The cases for reincarnation

Shanti Devi:
[link to en.wikipedia.org]
[link to in.answers.yahoo.com]
[link to www.beliefnet.com]
[link to www.viewzone.com]

Book: I have lived before by Sture Lönnerstrand.

At the age of four in 1930 in Delhi, India, Shanti Devi began to mention certain details about clothes, food, people, incidents, places which surprised her parents. Briefly, Shanti mentioned the following which were later verified to be true. She:
• identified herself as Lugdi who used to live in Muttra, 128 kilometres away
• spoke the dialect of that area without having learned it
• claimed to have given birth to a son and died ten days later, events which it was later found did happen to Lugdi
• when taken to Muttra recognized her husband of her former life, Kedar Nath, and spoke of many things they did together
• was able to identify with accuracy a number of landmarks where she used in live in the previous life in Muttra
• was able to correctly state how the furniture was placed when she used to live there in her home
• knew that in her former life where she had hidden 150 rupees in an underground corner of a room for safe keeping in the house. The husband of the previous life, Kedar Nath, confirmed that although the money was not there he was responsible for taking it himself
• correctly identified Lugdi's former parents from a large crowd.

"In 1930, aged 4, Shanti Deva from Delhi, India, told her parents that she had once lived in a place called Muttra (now known as Mathura), that she had been a mother of three, who died in childbirth, and that her previous name was Ludgi.

Because the girl continually related the story, her parents investigated. It turned out there was a village called Muttra, and that a woman named Ludgi had recently died there. They took Shanti to the village where she began to speak the local dialect and recognized her previous-life husband and children. She even gave twenty four accurate statements matching confirmed facts about Ludgis life. An impressive feat for a four year old.

One of the earliest and best-known documented cases of children who claim to recall a past life, that of Shanti Devi

(studied by K.S. Rawat), also includes statements about her experiences after death and before her reincarnation.

Shanti Devi

In the 1930s when the idea of successive lives was not shared by the educated elite, the case of a 9-year-old girl Shanti Devi of Delhi attracted much public attention throughout India and soon its reports travelled far and wide in the entire world (Rawat, 1997). For the first time in history, a committee of fifteen persons, including journalists, was constituted to investigate the veracity of the statements made by the girl, claiming to be a Chouban (member of the Choubey family) of Mathura in her past life. Mathura, a town 145 kilometers from Delhi, never visited by the girl or her parents. Spiritualists and rationalists, scientists and laymen visited Delhi and Mathura either to investigate dispassionately or to support their religious beliefs or to entirely expose what they saw as a hoax. One such critic, Sture Lönnerstrand, came all the way down from Sweden to expose the fake case. After completing his investigations he issued the statement: This is the only fully explained and proven case of reincarnation there has ever been. (Hunt, 1971.)"

- [link to theunexplainedmysteries.com]

"Shanti Devi (11 December 1926 - 27 December 1987) was born in Delhi, India.[1] She began as a little girl in the 1930s to claim to remember details of a past life. The case was brought to the attention of Mahatma Gandhi who set up a commission to investigate; a report was published in 1936.[2] Two further reports were written at the time, one critical of the reincarnation claims,[3] and a rebuttal.[4] Later in life Shanti Devi was interviewed again, and a Swedish author who had visited her twice wrote a book about the case.[5]

According to these accounts, when she was about four years old, she told her parents that her real home was in Mathura where her husband lived, about 145 km from her home in Delhi. Discouraged by her parents, she ran away from home at age six, trying to reach Mathura. Back home, she stated in school that she was married and had died ten days after having giving birth to a child. Eventually interviewed by her teacher and headmaster, she used words from the Mathura dialect and divulged the name of her merchant husband, "Kedar Nath". The headmaster located a merchant by that name in Mathura who had lost his wife, Lugdi Devi, nine years earlier, ten days after having given birth to a son. Kedar Nath traveled to Delhi, pretending to be his brother, but Shanti Devi immediately recognized him and Lugdi Devi's son. As she knew several details of Kedar Nath's life with his wife, he was soon convinced that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi. When Mahatma Gandhi heard about the case, he met the child and set up a commission to investigate. The commission traveled with Shanti Devi to Mathura, arriving on November 15, 1935. There she recognized several family members, including the grandfather of Lugdi Devi. She found out that Kedar Nath had neglected to keep a number of promises he had made to Lugdi Devi on her deathbed. She then traveled home with her parents. The commission's report concluded that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi.[2]

Shanti Devi did not marry. She told her story again at the end of the 1950s, and once more in 1986 when she was interviewed by Ian Stevenson and K.S. Rawat. In this interview she also related her near death experiences while Lugdi Devi died.[1]

K.S. Rawat continued his investigations in 1987, and the last interview took place only four days before her death on December 27, 1987.[6]" "In an attempt to trip-her up, when Shanti made her first visit to her former home, the research team hired an actor to pretend to be her former husband while her former husband pretended to be one of the onlookers in the crowd. Shanti immediately saw through the fraud and identified the man who had been her former husband recalling to him some intimate details of their personal life together that her former husband, in complete amazement, acknowledged."

book: twenty cases suggestive of reincarnation

"What Stevenson was looking for were stories that could not easily be explained by hypotheses other than the survival of personality. He knew that stories of previous lives could get contaminated in a variety of ways. They might be due to cryptomnesia. The source might have been a movie, a book, a play, a radio program, an overheard story or conversation. He thought that the best evidence for reincarnation would be those cases where someone wrote down the instances where a child gives evidence of a PLE and then later the written account is verified. For example, a father writes down his three-year-old son's statements that he was Joey the blacksmith in Portsmouth and was stabbed by pirates in the neck on a wharf in Hong Kong. Later, it is discovered that there was a Joey who was a blacksmith in Portsmouth who was killed by pirates in Hong Kong. Adding poignancy to this account would be the discovery of some sort of birthmark on the neck of the child. One problem with such a method is that the verification process may not occur for a decade. But even if it takes place within a few months of the written record being made, we must take it on faith that the father is being honest. We have no way of knowing whether the father (or an uncle) in a semi-drunken state read an account of Joey's death to his son and told him that that mark on your neck is the mark of Joey. We have no way of knowing that the father is being completely honest with us. In other words, we have to assume a story is uncontaminated in order to declare the case "solved" (as Stevenson calls those cases "when evidence of a person that corresponds to the experient's statements concerning a past life is found" [Mills and Lynn: 290]).

In a fairly typical case, a boy in Beirut spoke of being a 25-year-old mechanic, thrown to his death from a speeding car on a beach road. According to multiple witnesses, the boy provided the name of the driver, the exact location of the crash, the names of the mechanic's sisters and parents and cousins, and the people he hunted with -- all of which turned out to match the life of a man who had died several years before the boy was born, and who had no apparent connection to the boy's family.* "

[link to www.skepdic.com]

can these reincarnation cases be fake?

Published results

Stevenson concluded that reincarnation was the "best possible explanation" for the following reasons:
The large number of witnesses and the lack of apparent motivation and opportunity, due to the vetting process, make the hypothesis of fraud extremely unlikely.
The large amount of information possessed by the child is not generally consistent with the hypothesis that the child obtained that information through investigated contact between the families. Demonstration of similar personality characteristics and skills not learned in the current life and the lack of motivation for the long length of identification with a past life make the hypothesis of the child gaining his recollections and behavior through extra-sensory perception improbable.
When there is correlation between congenital deformities or birthmarks possessed by the child and the history of the previous individual, the hypothesis of random occurrence is improbable.

- [link to en.wikipedia.org]

Even skeptics believe the book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation that was written by a psychiatrist Ian Stevenson

Look at the reviews: [link to www.amazon.com]

Ian Stevenson was a Psychiatrist who did studies on reincarnation. He wrote I believe a dozen books. The most popular one of his books is "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation". Its very convincing and proves that fraud is extremely unlikely. Even skeptics agree that reincarnation is the best explanation of these cases.

another website: [link to reluctant-messenger.com]