A psychiatry department at the University of Virginia has been quietly studying children who remember past lives since 1961, and they have over 2,500 cases on file

So there is a research division at the University of Virginia School of Medicine that most people have never heard of. It is called the Division of Perceptual Studies and it was started by Ian Stevenson, who was actually the chairman of UVA's psychiatry department. Not some fringe guy.

What he did starting in 1961 was collect cases of very young children, usually around two or three years old, who started spontaneously talking about a previous life. Naming people, describing places, giving details about how they died. He focused on kids specifically because he figured they were too young to be making it all up.

He would then go to the location the child described, find the family of the deceased person, and check every claim one by one. Over the decades he and his team put together over 2,500 of these cases. In about 1,567 of them they were actually able to identify the specific person the child was describing.

Here is where it gets really weird though. In roughly 30 percent of cases the children had birthmarks or birth defects that lined up with wounds on the deceased person's body. Not vague stuff either. Stevenson got autopsy reports when he could and published a massive two-volume 2,200 page book in 1997 documenting it all called Reincarnation and Biology.

There is also a strange pattern where about 70 percent of the children described dying from something violent or sudden in the previous life. Accidents, murders, that kind of thing. Peaceful deaths were way less common in the data.

When his first major book came out, the JAMA reviewer actually wrote that the evidence was "difficult to explain on any other grounds" and that it "cannot be ignored." And then the scientific mainstream mostly just ignored it anyway.

Stevenson died in 2007 but the work is still going at UVA under Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist who left his private practice after reading Stevenson's research. They still get over a hundred new cases from families every year.