Children say strange things.

Anyone who has spent enough time around a three-year-old knows this.

They invent elaborate worlds. They hold conversations with people no one else can see. They confidently explain how the moon works, where babies come from, what cats are thinking, and what happened before they were born.

Most of it is funny.

Some of it is surprisingly profound.

And every once in a while, a child says something that makes an adult stop breathing for a second.

Not because it is frightening.

Because there seems to be no reasonable way the child should know what they just said.

I have one of those stories.

And I still don't know what to make of it.

The Ancestor Wall

There is a wall in my house covered with old photographs.

Black-and-white photographs. Sepia photographs. Wedding portraits. Formal studio pictures. Faces staring solemnly into cameras from generations ago.

My parents are there.

My grandparents.

My great-grandparents.

There is even a great-great-grandparent among them.

We have always called it the ancestor wall.

It isn't intended to be spooky. Quite the opposite.

I'm a genealogist, and I have always believed that family history should be more than names and dates tucked away in a database. I want the people who came before us to remain people.

So when my granddaughter Paisley was very small, the ancestor wall became part of our routine.

She would ask me to pick her up so she could see the photographs better.

Then we would go from face to face.

Who is that?

That's my mother.

Who is that?

That's my grandmother.

Who is that man?

That's your great-great-great-grandfather.

Long before Paisley could understand family trees or generations, she understood something much simpler:

These people belonged to us.

Then, when she was about three years old, something happened at that wall that I have never forgotten.

“I Used to Play With You”

I was holding Paisley in front of the ancestor wall one day when she said something peculiar.

“I used to play with you when you were little.”

I thought that was odd.

I was an adult. She was three.

Obviously, she had never known me when I was little.

But three-year-olds say strange things, so I didn't immediately make much of it.

Then she continued.

She told me that she had taught me to read.

Now she had my attention.

I remember my eyes getting big as I listened to her.

Then she offered another memory.

She told me she had taught me how to shut a door without getting my fingers caught in it.

That was the moment the conversation changed for me.

It was such a mundane thing to say.

Not a castle. Not a princess. Not a dramatic adventure from some imaginary world.

A door.

Fingers.

The kind of tiny lesson someone teaches a little child because they don't want her to get hurt.

I quietly asked Paisley a question.

“Did you used to be one of those people on the wall?”

She said yes.

"Who?" 😳

And then she pointed.

At my mother.

So What Was That?

I don't know.

That may be the most important sentence in this entire story.

I don't know.

I don't know whether Paisley was remembering something.

I don't know whether she had heard a family story somewhere and incorporated it into her imagination.

I don't know whether she had absorbed information from conversations happening around her that I didn't realize she understood.

I don't know whether it was coincidence.

I don't know whether her three-year-old brain was simply doing what three-year-old brains do—taking bits and pieces of the world and assembling them into something entirely new.

And I certainly cannot tell you that my granddaughter was my mother in another life.

But I can tell you what happened.

Those are two very different things.

And throughout history, countless families have found themselves making that same distinction.

Children Who Talk About “Before”

Stories about children remembering other lives are remarkably widespread.

They appear in cultures with established traditions of reincarnation, but they aren't confined to them.

Parents have reported very young children talking about another home, another family, another name, another occupation, or a way that they supposedly died.

Some children reportedly insist they once lived somewhere they have never visited.

Others reportedly claim to recognize people they should not know.

Sometimes the statements are dramatic.

Sometimes they're almost laughably ordinary.

And that ordinariness is part of what makes certain stories difficult to shake.

A child saying, “I used to be a king,” isn't terribly surprising.

Children play pretend.

A child becoming upset because someone prepares a familiar food “wrong,” describing the way a former house was arranged, or casually referring to a spouse no one has ever mentioned is a different sort of strange.

Not proof.

Just strange.

People Have Actually Studied This

These stories haven't been left entirely to folklore.

In 1961, psychiatrist Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia began systematically investigating reports of young children who claimed to remember previous lives. His work eventually grew into a collection of thousands of cases, and researchers at UVA continue studying the phenomenon today. 

Later researchers continued that work.

Thousands of cases have been collected from different parts of the world.

The reports vary enormously, and their existence does not mean reincarnation has been scientifically proven.

It hasn't.

But the phenomenon itself—the fact that some young children spontaneously make detailed statements they describe as memories of another existence—has been interesting enough for researchers to spend decades documenting it.

One recurring feature is particularly fascinating.

The children are usually very young.

And then they forget.

Why So Many Stories Begin Around Three

Very young children occupy a peculiar territory.

Their imaginations are enormous, but their understanding of what adults consider possible is still being constructed.

A three-year-old doesn't necessarily know that saying, “When I was your mother...” is extraordinary.

She hasn't learned the rules yet.

She doesn't know which ideas adults consider rational, spiritual, ridiculous, impossible, or inappropriate for dinner conversation.

She simply talks.

That creates an intriguing question.

Are small children inventing extraordinary stories because their imaginations haven't yet been constrained?

Or do they sometimes say extraordinary things because they haven't yet learned not to?

Those two possibilities look remarkably similar from the outside.

The Ancestors We Carry

There is another possibility that doesn't require reincarnation at all.

Families carry memory.

Not necessarily literal memory, but stories, habits, expressions, fears, traditions, mannerisms, photographs and tiny pieces of information passed almost invisibly from one generation to another.

A child grows up surrounded by people who were shaped by people she never met.

My mother shaped me.

I helped shape my daughter.

My daughter helped shape Paisley.

In that sense, Paisley carries pieces of people who died long before she was born.

We all do.

Perhaps that is one reason stories of ancestral memory affect us so deeply.

We already know that the dead don't disappear completely.

We see them in someone's eyes.

We hear them in an expression we haven't heard in thirty years.

A child laughs exactly like a grandfather she never met.

Someone holds her hands exactly the way an aunt used to.

A familiar mannerism suddenly appears in a new generation.

We call it genetics.

We call it family resemblance.

We call it learned behavior.

Sometimes we simply stare.

And Then They Forget

One of the strangest parts of stories involving supposed past-life memories is how often they belong to very early childhood.

Eventually, ordinary life takes over.

School.

Friends.

Birthdays.

Cartoons.

Soccer practice.

Lost teeth.

The enormous business of becoming yourself.

And whatever strange doorway seemed to exist for a while quietly closes.

That is exactly what happened with Paisley.

She doesn't remember our conversation at the ancestor wall.

Not at all.

She knows about it because I told her the story.

And now she thinks it's hilarious.

Every once in a while she'll tease me:

“I'm your mom!”

Then she laughs.

Apparently reincarnation, if that's what we're dealing with, does nothing whatsoever to prevent your former self from becoming a smart aleck nine-year-old.

I Still Have the Wall

The ancestor wall is still there.

The faces haven't changed.

My mother is still among them.

And somewhere in the history of that wall is an afternoon when I stood holding a three-year-old girl who told me she remembered playing with me when I was little.

She said she taught me to read.

She said she taught me how to close a door without catching my fingers.

Then she pointed to the woman who had actually been there when I was a child.

My mother.

Maybe Paisley had heard something.

Maybe she was pretending.

Maybe her developing mind created a remarkable coincidence.

Maybe there is an explanation I simply haven't thought of.

Or maybe there are things about memory, consciousness, family and whatever comes before or after this life that we don't understand nearly as well as we think we do.

I won't turn one strange afternoon into proof of something I cannot prove.

But I won't explain it away simply because I can't explain it, either.

Sometimes the most truthful answer is also the least satisfying one:

Something happened.

I remember it.

Paisley doesn't.

And I still don't know what it meant.

And now there is another little one studying the ancestor wall.

Paisley’s baby brother is nine months old, and already he loves looking at those old faces. Interestingly, their brother in between has never cared much about the wall at all. The photographs have always been there for him, but they have never seemed to hold his attention.

The baby is different.

I hold him in my arms in front of the wall, just as I once held Paisley, and I tell him who everyone is.

That’s my mother.

That’s my grandmother.

That’s your great-great-grandmother.

Face by face, generation by generation, we are beginning the same little ritual Paisley and I began when she was a baby.

Maybe this time nothing unusual will happen. Maybe, when he learns to talk, he will simply ask me their names and listen to their stories. Maybe the ancestor wall will be exactly what it appears to be: a collection of photographs keeping our family’s past where the next generation can see it.

But I have stood here with a baby before.

And I know how quickly babies become three-year-olds.

So when this one begins to talk, I’ll be listening.

Just in case he has something to tell me.