Ian Stevenson, the late rock star of scientific research of reincarnation has documented several cases of children being born with birthmarks that correspond to wounds and scars that were present in the previous life. Read all the about it in my previous blog posting.
Some colleagues of Dr. Stevenson, following in his rather large footsteps, have also found cases of "Experimental Birthmarks." These are marks that are made on a dying person, so that when they reincarnate they can be identified by the family as who they were. Dr. Jurgen Keil and Dr. Jim Tucker found 18 of these cases occurring mainly in Thailand and Burma, with a few in Turkey.
The cases primarily occur within the same family. In a few, the mother actually saw the marking, while in others she had heard about it but did not see it, and in still others, the mother did not know about the expected birthmark. For instance, in Thailand, an older sister died of heart disease and some friends preparing her for burial marked her on the back of the neck with lipstick. They never told the mother until after a child was born with the analogous birthmark.
Most markings are ash or soot, things that do not penetrate the skin, however, a few more serious
marking cases occur in Africa. In Nigeria, they believe in what are
known as ogbanje spirits, children who are born into a family, live for
a while and then die in a repetitive cycle to harass the parents. When
this happens a number of times, parents will mutilate the body of the
dead child, which is believed to stop this process. They will typically
cut off a fingertip or remove part of the ear, acts which are not
drastic enough to cause a full deformity but allow recognition of the
ogbanje.
Occasionally, the mutilation is more severe. In one case, a father chopped off the fingers and toes of the supposed ogbanje and a subsequent child was born with grossly deformed and missing fingers and toes. An interesting dimension of this story is that the enraged father had cut off the fingers and toes, performed a ceremony, and hung them in a bag in the home to ward off the ogbanje spirit. He married a new wife who cut down the bag without knowing the story. The birth-deformed child arrived shortly thereafter. An alternative explanation to actual reincarnation is the maternal impression hypothesis, in which the psychological impression in a mother's unconscious mind affects the developing fetus.
Moral of the story: if you see a bag of fingers and toes hanging from a tree, leave it alone.








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