The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  IT WAS THE STRANGEST STORY news anchor Chris Cuomo had covered in her career with America’s ABC TV network.

  The saga began when Bruce and Andrea Leininger, an educated professional couple living in Lafayette, Los Angeles, began to notice odd behaviour by their three-year-old son James. ‘He suddenly became obsessed with planes,’ Andrea recalled. ‘He refused to play with anything else - and at first we went along with it. But then we realised that far from making him happy, the toys were scaring him. He’d start crying in the middle of a game - and he’d often wake screaming in the night. When I asked him what was wrong he’d say things like, “Airplane on fire - little man can’t get out.”’

  The couple didn’t take these outbursts seriously, imagining James was simply ‘going through a stage’. But Andrea Leininger’s mother, who spent considerable time with the boy, took a different view. She was the first to suggest that James might be remembering a previous existence.

  The Leiningers were doubtful about that. Reincarnation was a subject to which they had ‘never given any thought at all - and did not intend to’. But when a friend suggested that James might be getting his ideas from television, they were equally adamant. The little boy was strictly confined to watching children’s shows.

  However, as months passed, James’s parents became, of necessity, more open-minded in their search for an answer. On several occasions they clandestinely videotaped the boy at play - capturing on one video a scene in which he seems to be giving a plane a pre-flight check. On another occasion his mother bought him a new toy aircraft, remarking when he had unwrapped it that it seemed to be carrying a bomb on its underside. Exasperated, James told her, ‘It’s not a bomb - it’s a drop-tank.’

  ‘I’d never heard of a drop-tank,’ Andrea Leininger told ABC’s Primetime Live program. ‘I didn’t know what a drop-tank was.’

  The couple took their son to Carol Bowman, a counsellor and therapist who believed that the dead could sometimes be reborn. James’s four sessions a week with Bowman had two positive effects: he suffered fewer nightmares - and as he grew older, began talking openly about his ‘past’. He was most informative at bedtime, when he was drowsy. With his parents sitting, feigning casualness, on either side of his bed, he began to reveal details about a pilot whose plane had crashed after being shot down by ‘the Japanese’, a term the parents would not have expected to be part of his vocabulary. The pilot’s plane had been ‘hit in the engine’. [The child seemed confused about identities here. Sometimes he referred to the pilot in the third person; at others, as himself, the now five-year-old.] He told his father that the aircraft he had flown was a Corsair - remarking, ‘They got flat tyres all the time.’

  The scholarly Bruce Leininger began regularly to take notes after saying goodnight to his son. He took occasional leave from work so that he could research, one by one, the points James was making. For example he discovered, but only with difficulty, that the Corsair’s tyres had indeed been a source of annoyance to the maintenance men of 1944-45. The reason was that the plane’s design caused it to descend onto the tarmac more violently than other attack-craft.

  He also noted his son’s answers to questions. One night he asked James if he could remember the names of friends he had flown with. The boy immediately replied, ‘Jack…Jack Larson.’ The father enquired, And what was your name?’ Immediately the child responded, ‘James.’ From that time he began signing his crayon drawings JAMES 2.

  With difficulty, and over many nights, Bruce Leininger extracted further information. The name of the place where the flier had died was Jeerma. Which sounded nonsensical - an infantile, invented place. The name of the ship from which the pilot had flown was Natoma (another invention?). And the pilot’s full name (his son’s name?) had been James M. Huston Jr. Leininger pondered this. So James 1 must - theoretically - have been the pilot’s father… James 2, the pilot himself… and James 3 his own son.

  It was quite a coincidence, he thought, that he and Andrea had chosen to name their son James. But perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence at all. Maybe it proved only that the entire affair was a childish fantasy. Over the following week Bruce Leininger tried to track down a World War II navy aircraft carrier named Natoma. There wasn’t one - but there had been a small carrier in the Pacific war, Natoma Bay, which had served at Iwo Jima.

  Most significantly of all, James’s father discovered that former World War II pilot Jack Larson was real and alive and retired in Arkansas. He telephoned. Yes, said Larson, who loved to talk. I flew with James Huston in ‘45 - but what’s your interest in this? Leininger mumbled an excuse. Jack Larson recalled that his friend’s plane had been hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire. He was the only pilot in the squadron to be killed at Iwo Jima.

  Bruce Leininger expressed the hope that there would be further conversations. He had now, understandably, become obsessive. He took his holidays and spent the time combing old naval records to find men who had served aboard the Natoma Bay.

  He tracked down one more. Ralph Clarbour had served as a reargunner on an American aircraft based on the Natoma Bay. On 3 March 1945 his plane had flown beside the one piloted by James Huston during an air raid near Iwo Jima. Clarbour remembered watching, horrified, as Huston’s plane was hit head-on by Japanese anti-aircraft fire.

  Bruce Leininger now ‘knew’ his son James had lived, and died, on earth before. Untiringly he searched for surviving members of the dead pilot’s family - and found a sister, Anne Barron. Over a series of conversations with the boy, Anne gradually became convinced that he must somehow possess information about her long-dead brother, reaching back into the particularities of their childhood together.

  Whether it was reincarnation or a decades-spanning quirk of the human mind, Anne didn’t know. But she was certain that the boy was in some way ‘mentally relating’ to her brother. She looked at some of the personal effects the navy had sent to her parents when James M. Huston perished. She chose a bust of George Washington and a model of a Corsair aircraft - and presented them as a gift to the boy who signed his drawings James 2.

  The Tot Who ‘Flew for Adolf Hitler’

  Shortly after his third birthday, Carl Edon of Middlesborough, UK, began to talk about his experiences as a pilot. Repeatedly the boy said he had crashed his plane into ‘a big building’ and ‘gone to sleep’ in the tangled wreckage.

  Like other children of his age, Carl had little sense of extended time - describing the crash as if it had just happened. British reincarnation researchers Peter and Mary Harrison investigated the case and subsequently featured it in their book Children That Time Forgot.

  At first Carl’s parents Valerie and David Edon dismissed his ‘memories’ as flights of fancy. But as months passed they realised that something unusual was happening. Using coloured pencils the boy would spend long periods painstakingly drawing what appeared to be crude representations of badges or insignia. The Edons kept the drawings.

  Over the next two years Carl spoke frequently about his memories, or dreams, as he occasionally described them. He recalled a large area where he and many other pilots ‘lived in a lot of huts in a row’. There were sinks, but no taps. All water had to be drawn from a pump. At age five the boy began pencilling pictures of a cockpit in which, he now calmly insisted, he had died.

  A friend advised the Edons to call in Peter and Mary Harrison. The investigators checked Carl’s childish representations of badges against the uniform displays of numerous airforces - and found a match in Hitler’s Luftwaffe. The instrument panel in the boy’s cockpit sketches also matched a World War II German design.

  ‘Children in cases like this sometimes look very different from other family members,’ Mary Harrison commented. ‘Carl is a good example of this syndrome. He’s slightly built with pale blond hair and white eyelashes. His sister Angela and brother Darren are solidly built with dark hair and tan complexions. And Carl’s parents are still wondering why they gave him that Germanic name.’

  One of t
he eerier cases discovered by the Harrisons concerns Nicola Wheater of Keighley, Yorkshire. From the moment the tot could talk she pleaded to be returned to her ‘mama and papa’, whose house she described in steadily increasing detail. As her vocabulary improved she began to speak of her life as a boy - insisting that her name was Thomas Benson and that her home was in Haworth, a village a few kilometres away. She referred to a family dog, Muff- and discussed a selection of antique toys her ‘parents’ had allowed her to play with.

  But what distressed her present-day mother and father most was when she recalled how she had been fatally injured beneath the wheels of a steam train in July 1875. Nicola vividly told of the two days in hospital in which her (Thomas Benson’s) life had slipped away - and later, the funeral where he had hovered, invisible above the grave, trying to comfort the grieving family.

  Kathleen, Nicola’s mother, was so intrigued by the detail in these reminiscences that she decided to check whether a Thomas Benson had indeed existed. A study of old parish records confirmed that he had - and had died after a train crash, just as Nicola claimed. Intrigued, Kathleen took Nicola to Haworth - a village neither mother nor child had visited.

  The little girl was able to lead her mother to the house formerly owned by the Benson family, all of whom were now dead. Kathleen sought the present owners’ permission to go inside. The house had been renovated - but it was clear that Nicola’s descriptions of the interior, with its cellar and attic rooms, had been substantially accurate.

  ‘I now have no doubt that my daughter lived and died as a boy in the 1870s,’ Kathleen said. ‘There’s too much evidence to allow for any other explanation.’

  Fingers and Toes of Fate

  Professor Stuart Edelstein, chairman of the biochemistry department at Cornell University, USA, never had the slightest intention of involving himself with reincarnation studies. However, the decision was forced on him in the 1980s when he was researching sickle-cell anaemia, a blood disease rampant in Africa.

  In his book The Sickle Cell -from Myths to Molecule Prof Edelstein recalls his initial surprise, and horror at seeing African mothers chop fingers and toes from their dead children’s bodies. When he asked why they were doing this they explained that when they gave birth again, their new babies would have the same extremities missing. And in many cases, that was precisely what happened.

  In families from Senegal to Chad these slightly imperfect infants are known as repeater children.

  Intensely curious, Edelstein began taking hundreds of photographs of the slightly mutilated corpses. He then compared these with his photos of the dead children’s brothers and sisters, born years - or sometimes only months - later. He found ‘that the missing parts matched each other in a most extraordinary way’. In his book he writes:

  Africans have believed for thousands of years that these imperfections prove the new child is a reincarnation of its sibling. I observed that after the death of her third or fourth infant the mother would amputate the end of the left little finger. If the next baby was born with that finger-part missing the family would regard it as proof it was the previous child, reincarnated.

  One child Dr Edelstein photographed for his book was Onuchukwu Nwobodo.

  He was born in a small Nigerian village, without the last bone segment of his little finger. The last child to die in his family had part of his little finger cut off- so Onuchukwu was hailed as a soul returned to earth.

  The British psychiatrist Dr Ian Stevenson made similar discoveries about ‘inherited wounds’. In an article published in the prestigious Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases he described what he called ‘the birthmark phenomenon’. He summarised case records noting marks found on 200 children who claimed to have lived before. ‘Many [of these marks]’ he wrote, ‘are indistinguishable from wound scars. The flesh is either puckered or depressed.’

  In several instances [and on numerous occasions later] Stevenson was able to match a photograph of a birthmarked child with a police or autopsy photograph of the murder victim that child claimed to have been. He wrote, ‘A very high proportion of children who claim to be reincarnated experienced violent deaths in their alleged earlier lives.’

  The remembered agony of drowning, of dying in a plane crash or of being killed by bullets tearing into the body may be the triggers to a ‘reincarnated’ child’s recollections, Stevenson believed. For people who died quietly last time around, there might be little to stir memories.

  The Girl Who Found a House of Echoes

  One of Dr Stevenson’s most celebrated investigations centred on three-year-old Swarnlata Mishra, daughter of a wealthy Indian family in Pradesh. While being driven with her father past the town of Katni, more than 160 kilometres from home, she suddenly pointed and asked the chauffeur to turn right, to ‘my house’.

  At this stage she had seen only the turnoff, not the house itself - and she did not visit it that day because Sri Mishra, her dignified father, was averse to knocking, without serious reason, at the doors of strangers.

  However, her brief glimpse of Katni sparked something in Swarnlata - and from that day on, she spoke of the place incessantly. It was her ‘real’ home, the little girl said. And she described it in some detail. The house was white with black, barred doors. The large front room had stone-flagged floors…

  Her father hastily found a diary and began taking notes.

  …The house, said his little daughter, was situated behind a girls’ school, with a railway line nearby. Lime furnaces were visible from one window. And the family owned a car - a rare possession in India at the time. But the bombshell exploded when the child said who she was. Her name, she announced confidently, was Biya Pathak. She was married with two children. She had fallen ill with ‘a pain in the throat’. A Dr S.C. Bahrat treated her, but it had been no use. She died.

  Reincarnation is an accepted part of life, and renewed life, in India. But for emotional reasons Swarnlata’s parents were loath to visit the house she described and to concede that their daughter was not entirely their daughter at all, but a married woman lying buried somewhere. They stonewalled Swarnlata’s demands to be taken to Katni, and in time it became an occasional rather than a daily argument.

  In 1959, when Swarnlata was 10, her story reached Professor Sri Banerjee, a specialist in reincarnation cases, and a colleague of Stevenson’s. Guided by the father’s meticulous notes, Banerjee travelled to Katni to discover whether the girl’s memories could be verified. Using nothing more than the diary he quickly found the house, which had been considerably enlarged since 1939, the year in which Swarnlata said she had perished. But the principal features and surrounding landmarks remained.

  There, as the girl had described, were the lime furnaces, the school, the railway line. And the occupants of the house were the Pathaks, a rich commercial family.

  Banerjee sought permission to enter the house and interview its owners. They confirmed everything in the father’s notes. Yes, Biya Pathak had indeed died in 1939, leaving behind a distraught husband, two young sons, and numerous younger brothers. And no, they had never heard of Swarnlata Mishra or of her parents.

  Professor Banerjee persuaded the Pathaks that it was time they met Swarnlata. That summer, Biya’s husband, son and eldest brother went to Chatarpur, the town where Swarnlata now lived, to test her memory. They arrived at the Mishra house unannounced, with nine local men as witnesses.

  Startled though she was, 10-year-old Swarnlata could not conceal her joy. She immediately recognised her brother, calling him ‘Babu’, which had been Biya’s nickname for him. Despite the press of males in the room, the girl swiftly went on to identify her ‘past-life’ son Murli and husband Sri Pandey, in whose presence she bashfully lowered her eyes, as was the Hindu tradition.

  In the excited conversation that followed, the 10-year-old girl recalled incidents from her life with the Pathaks 20 years earlier - including the embarrassing fact that husband Pandey had appropriated 1200 rupees from her secret moneybox.


  The following month Swarnlata’s father took her for the first time to the Pathaks’ house. She immediately noticed the renovations - regretting the disappearance of a parapet, a verandah and a neem tree. She went straight to Biya’s marital bedroom and then to the room in which Biya had died. And she not only recognised the many relatives who came to the house to meet her, but was able to remind them of obscure incidents in the life they had once shared.

  In 1961 Dr Ian Stevenson travelled to India to investigate the case. Swarnlata, now 12, was by this time a regular visitor to the Pathaks’ house and Stevenson wrote of the loving relationship she now enjoyed with her ‘past-life’ family. Nobody doubted that she was Biya Pathak reborn. She simply knew too much - including a mass of minor incidents that even the family members involved had forgotten. But fascinatingly, Stevenson reported, the girl remembered nothing that had occurred after Biya’s death in 1939.

  The relationship between the two families became so close that when Swarnlata reached marriageable age her father consulted with the Pathaks about a suitable husband for her. Dr Stevenson stayed in touch with the beautiful young woman for 10 years, reporting that she had received a doctorate in botany and was happily married. There seemed to be no conflict in her mind between her ‘past’ and present lives. Swarnlata loved and remained loyal to her present-day family. But she did weep sometimes when she recalled her idyllic life in Katni long before.

  Curious Case of the ‘Body-raider’

  Can a dying person’s spirit take over someone else’s body? Dr Ian Stevenson asked this question while chronicling events in the lives of two Indian boys, Jasbir Lal Jat and Sobha Ram.

  When three-year-old Jasbir died of smallpox his family laid the corpse out for burial. But next day their child astonished them by stirring and beginning to breathe again. For several weeks he lay staring and silent. When, eventually, he managed to speak, his parents found that he had changed.