The Stevenson Reincarnation Case Collection

The programme's unit of evidence is a documented case rather than a trial, and understanding what a case consists of is essential to weighing the claim. A typical file begins with a young child, usually between two and seven, who has begun making statements about another life: a name, a place, a family, an occupation, sometimes a manner of death. Ian Stevenson or a colleague interviews the child and the family, recording the statements as reported. Where possible they then attempt to trace a deceased person matching the description, and if one is found they interview that family too, comparing what the child said against the facts of the life.

Some files add a physical element: a birthmark or birth defect on the child said to correspond to a wound recorded in the previous person's postmortem, which Stevenson documented photographically and against medical records where he could obtain them. More than two thousand cases were accumulated over four decades, drawn heavily from cultures where reincarnation is an accepted belief. Stevenson's own language was consistently guarded, and his best known book is titled Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. He held a chair in psychiatry at the University of Virginia throughout, and the programme was funded by a private bequest rather than by public research money.

The methodological objection is not that the investigators were careless, and Stevenson's critics generally concede that his documentation was unusually careful for the subject. It is structural. By the time an investigator hears about a case, the child has been speaking for months, the family has interpreted the statements within a framework that expects them, a candidate previous personality has often already been identified by relatives or neighbours, and the two families may have met and talked. Everything the investigator records is therefore downstream of a process the investigator did not observe.

The interviews are frequently conducted through interpreters, which adds a further layer between the child's words and the written record. And there is no controlled version of the study available: one cannot randomise children to cultures, or blind a family to its own conversations. Stevenson knew all of this and argued that the strongest cases involved verified details that could not plausibly have travelled between the families, which is the right defence to attempt and one that turns on the particulars of each file. The collection continues at the University of Virginia under Jim Tucker, and the standoff between the case-by-case defence and the structural objection is exactly where it was thirty years ago.