. His eczema cleared, his phobia disappeared. And for Carol, that opened up a question she could not let go of.

• 22:11Speaker 04

  I was driven to, just out of curiosity, figure out what happened. Like, what is this? Can other children have these memories? Can they be healed of problems that they bring in with them from previous lives?

• 22:26Ky Dickens?

  And Carol, maybe for a little context, like, what were you doing up until then? And, you know, same with your husband.

• 22:31Speaker 04

  I had a bachelor's degree in English. My husband, Steve, graduated with his class of 72 from Harvard. And he taught in a private school in Concord, Mass. We decided we wanted to leave the Boston area and ended up in western North Carolina. And we bought a 24-acre farm. I stayed home by choice with my kids. And at one point, I'm sure all mothers go through this, I was a little frustrated. Is this all there is? You know, we had a great community in Asheville. I had friends and we did things with our kids. But it's like, I know I'm supposed to be doing something more and I don't know what it is. And I'm not exactly a praying person. But I remember during that period, I was saying, just show me what to do.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  I know I'm supposed to be doing something, just show me. And in that moment, when Chase remembered his past life on a battlefield, my research began. I wanted to find answers and I'll do whatever it takes to get there. And I started talking to my friends in Asheville about what happened with Chase. And I remember one person saying, you've really lost it, Carol. But other people were telling me stories about their young children and what they had said. And they thought, maybe that was a past life. I started getting little cases from them. Oh, yeah, my daughter remembered burying her children after a flood. It was just, yeah, that happened to my little girl or my son.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Little cases like that. But to me, it was like, wow, you know, they're here, they're everywhere. And my daughter had memories too, but I don't want to go into that now. Same thing happened. She had a phobia of fires, especially house fires, and she was terrified.

• 24:17Ky Dickens?

  We'll come back to this in a later episode when we explore another strange facet of many cases that some families have multiple people who remember past lives, which raises a fascinating question around memory and if some families might be wired less for forgetting. And if that's true, could there be a biological predisposition for memory retention extending beyond our current physical life? But to stay on track, Carol's current question was more immediate. She was already hearing little stories in Asheville, but could any of it be validated beyond just anecdotes?

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Before the internet, our source of material was through bookstores and libraries. And a lot of libraries didn't have any books on past lives.

• 24:56Ky Dickens?

  But through a twist of luck locally, Carol was given her first handle to hold on to.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  I had a friend whose name was Kathy. And I had just experienced Chase's memories and was talking to her about it over at her house. Kathy and I were carrying on in the kitchen, laughing and talking about this. And her husband was there, Patrick. And he stuck his head around the corner. He said, I heard you talking about reincarnation. I don't believe that BS, but my friend does. Roger Woolger, he just wrote a book called Other Lives, Other selves. Here, take it. So I got really excited that there was a book that I might learn a lot from.

• 25:38Ky Dickens?

  And tell me a bit about the author of this book because I think for something like reincarnation, right, I mean, it really needs to come from a credible source.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Roger Woolger was trained in behavioral psychology and analytical philosophy at Oxford. He attended the Jungian Institute in Zurich and had a PhD in comparative religion from London University.

• 25:59Ky Dickens?

  Okay, so clearly impressive.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely.

• 26:02Ky Dickens?

  I did research on Dr. Woolger myself. And what I found is that like many of the authors in this space, reincarnation was nothing he went looking for. But during psychotherapy work, his patients would unexpectedly enter vivid narratives filled with historical details and names, dates, specifics, and often trauma. The experiences were often extremely emotional for his patients, almost like a full-bodied somatic experience. To give you an example, one patient came to him with extreme fear of the outside world. Her condition grew so severe that she stopped leaving home entirely, keeping her curtains drawn and having her groceries delivered, which was very uncommon 40 years ago. Her fear of being around other people was so intense

• 26:44Ky Dickens?

  that Woolger compared it to extreme agoraphobia or even psychosis. But when Dr. Woolger started to work with her and asked her to focus on the feelings themselves and what arose for her when she focused on the feelings, what emerged shocked him. The woman suddenly experienced herself as an enslaved woman locked naked in a wooden cage at a slave market. She described crowds staring at her body while she stood chained and exposed. And then for this patient, the imagery shifted to plantation life where there was repeated sexual assault and degradation and humiliation. And what Dr. Roger Woolger started to realize was that she didn't simply have a fear of crowds. She had a terror connected to objectification and shame and violation.

• 27:29Ky Dickens?

  And after this patient expressed this trauma in a session, her symptoms began to ease. And he didn't say it was an overnight miracle, but he believed this woman's regression helped loosen something that had been frozen, you know, inside of her psyche for years.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  And that's common. Dr. Roger Woolger, in his book, Other Lives, Other selves, shows empirically that past life memories can heal. So it was very helpful to read that at that point when I was just beginning.

• 27:55Ky Dickens?

  Woolger was part of a larger wave that had been building for decades. By the time Carol had found his book, hypnosis had gained more acceptance as a clinical tool and past life regression had already exploded into the American psyche through the famous Bridie Murphy case.

• 28:11Ky Dickens?

  There erupted a storm of controversy. While in a hypnotic trance, Bridie Murphy recreated intimate details of the length of a young girl who was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1798. Do you know what year it is?

• 28:25Speaker 04

  1806.

• 28:27Ky Dickens?

  Where do you live?

• 28:28Speaker 04

  I live in Cork.

• 28:30Ky Dickens?

  People called the story a hoax. So an interested newspaper reporter decided to go to Ireland and check it out. He astounded the world by finding concrete evidence that corroborated dozens of details outlined in trance. And though that case became a sensation, there was also a controversy. Skeptics argued that what looked like a past life memory could be suggestion or fantasy or forgotten information resurfacing from the subconscious. But by the 1970s and 80s, a small group of therapists and psychologists kept reporting something similar. They would use hypnosis or regression to help a client trace the root of a fear or symptom or trauma. And suddenly, the client would describe another time, another body, another death. And many of these clinicians came to believe that whether the memories were literal or

• 29:15Ky Dickens?

  symbolic or something else entirely, working through them could help people heal. So this was the world that Carol was stumbling into through writers like Roger Woolger and Edith Fiore and Helen Womack, who we'll return to later in the season. But these books were about adults in regression therapy. And Carol's situation was different. Chase was five years old, sitting on her lap in the kitchen, when he started describing vivid details about a battlefield.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  That was in 1988. And I just couldn't find anything about children's past life memories.

• 29:46Ky Dickens?

  Until she stumbled across the name Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, who did research on children's past life memories.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  I tried to find Dr. Stevenson's books or anything about him. And I couldn't find anything through the bookstores or libraries. So I immediately called University of Virginia. And I found out that his book was available, or his books, I should say, he wrote many. So I said, please send me one. And the woman at the bookstore said, nobody I ever talked to was excited about the books.

• 30:19Ky Dickens?

  But Carol was excited because Dr. Ian Stevenson was the first person she'd found who had taken children's past life memories seriously and as something that could be investigated. Dr. Ian Stevenson was a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, who spent decades traveling around the world meticulously investigating and documenting thousands of cases of children talking about their past lives with such specifics that many of them could be tracked to an actual person who had lived.

• 30:44Speaker 04

  And when the book arrived in the mail, I was walking up the driveway from the mailbox and I opened the book. I couldn't even wait to get in the house. In the book were deeply researched cases. He would interview anyone who observed the child. And anything you can imagine was detailed and documented. I used to joke when I first got the books that I think for a lot of people, reading them before they go to bed would just put them to sleep. It was very academic. It was dry. It was not emotional. He was a scientist who was writing for his peers, but exciting to someone like me.

• 31:23Ky Dickens?

  And a little later in the season, I'll bring you on a road trip to the University of Virginia's Department of Perceptual Studies to meet the colleagues caring on his work because he fundamentally turned stories about reincarnation into valid science and data.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  I was in awe of Dr. Stevenson's work. But what was puzzling to me and very significant was it didn't say anything about healing.

• 31:45Ky Dickens?

  And healing is what led Carol to be reading these books in the first place. Chase's phobia around loud booming had disappeared. His eczema had cleared. And Carol's driving question was whether or not children remembering and talking about these memories could help them.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  I was wondering why he didn't mention this. And it took me a while to realize that since he was writing this for his peers, he was just looking at the evidence. So that was actually exciting to me because I felt like, oh, boy, this is new territory I can explore.

• 32:15Ky Dickens?

  So what did you do next, especially as you're starting to think like, maybe you're the person that needs to investigate this?

• 32:21Speaker 04

  I had found out there was an organization called the Association for Past Life Research, founded in 1981 by therapists, psychiatrists, hypnotherapists, who had discovered this phenomenon of past life therapy on their own. They were the first generation who were studying it, writing about it. And they had workshops and conferences once a year. And I ended up going.

• 32:48Ky Dickens?

  And there was only one person at the event whose work focused on children, a woman from the Netherlands named Tinica Nordograv.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  As luck would have it, there was a banquet that night and I was seated right next to her. So I asked Tinica what she was doing. And she had different methods working with children. Instead of straight out hypnosis, as the others worked with the adults, she created techniques to pull these memories out of the children by using drawing, sandplay, deep breathing. And she found that it worked. Once the memories started surfacing and the child could talk about it, she would ask them questions, of course, and lead them through it. They mostly remembered traumatic deaths and she had success in working with them.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  And I said, well, are you going to write a book, Tinica? And she said, you need to write the book. And it was almost like she was casting a spell in that moment. And she said, you have to start it now.

• 33:52Ky Dickens?

  And in that moment, something clicked into place for Carol. The search that had started at her kitchen table was no longer just about her son. It was beginning to feel like an answer to the prayer she'd quietly made when she said, show me what to do.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  I wanted to write the book that I wanted at the time when my children had their past life memories and I couldn't find anything.

• 34:13Ky Dickens?

  But Carol had never written a book. She wasn't a scientist. She didn't have a research team or a grant, or really any idea how you were supposed to investigate something like this. She was working from her kitchen table and she needed to find American families willing to talk about something that most people dismissed. That's coming up after this break.

• 34:33Ky Dickens?

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• 36:06Ky Dickens?

  Welcome back to The Reincarnation Records.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  I think that a lot of parents dismiss what the child is saying. We're in the Judeo-Christian culture and the children, on some level, realize that what they're saying will not be received well. It might be from a very religious family or just that this is scary.

• 36:26Ky Dickens?

  So, you know, what did you do next?

• 36:28Speaker 04

  I realized that I need to find more cases because I had such a small sample for my friends. So I put an ad in Mothering Magazine and I started getting letters and telephone calls. I wouldn't say the cases flooded in, but they were coming in and it was extremely exciting for me. I talked to all of these parents on the phone, took notes, and I started to feel like a real researcher after that.

• 36:55Ky Dickens?

  And from inside the Bowman's home, Chase could see it happening.

• 36:58Speaker 06

  As I got older, it seemed like there were just more and more papers in her office. And suddenly there were just stacks of books and stacks of documents. And it seemed that she was just collecting, physically, literally just collecting all these cases and all this information.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  I was really on my own with the research of the healing effects of these memories. No one had written a book about this for parents. I was pioneering in some way.

• 37:26Ky Dickens?

  But was Carol actually uncovering something no one had paid enough attention to? Or was she slowly spending her precious time and filling her house with evidence of something that wasn't real? What if all these parents were just misinterpreting normal childhood fantasy? What if the kids were picking up these stories somewhere and adults were just connecting dots that weren't really meant to be connected?

• 37:44Speaker 06

  She would be with my dad and there'd just be index cards everywhere, just all over the table, all over the chairs, and they're trying to put these pieces together. It was really cool to see her build this thing from a simple belief that it was information that needed to be out there.

• 37:58Ky Dickens?

  But Carol wasn't just trying to make sense of this for herself anymore. She was boldly stepping into the public sphere, telling other parents, maybe your child isn't imagining this. Maybe you should listen. And without a university or a research team or even an established field behind her, that takes a certain kind of courage.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  Carol Bowman says many children do remember their past lives easily and look for opportunities to express them.

• 38:22Ky Dickens?

  It's one thing to privately wonder if your five-year-old somehow remembers another life. It's another to start putting your name behind that idea publicly. Andrea's mother suggested she look into the work of Carol Bowman, supporting the proposition that sometimes the dead can be reborn. But maybe being a mother, approaching this from healing, not science, is what allowed others to open up and tell Carol stories and details that otherwise would have remained private.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  He said, a truck hit me. The wheels went over me. It wasn't a fantasy story.

• 38:56Ky Dickens?

  Maybe Carol is exactly what other parents needed.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  How can a three-year-old be clinically depressed when there's nothing that happened that would cause it? How do I go into a therapist while they blame me?

• 39:08Ky Dickens?

  And as more families started to find Carol, the stories got better and bigger and harder to dismiss. It's being called The Case for Reincarnation. Try to explain how a little boy could know specific details about a fighter pilot who lost his life more than 60 years ago. She started to uncover cases with names and places and paper trails, stories that had the power to change the most hard-nosed skeptics into believers.

• 39:34Speaker 06

  Two down-to-earth parents who thought they understood the mysteries of life. That is, until their toddler began to talk.

• 39:42Ky Dickens?

  So would Carol's hunch that these memories are real and could heal help other parents or mislead other parents? Would it damage an already controversial field? Or would Carol Bowman change it forever? That's next time on The Reincarnation Records from TTT Media.

• 40:00Ky Dickens?

  Thank you to the small team who made this season possible. Our amazing producer, Cooper Mall. Our audio mix and sound design was by Jeremy Cole. Music was by Mike Rbino. My right hand was Selena Kennedy. And I'm Ken Dickens, your executive producer, writer, editor, and host. And if you haven't listened to our last season of the podcast, The Consciousness Cassettes, I highly recommend you do so as it will give even more context to this season. And if you want to go in deeper, subscribe to our Backstage Pass by visiting our website. With it, you'll unlock access to bonus content, Ask Me Anything interviews with myself and guests. You'll be able to connect with other members on our Discord. You'll be able to enjoy the podcast ad-free and hear and see exclusive content from the Telepathy Tapes Vault.

• 40:41Ky Dickens?

  Visit our website at thetelepathytapes.com for more info on how to subscribe to our Backstage Pass. This is The Reincarnation Records from TTT Media.