Aged five, Carl Edon loved to draw. He spent hours working on dot-to-dots or his colouring books, and drawing his own shapes and patterns.

One morning, his mother, Val, noticed how long he had been working on a picture and asked to take a look.

It was surprisingly neat, not a scribble, yet she could not quite make out what the designs were meant to be.

Carl explained that these were his air force badges. The first was an eagle, its wings drawn straight out at the sides.

But before Carl could describe the next symbol, Val recognised it with a jolt. It was a swastika.

Perhaps even more extraordinary was the picture that his father Jim found in Carl’s bedroom just after his son’s sixth birthday. It showed the cockpit of a plane, complete with all the gauges, instruments and levers.

Carl pointed out a red pedal at the bottom: this was the handle to drop the bombs, he said, adding that it was a Messerschmitt bomber like the one he had flown in the war.

It was not the first time the boy had claimed to remember a past life as a German pilot. As young as two, he would wake from vivid dreams, screaming that his plane had crashed, his leg was severed and he was bleeding to death.

These were horrific nightmares for a boy so young — and, more eerie still, Carl refused to accept they were just dreams.

‘It really happened,’ he would say. ‘I died. One of our engines ran out and I opened a hatch to try and get out, but my right leg was gone.’

He showed his mother where the fatal wound had been. On the inside of his right thigh, he had a blotchy red birthmark.

Val was frightened and confused, but her husband was sceptical. He tried to pick holes in the boy’s fantastic story. And he thought he’d spotted a big one, believing the Messerschmitt was a fighter plane, not a bomber.

From the moment Carl Edon was born, his mother sensed there was something different about him

He decided to test Carl a little more. ‘So what uniform did you wear?’ he asked. Carl replied without hesitation: ‘Grey trousers, tucked into knee-high leather boots and a black jacket.’

A few days later, Jim visited the local library in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, clutching the pictures Carl had drawn.

In the history section he pulled out any books he could find on the German Luftwaffe of World War II. With the books laid out in front of him, he sat in total shock.

It was all there. The picture of the cockpit, the badges, the description of the uniform: everything was exactly as Carl had described. There was even a Messerschmitt bomber — the 110.

The legend of a crashed German bomber had a special significance for the people of Middlesbrough. On January 15, 1942, after a German attack on merchant ships in the North Sea, a stricken Luftwaffe plane attempted a crash-landing outside the town and ploughed straight into an anti-aircraft cable, a thick metal line securing a barrage balloon.

The cable sheared off one wing, and the aircraft smashed into the ground. The fireball was so intense that it was half an hour before firemen could get close. The next morning the wreckage lay in a smouldering crater, amid 100ft of smashed railway track.

Rescue workers, watched by two intelligence men in thick woollen coats, pulled three charred bodies from the plane.

World War Two German bomber Heinrich Richter, who Carl Edon believed he was during a past life

There was meant to be a four-man crew — the fourth body was thought to have been completely destroyed in the fire. The three corpses were taken to nearby Thornaby-on-Tees cemetery and laid to rest.

With the government keen to rebuild the track as soon as possible, the remains of the aircraft were buried under a mound of earth and the track was reinstalled as if nothing had ever happened.

On December 29, 1972, 30 years later, Carl Edon was born. From the moment he arrived, Val sensed there was something different about him.

These were physical differences at first: Carl’s dark-haired brother and sister had brown eyes, whereas Carl’s were blue and his hair strawberry blonde. Carl was also pale, while their skin was a little darker and tanned easily.

But there was something else, too: the sense that Carl never seemed able to relax. He was so particular about his clothes — his collars always had to be ironed.

When he was seven, his friend Michael came over for tea. Carl told him the story of how he had died in World War II. Val grew increasingly uncomfortable as Carl described bleeding to death and predicted he would die again before he was 25.

He finished by describing a man called Adolf Hitler, then got down from the table and started goose-stepping round the kitchen. Michael didn’t stop laughing until Val quietly reminded them to finish their food.

Carl’s belief in this extraordinary past life began to have an impact at school.

During a parents’ evening, one teacher asked Val and Jim if everything was all right at home, adding that she had noticed Carl becoming distracted in class.

‘When I talk to him about anything, it’s as if he is staring straight through me,’ she said. Over the next few years, Carl continued to describe vividly a life lived somewhere else, in a time and place unrecognisable from the concrete streets and industry of Seventies’ Middlesbrough.

He spoke of a village tucked away amid forest hills, and explained how his father Fritz used to teach him about the flowers and trees.

He couldn’t remember his mother’s name, only that she wore spectacles and had been large, with dark hair pulled tightly back in a bun.

‘But I’m your mother,’ Val would say whenever Carl got too carried away, her voice gently breaking. ‘I know,’ Carl would reply, ‘but she’s my mother, too.’

According to Carl, in his past life he would often have to do chores, chopping up wood and bringing it home in a wheelbarrow — or else face the wrath of his mother, bossing him about with her glasses perched on the end of her nose.

When she wasn’t ordering him to chop wood, she would be by the stove making a dark red soup, like nothing Val had ever made.

He remembered brothers, too, who also fought in the war, including a younger boy who was apparently killed shortly after him. The pictures seemed to come to him as if he was watching clips from a television show, turning on and off for a few seconds at a time.

One minute he was a seven-year-old boy playing with toys in his bedroom, the next he was 19 and living in a kind of camp, with lots of small huts lined up in rows, watching people collecting water from a pump.

Sometimes he recalled putting bandages on people, or standing in a hall, surrounded by rows of men in uniform. In this hall was a framed picture of a man he recognised by now as Hitler.

Together, he and the others were stamping their feet and raising their arms in a salute with the fingers locked together.

Val felt uneasy when Carl repeated the gesture. To hear Hitler’s name spoken aloud by her young son, when it had never been mentioned in the home before, sent shivers down her spine.

One morning, an oddly subdued Carl told his mother about a new dream from the night before. He was 23, sitting in what seemed to be the cockpit of a plane. He couldn’t say if he was flying it or not, but it was shaking all over the place.

Suddenly everything went black. When he woke again in the plane, the buildings on the ground were rushing up towards him. In that moment, Carl knew he was going to die.

As the plane crashed it must have gone through a window, he thought. There was glass everywhere. He saw that his leg had been cut off and he felt very sad, not for himself but for a 19-year-old woman he wanted to marry, left behind in his village in Germany.

Val listened in horror as Carl finished the account by describing his ‘final moments’, bleeding to death alone in the plane.

The following year, after a journalist caught wind of Carl’s extraordinary claim and published a small piece in the local paper, the nine-year-old was interviewed by Woman’s Own magazine. Later that year the story even made it as far as Germany when it was picked up in Berlin’s Morgenpost.

With the exposure came ridicule at school. Within days of the articles appearing, Carl’s classmates began calling him Hitler and throwing their arms up in Nazi salutes. Most days Carl returned home in tears because of all this teasing.

As the attention became unbearable, he decided to stop talking about it. But that didn’t mean interest in his case waned. It was some time toward the end of 1983 when the Woman’s Own article found its way to the U.S., onto the desk of Dr Ian Stevenson in Virginia. At the time, he was the Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

A fascinating but controversial figure, he had dedicated himself to investigating so-called reincarnation cases for 25 years. He even established a specific department, the university’s Division of Perceptual Studies, to better conduct his research.

Despite much criticism from his peers, Dr Stevenson’s dogged research ultimately earned him grudging respect from the psychiatric community.

His interest in reincarnation stemmed from his fascination with how certain characteristic traits or unusual illnesses often seemed incompatible with any environmental or hereditary influences.

This suggested that there may be a third type of influence on human character, such as memory transfer.

One feature in many of Dr Stevenson’s case studies, of which there were hundreds, was the appearance of birthmarks or birth defects in places with a deep significance to the past life.

For example, in his book Reincarnation And Biology: A Contribution To The Etiology Of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, published in 1997, Stevenson recounted the story of a young boy who became convinced that he had shot himself in a past life.

The boy’s recollections eventually led him to a woman whose brother had indeed shot himself in the throat.

When Dr Stevenson examined the boy, he found a birthmark on his throat where the bullet had entered, and suggested checking for an exit wound. Sure enough, after pulling back the hair on top of the boy’s head, a birthmark was found.

Dr Stevenson was immediately enthralled by Carl’s case, and in particular the birthmark on his right leg. He sent an associate, Dr Nicholas McClean-Rice, to interview Carl and his family.

After analysing the various anecdotes and stories collected, Dr Stevenson concluded that reincarnation was ‘at least a plausible explanation for Carl’s story’.

However, by the age of 13, Carl’s lingering memories of the mysterious Luftwaffe pilot had apparently all but vanished. He left school at 16 to work for British Rail.

Five years later, Carl granted one final interview to Dr Stevenson. It proved disappointing for the psychiatrist, with Carl unable to offer any more insights into his apparent past life, but Dr Stevenson was pleased to find the young man happy and in love, living with his 17-year-old girlfriend.

Carl welcomed his first child with her 12 months later, and he proposed the following year, with a second baby on the way.

It was as if his life had truly become his own, and the spectre of the mysterious German pilot had finally been laid to rest.

Then tragedy struck. In the heatwave of summer 1995, a man walked into Middlesbrough’s South Bank police station, his clothes covered in blood. He said his name was Gary Vinter, he worked for British Rail, and he had come to report a murder.

He had been working the evening shift less than a mile away, at the Grangetown signal box, when he and a colleague got into an argument.

Vinter claimed he couldn’t remember exactly what had happened — only that when it was over, his workmate was dead.

Beside the tracks, in a squat redbrick building with a flat Tarmac roof, police found the body of a man lying in a pool of blood. The remains of a knife still protruded from his body.

The man was Carl Edon. He had been stabbed 37 times across his whole body, with most of his internal organs punctured.

The pathologist’s findings seemed to contradict Vinter’s initial claim that he had acted in self-defence. The jury at his trial agreed and he was convicted of murder the following year.

For Carl’s family — his fiancee and two young daughters, his parents, brother and sister — the grief and shock were almost unbearable.

But as the months went by, the Edons couldn’t help but reminisce about Carl’s early years and those peculiar visions that had plagued his childhood.

Then, in November 1997, workers for the Northumbrian water board were digging a sewage pipeline at a site on Clay Lane, a few miles down the track from the Grangetown signal box, when one of them hit something in the mud.

A couple of workers jumped into the pit and, scraping away at the earth, found a mangled metallic structure underneath. One of the men spotted what looked like an old sack. Opening it, he found a bundle of pristine white silk stuffed inside: a parachute.

Concerned that they might not only have the remains of a wartime aircraft on their site, but also some unexploded ordnance, the water workers immediately informed the Royal Engineers.

Within days, a team of bomb disposal experts from nearby RAF Wittering set about excavating the wreckage. The plane was soon identified as a German bomber that had belonged to a unit of the Luftwaffe, based at Schiphol in the Netherlands.

A quick check of the records revealed it to be the plane that crashed on the evening of January 15, 1942 after taking a hit just off the coast and colliding with a barrage balloon.

When the engineers dug deeper, they found more than five tons of wreckage, including machine guns, a wooden propeller and two further parachutes. Then they came across a fragment of bone.

From the records they ascertained that the bodies of three of the crew had been recovered from the crash, with a fourth thought to have been too badly burned to be removed.

But they soon discovered what appeared to be a complete skeleton, in what would have been the gunner’s position, a large bubble of glass at the base of the plane.

The missing body was identified as that of the plane’s gunner, Heinrich Richter.

When the aircraft crashed nose-first, this bubble — effectively a spherical glass window — would have borne the brunt of the initial impact and been smashed to smithereens, covering the occupant in thousands of shards, similar to the way Carl had described a shattering window in his dreams.

Most peculiar of all, when the team removed the skeleton from the wreckage, they discovered it wasn’t quite as complete as they had first thought.

The right leg had been severed in the crash.

News of the plane’s rediscovery soon spread throughout the town and, the following year, the remains of Heinrich Richter were laid to rest alongside his comrades at the cemetery at Thornaby.

The German ambassador to Britain attended the moving burial ceremony, as well as a handful of the crew’s descendants, 22 British ex-servicemen and more than 200 members of the public.

Heinz Mollenbrok, then 78, a former Dornier pilot of the same unit who was shot down during the Battle of Britain, laid the first wreath on Richter’s grave.

He then placed another on a monument for British airmen, representing the 55,000 members of RAF Bomber Command who, like Richter and his fellow crew members, had never made it back home.

And as the RAF military standards were lowered and a bugler of the Cleveland police blew the Last Post, two other faces watched from the back of the crowd. Val and Jim Edon were there to pay their respects to the German airman.

Years later, after further investigative work, Middlesbrough historian Bill Norman tracked down Richter’s family. One morning, Bill received a letter containing a striking photograph of the young airman shortly before he was killed.

When Val and Jim looked at the picture for the first time, they felt as though they were seeing a ghost.

There, staring back at them, with his strong nose and chin, was the face of their son.

The collar of Richter’s jacket bore the insignia of eagles — just as Carl had drawn them in his childhood pictures all those years ago.