Photo: Fox 8



Kids say the darndest things – at least that’s what Cincinnati mom Erica Ruehlman thought when her son first started talking about “Pam.” Luke Ruehlman was just 2, she tells Lifetime’s Ghost Inside My Child, when he began mentioning the woman. After the homemaker finally asked the boy who that was, she tells Fox 8 her now 5-year-old “turned to me and said, ‘Well, I was. [He said] ‘Well, I used to be, but I died and I went up to heaven. I saw God and then eventually, God pushed me back down and I was a baby and you named me Luke.’”

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The tot also shared that Pam’s skin was “black,” and that she used to ride a train in Chicago, Erica says, adding that Luke had never been to the city. Then the mother says Luke revealed the most telling detail: “Pam” had died in a fire. “At that point he made a motion with his hand like he was jumping off of a building,” she says. Pulling the clues together, Erica began investigating and says she discovered a woman named Pam Robinson – who died in her 30s in Chicago after jumping out of a window of a burning hotel in 1993. Erica believes Luke used to be Pam.

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Sound bizarre? Not to Erica. “It’s a positive [message] of unification, of love,” she says. And since contacting Robinson’s family, the mother has reportedly also uncovered coincidences between her son and the late Chicagoan’s favorite things: music (Erica says Pam was a Stevie Wonder fan and that Luke adores “that era of music.”) and the piano (according to Erica, Pam played the keyboard and “as an infant Luke’s favorite toy was a little piano”).

Luke Ruehlman (Photo: Fox 8)

Luke’s story isn’t as unique as it may sound, Jim Tucker, M.D., reincarnation expert and Associate Professor of Personality Studies in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia Health System, tells Yahoo Parenting . “We have studied 2,500 cases of young children who report memories of past lives,” says the Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives author. “We don’t really know just how common they are, but we are hearing from parents all the time these days.” Numerous children, he adds, “have given details that were found to match the life of a particular deceased individual.”

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Matching nitty gritty details, says Tucker, is the key to distinguishing between a child’s fantasies and the possibility of another, perhaps supernatural, explanation. “Without that verification, there is no way to know if the stories are simply imagination or possible memories of life the child experienced previously.”

Parents can take these stories with a grain of salt, he says, “but they should also be open to what their children are saying, especially since the children often have intense emotions attached to their apparent memories.”

Such other-era connections, however, may fade over time. Erica notes that as Luke has gotten older, his recollections of Pam have gotten fewer and father between. Tucker says that tendency is common for reincarnated kids. “The children typically stop talking about the past life by the time they are 6 or 7,” he says. “It happens around the same time that all children typically lose their memories of early childhood, so it’s not too surprising.” What’s more, it’s a positive thing, he says. “It’s good that most of the children move on from the memories and get fully involved in their current life.”

The bottom line — regardless on your belief about the possibility of reincarnation — if your child starts to tell some tall tales, it’s best to just sit back and enjoy. “Telling stories is a healthy part of a child’s development,” child psychotherapist Amy Morin tells Yahoo Parenting. “And parental response to such stories will play a big role in how likely the child is to keep talking about them. There have been instances where kids have made stories up and parents have given them lots of attention for it. As a result, it reinforces the child to continue offering up details.” And don’t be surprised if the reminiscing gets more outlandish each time. “Kids have wonderful imaginations and they often fill their days hearing magical stories and engaging in pretend play,” says Morin. “They’re bound to make things up sometimes.”



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