So Supernatural - MYSTICAL: Shanti Devi

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

This story begins in 1926, when Shanti Devi was born in Delhi, India. For the first several years of her life, Shanti was a typical girl, except for one thing: she didn’t talk. Her parents began to think she was a mute until four years later—when she spoke in full about memories from a past life. Ensuing events suggested that she was right...   

Maybe the biggest mystery of all time is what happens to us after we die. Is there an afterlife? Do we come back as someone else? After centuries of scientific discoveries and progress, we still don't know. But a certain phenomenon may hold the answer. Children who remember living a previous life and whose past life memories turn This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. Every Wednesday, I'll be taking a deep dive into a real unexplained mystery to try and figure out the truth. This week's episode is about Shanti Devi and James Leininger, two children who grew up in different parts of the world decades apart,

but each had memories of a previous life that were so accurate reincarnation is the only way to explain them. The story of Shanti Devi begins in 1926 when she was born in Delhi, India. For the first several years of her life, Shanti's a typical little girl, except for one thing. She doesn't talk at all. Her parents actually begin to think she's mute. When Shanti turns four, to everyone's relief, she starts to speak. But something's off. Instead of just using one or two words at a time the way you'd expect from a child, Shanti speaks in long, perfectly formed sentences like a grown-up, which is extra strange because she keeps referring to her husband. It seems this four-year-old girl believes she's a married woman expecting a baby and living in an entirely different city.

When her parents and older sister think she's joking, Shanti gets angry. She tells them that this isn't her real life, this isn't her real name, and they aren't her real family. She has a whole other life somewhere else that she's desperate to get back to. When she closes her eyes, she still sees herself as a grown woman. It's like she went to sleep and woke up in a different child's body. Now, because she's so young, Shanti's parents don't take her that seriously. They figure this is just a phase that will end sooner or later. But there's something that bothers them. Shanti claims her real home is in a city called Matra. It's a city about 990 miles away, which nobody in Shanti's house had ever spoken about, let alone been to. So they can't figure

out how Matra could have figured into Shanti's fantasies. It's a detail that seems almost too mundane to be made up. And even weirder, only local residents call it Matra. The city's real name is Matura. The family has no idea where Shanti would have heard the nickname. As time goes on, Shanti remembers all kinds of details. For example, her old house. She says it's painted yellow and that there's a well on the property. She also talks about a temple nearby that she went to every day to pray to Krishna. Apparently, her husband is a businessman who's successful enough to own several homes. She talks about the birthmark on his cheek and the reading glasses that he wears.

And at first, Shanti had claimed that she was expecting a baby in this former life, but now she remembers she actually gave birth to a son. She's also fully committed to her old habits, like what she eats. She won't touch meat because in Mathura, nobody eats it, and she never even served it to her husband. When her parents give her a sari, which is a draped garment worn by women in India, she says they overpaid, that it isn't real silk. She's used to wearing fine clothes because her husband's in the cloth trade. And sometimes she uses slang words for things that only people in Mathura use. She knows her real name. It's not Shanti Devi. It's Lugdi Devi. And she wants to go back home. By now, Shanti's parents aren't just bewildered. They're downright scared. They've been trying to wave off what Shanti's saying as fantasy, but they can't ignore the fact that a lot

of what she's saying checks out. Like the slang word she's using, the fact that in her other life she prayed daily to Krishna, who happens to be the patron god of Maitreya. Then when she's six, she can describe how she died, which she said was soon after giving birth and after some complicated surgeries. Her parents take her to see a doctor. He can't seem to find anything psychologically wrong with her, but he's amazed by how much she knows about certain surgeries, the one that she supposedly had as Lukti. This leaves Shanti's parents with only one explanation. Their daughter is remembering another life. Now, Shanti's parents are Hindu, and one of the core principles of Hinduism is reincarnation. But it's not a regular occurrence to remember past lives. It's actually really rare. Also, people believe that remembering a previous life is an omen, a sign that you'll suffer harm or

unhappiness or even die young. So to protect her, Shanti's parents keep the whole thing very private. But when seven-year-old Shanti starts school, she tells her classmates about her other life. And pretty soon, she's being bullied by other students. Even her teachers and the headmaster assume she's lying. But Shanti is indignant. She is so sincere, the teachers really start to wonder. They decide to look into this a little more deeply. They go to Shanti's house and with her parents' permission, they ask her more about her other life. Listening to her talk about her husband, her pregnancy, her illness, the teachers are overwhelmed. They can tell from her demeanor she's not just telling a story. It's as if she's actually lived through this. So they ask her point blank for her husband's

name and their address in Matra. Before they jump to any conclusions, they want to write to this man to see if any of what Shanti is saying is true. Now, up to this point, Shanti hasn't told anyone the name of her husband because it's frowned upon for Hindu wives of the time to speak their husband's name in public. But finally, she agrees to whisper it in her teacher's ear. His name, she says, is Kedar, not Chaubey. Without telling Shanti or her family, the teachers write to Kedar and tell him that an eight-year-old girl in Delhi believes she's his former wife. If he writes back saying he doesn't know what they're talking about, that Shanti's story is totally wrong, then they can put this to bed once and for all.

But when they hear back from Kedar, he confirms everything in the teacher's letters. Yes, he was married before to a woman named Lugdi. But Kedar is still skeptical and he says he's going to ask his cousin Kanji, who lives in Delhi, to visit Shanti first. If he thinks that she's the real deal, then Kedar will come to see her for himself. So the teachers bring Kanji to Shanti's house. They don't give Shanti's family any advance notice about who he is. They just want to see what will happen. When they arrive, Shanti runs out and throws her arms around Kanji. Now, she can't remember his name right away, but she knows he's her husband's cousin.

She talks to him like they're long lost friends. And Kanji is shocked. Here is this eight-year-old girl he's never laid eyes on asking him if he's still unmarried, if he's finally bought his own house. She even knows that Kanji used to have a crush on her. When Kanji leaves, he writes to Kedar and says, listen, this is real.

This little girl is the living image of your dead wife and you have to come see her immediately. On November 12th, 1935, Kedar arrives in Delhi along with his new wife and the son he had with Lugdi, a 10-year-old boy named Navneet. They get into Shanti's house, and before he walks in, Kedar suddenly thinks of one more way that he can test this girl. He's going to say that he's his brother Ram. And if she believes that, then he'll know it's all a fraud. He walks into Shanti's house and tells her parents his name is Ram. But when Shanti sees him, she knows he's her husband, Kedar. And then when she sees their little boy, she throws her arms around him and weeps.

Kedar's still a little skeptical. But the more they talk, the more he realizes Shanti knows things that no one other than Lugdi could have possibly known. Like the promise he made to her on her deathbed that he'd never remarry, a promise he obviously broke. She tells him exactly how they conceived their son, and she remembers that while she was pregnant, she saw him cheat on her. Kedar is stunned. He goes back to Muttra convinced that this little girl has inherited the soul of his dead wife. Meanwhile, news of this spreads through Delhi and the whole country. Even in India, where the majority of the population is Hindu, reported reincarnations are incredibly rare. The news finally reaches Mahatma Gandhi, the activist and leader. He's intrigued by the case, but so far the evidence is all anecdotal.

No one outside of Shanti or the Kedar's family has been able to pass judgment on this. So Gandhi convinces Shanti's parents that it's in everyone's best interest to figure out whether this is all true or not. This means sending Shanti to Matra with a group of objective witnesses who can evaluate her behavior. Because so much of what she remembers has to do with places in Matra, like her old house, the temple, her previous family, they figure that this is the best way to put it to the test. Shanti's parents agree. They want to know what's going on more than anyone else. So on November 24th, 1935, the whole family leaves for Matra. When we come back, we'll find out exactly what they saw. Now back to the story.

In November of 1935, eight-year-old Shanti Devi traveled to Mutra along with an official committee of inquiry made up of journalists and academics. They're told not to speak to Shanti or pepper her with leading questions. They're just supposed to observe. Nobody really knew what to expect. It was possible that none of what she'd said about her old family and home would be true. But the crazy coincidences began as soon as they got off the train. As they step onto the platform, an older man approaches them. He doesn't speak, but Shanti stops in her tracks and falls to his feet. She cries out that he's Lugdi's brother-in-law, and of course, she's right.

Then she takes the committee into town and leads the way to her old house. She doesn't need direction. She remembers the way. Shanti had said that the house was yellow, but when they get there, it's painted white. However, the people who live there now say that they painted it because it used to be yellow. Later, when they visit her second house, she's momentarily confused. There used to be a well on the property. But then Kedar picks up a stone and shows her the spot where it used to be. She was right. She recognizes her old clothes, her old jewelry.

She goes straight to a room and remembers hiding money in a certain spot before she died. And Kedar confirms that he found money in that exact spot. Finally, she goes to the temple where she said she used to pray. By now, word has spread through Muttra of what's going on, and literally crowds are starting to form outside the temple wanting to catch a glimpse of Shanti. When they're done inside the temple, the committee addresses the crowd. They confirm this little girl used to be Lugdi Devi. They cite all the evidence they've seen that day. They're confident that this is a true case of reincarnation. Then Shanti makes a speech. She says that she was very happy to live in Mathura,

but now she wants to go home to Delhi and live the rest of her new life. After this, Shanti's case becomes famous. Word spreads all over the world and everyone is desperate either to prove or disprove her claims. Shanti is put under hypnosis and taken back to Matura and quizzed all over again. There are a couple of her memories that don't totally line up with the facts, but all in all, most of what she says holds up. But some skeptics maintain

there's no way to know exactly what Shanti said and how much she said before meeting Kedar and his family. To be honest, that's the biggest weakness in this case, the lack of any investigation before Shanti was reunited with Kedar's family. There's no way to know if Kedar or his family maybe might have influenced Shanti or planted details in her head intentionally or not. But the evidence is still so overwhelming no one's ever been able to fully debunk it to this day. A Swedish journalist even traveled to India in the 1950s hoping to prove that Shanti's case was a hoax. But after interviewing her, he actually became convinced that her case was real and he even wrote her official biography. Even today, Shanti Devi is considered possibly the most compelling case of reincarnation in recent history. But it's not the only case. Children with memories of past lives have been found all over the world, even in America. Now, American cases aren't as common as in some other

countries, which may be because reincarnation isn't a big part of American culture, so people are less likely to report it or even to take it seriously. Most cases have been found in places where reincarnation is widely accepted, like India, Burma, Thailand, and Lebanon. But there's one American case that is just as baffling and convincing as Shanti Devi's. In the spring of 2000, a couple in Louisiana named Bruce and Andrea Leininger began to notice a troubling pattern with their son James. Just a few weeks after he turned two, he started having terrible nightmares multiple times a week. Now, nightmares are pretty common in kids, especially at this age. So even though it's scary to watch, Andrea figures this is just a developmental thing.

But she notices he's saying something during the nightmares, screaming actually. Airplane crash on fire. Little man can't get out. It goes on for so long that Andrea takes him to the doctor, but the doctor can't find anything wrong with James. The nightmares continue, and soon James starts saying airplane crash on fire during the day, like when he's playing with his toy planes. Except he's not really playing, he's actually like reenacting a plane crash over and over again. Eventually, James starts talking in more detail

about the crash. This usually happens right before bed when he's maybe a little drowsy. One night, Andrew and Bruce ask him who the little man is, and he says James. They figure he's just repeating his own name. They ask him what kind of plane James is in. He says a Corsair. A Corsair that takes off from a boat. Now, James has been to a flight museum a couple of times with his dad, but he's never seen a Corsair. His parents are positive he's never even heard of one. Then, a few days later, they ask him about the boat that this plane supposedly took off from.

James says it's called the Natoma. They do an internet search and they learn that the Natoma was an aircraft carrier in the Pacific during World War II. Then, a few nights later, James tells them that his plane was shot down. When they ask who did it, he rolls his eyes and says to his parents, like they're idiots, the Japanese. Andrea realizes her son isn't having nightmares. He's having war flashbacks. There's no way James could have picked all this up from a book or a movie because even at two years old, he knows things about the planes that you'd have to be an expert to know. Like, he knows that the toy plane his mom buys him doesn't have a bomb attached. It's a drop tank. He knows certain quirks about

the Corsair planes. Like, for example, he says they always get flat tires. Then one day, Bruce is looking at a photo book of the Battle of Iwo Jima. James crawls into his lap, sees an aerial shot of the island, and says, here daddy, here is where my plane was shot down. James also starts to draw vivid pictures of airplane crashes, and he signs them James 3. He tells his parents it's because he's the third James. Now, Bruce is Christian, and reincarnation goes against pretty much everything he believes. He's still thinking it all might be a coincidence. But Andrea feels differently. She's pretty sure James is having some kind of past life memory. They decide to ask James if there's anyone else with him in his dream. And he says there's someone named Jack Larson. So Bruce decides to go

looking for this Jack Larson. He makes contact with a couple of veterans who flew from the Natoma. The first thing he finds out is that no course errors ever flew off the Natoma, which to Bruce is good news. It means James' supposed memory of the crash can't be accurate. But there is a Jack Larson who flew planes from the Natoma and who's still alive. Bruce tracks him down at his home in Arkansas and asks him if he remembers any pilots getting shot down during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Larson says he can think of only one, a 21-year-old named James Hudson Jr. He was the only pilot to go out that day and not make it back. Bruce later found out from eyewitnesses that James Houston's plane was hit in the exact same way that their son James had described it, right in the engine. And that signature James 3,

if James Leininger was James Houston Jr. reincarnated, that would indeed make him the third James. The Leiningers wrote a book about this whole experience that came out in 2009. Now, to some people, that's a red flag. Parents are often accused of feeding false memories to their children in order to make money off of them. But when you think about it, why pick such an obscure person? It took the Leiningers two years to figure out the identity of James Houston Jr. You'd think they'd pick someone easier to find. And is one single book deal that takes like eight or so years to materialize really enough motivation to go through all of this effort?

By the time the book was published, James was 11, and he remembered little of his past life memories. And this is common. These memories tend to come on early, around the time children start talking, and they start to fade by the ages of like six or seven. Shanti Devi was an exception. Her memories actually stayed with her her entire life. This may have been because the other life she remembered was so close to her own, both in terms of when it took place and where. In the majority of cases, though, these memories are fleeting. Still, they may be the most convincing proof of reincarnation we have. Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson spent 40 years investigating children's past life memories.

With each case, he tried to determine how many statements a child made that could be independently verified as true. After studying 2,500 cases, he was convinced that at least some of the time, a personality or a soul does survive after death, and it can then inhabit another human being. There was simply no other rational way to explain what he was seeing. Stevenson studied Shanti Devi's story at least twice, once in the early 60s and then again in the mid-80s, shortly before Shanti died. He never came out and said that it was absolute proof of reincarnation, but he never said that about any case. He only

said that he could determine through strict scientific methods that she made 24 statements about her past life that matched verified facts. Stevenson passed away in 2007, but his successor, Jim Tucker, entered over 2,000 of Stevenson's cases into a database and drew some general conclusions about this phenomena. Children tend to remember lives of people who are the same gender as them and who are from the same country as them. And most of the time in their past life, they died young or in a violent way, or sometimes both, like the case of James Houston Jr. This may account for why more past-life cases involve boys than girls.

Men tend to die of violent or unnatural causes more often than women. Strangely, when Tucker looked at the death statistics for the US, he found that men made up the same number of unnatural deaths in real life, 72%, as they do in the cases he was studying. All of these similarities seem too eerie to just be a coincidence. If these memories are all fantasies, why do they mirror real life so closely? And there's another strange aspect to this phenomenon that's even harder to explain away. Some of these children aren't just remembering a previous life. They actually can remember being dead.

When we come back, we'll look at children's memories of the afterlife. Now back to the story. James Leininger didn't just remember being a pilot in World War II. He remembered being in heaven. Around age five and a half, James told his mom that he'd been in heaven. At this point, Andrea wasn't exactly surprised. She asked him some basic questions. What did heaven look like? What did God look like?

Was God a man or a woman? James told her that heaven was beautiful and that God Was God a man or a woman? James told her that heaven was beautiful and that God wasn't a man or a woman. It was whatever you needed him to be at the time. He also remembered being greeted in heaven by two of his friends, Leon and Walter. He'd even named his G.I. Joe dolls after them. And sure enough, there were records of two men on board the Natoma who were killed before James Houston Jr. And their names? Leon Connor and Walter Devlin. James also told his mother that it wasn't a coincidence she and Bruce had become his parents.

James picked them. Before he was born into his new life, he saw them eating at a pink hotel in Hawaii, and that's when he decided he wanted them to be his new parents. Andrea remembered that she and Bruce had gone to Hawaii and stayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, which is completely painted pink, and this was a couple months before James had even been conceived. As far as Andrea was aware, there was no way James could have known about this. This kind of story isn't unusual for children with past life memories. They often remember heaven or a place like it or choosing their parents or being in this kind of waiting

area before they can come back to life. And remember, these children are typically like three or four years old when they're talking about this stuff. Normally, children don't even understand the concept of death until they're like in elementary school. Jim Tucker calls these memories intermission reports. Because if we're talking about reincarnation, then there's a certain interval between the death of a previous person and the birth of the new child. These reports tend to be very similar to near-death experiences reported by adults. They can involve a transition into a bright light or seeing loved ones waiting for them on the other side. But maybe the most detailed

example of an intermission is from Shanti Devi. She didn't just remember her previous life as Lugdi. She remembered her death as Lugdi, her birth as Shanti, and everything in between. As soon as she knew she was going to die, she started to pray to Krishna. And she didn't stop. Even when she finally lost consciousness, she kept praying. And her prayer was to come back. As she was praying, she felt a sensation of cold start to creep over her body from the bottom up. As it swept over her, her heart stopped. Her breathing stopped. Even after she was pronounced dead by the doctors, she was still partly aware of what was going on. She could see people come into the hospital room, break down in tears, and on and on. Then, finally, her soul escaped through the top of her head, and she

moved into another space filled with a silver light. She said other people were there, and they were both inside and outside of her at the same time. She understood that they were all waiting to be given orders. Would they continue on, or would they go back? Shanti felt a longing to go back and see her husband and child. And then, before she knew it, she was in darkness. She was wedged in this tight, uncomfortable place with a terrible smell. She was in the womb. But the whole time she was in there,

she's thinking of her old life, her house, her husband, the child she had just given birth to. She knew that these memories were what pulled her back to earth, and they stayed with her as she was being reborn. Now, there's no way to know really if this is true. Once again, Shanti's astonishing memory makes her an exception and not the rule, if we can say that rules even apply here. But if her memories are to be taken at face value, then they support one possible scientific explanation of reincarnation. That explanation involves a lot of quantum physics. Without going too far into it, certain experiments have shown that quantum particles exist in a state called superposition,

which means they don't exist in any one physical place or time. They exist in every possible place or time that they could go to. When you observe and measure them as particles, you're only seeing them in one of those many possibilities. Human consciousness could be like these quantum particles. The only way we can observe it in our physical world is when it's tied to a brain and a body. But the consciousness, or soul if you will, can still go on existing after that body dies and possibly reattach itself to another body later on. To people who research past life memories, this theory would mean that our reality is something like a shared dream, something that a whole bunch of people are creating and experiencing all at once. And just like when

we're woken up at night by a sound or a nightmare, some people might have their dream cut short by death. In real life, it's usually near impossible to go back into the same dream once you've woken up. But if people die too soon, too young or too violently, the thinking is they may be able to find their way back to the same dream. It may not be so far away, except now that dream will be experienced in a different body. As far as memories of the afterlife go, that's another dream, a transition dream. Reports of near-death experiences all seem to contain certain common elements, A bright light, no pain, the sensation of hovering above their dead bodies. Shanti's story contains all of these.

And so it seems that culture shapes people's near-death experiences in the same way that the events of our daily lives shape our nighttime dreams. For that reason, the exact details of this intermission between lives can be highly personal. And the fact that not everyone can remember it isn't proof that it's not real. Dr. Stevenson used to say that remembering may be a defect. In other words, this may be happening to everyone, but only a few people may be able to recall it. In the case of Shanti Devi, she took an active part in the whole process by praying. She, in a sense, co-created her next life by asking Krishna to send her back to the same life she was living before. And because

Lugdi Devi was so young, she was more able than most to return to her former world. As Jim Tucker puts it in his book, Return to Life, quote, dying young increases the likelihood that a child will later report memories of a past life. This might also explain why children often remember themselves as a person of the same gender and culture. And it could also explain why the average time between the death of an adult and the birth of a child who remembers them is so short, usually only about 16 months.

But again, we still don't have solid proof to support these theories. Some of these reincarnation cases could be fraud or coincidence, or maybe even psychic ability. The story of Shanti Devi, though, seems impossible to dismiss as fraud or coincidence. And so does James Leininger and his memories of being a pilot, not to mention the thousands of other cases Tucker and Stevenson found. How do we explain those?

Are they just coincidences? Or is something bigger going on here? Maybe the answer is that reincarnation exists if we believe in it. Maybe like Shanti, we choose what happens to us after we die. And maybe if we're handed some tough cards at birth, we can take some comfort in knowing that we'll have another round. Because death may just be the beginning. Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.