As a preschool toddler, Taru despised her father. ‘He can go away and we can live together without him,’ she once said to her mother, Iris.

The young Finnish girl refused to call her father ‘Papa’ and addressed him only by his name, Heikki.

Conversely, Taru expressed deep affection for her mother. At times she seemed confused about their relationship.

‘Why should I have to choose you as my mother?’ she asked.

Then, Taru revealed a strange clue when she declared, ‘I am not Taru; my name is Jaska.’

Jaska was the nickname of Iris’s second husband. He’d been hit by a bus and run over and killed three years before Taru’s birth.

Iris had never discussed the grisly details of her late husband’s death with Taru. Yet when barely three years old, Taru said, ‘I was left under a car and died.

Don’t you know?’ She went on to say the car was big and ‘first died the stomach, then the head.’ Taru added, ‘I was taken to the hospital, but I was already dead by that time.’

In fact, Iris’s former husband, Jaska, stumbled off a curb. He fell underneath a city bus while it was stopped at a traffic light.

When the signal changed, the bus’s enormous wheel rolled over Jaska’s body, first crushing his torso, and then his skull. An ambulance raced him to a hospital even though he had died at the scene.

Investigators study cases of people who remember past lives. They have documented many instances of someone believing they once lived as a deceased family member.

Still, how strange would it be if your own child declared herself the reincarnation of your former spouse?

Taru’s insistence that she’d once lived as Jaska created a disharmonious family dynamic. This situation forced her father, Heikki, to live in a different home for much of his daughter’s childhood.

As Taru grew up, however, her past-life memories faded, and she eventually became very close to her father.

THANK YOU FOR SHARING OUR STORIES ON SOCIAL MEDIA. TELL OUR READERS WHAT YOU THINK

BOOK SALES FUND OUR NEWS PLATFORM. Award-winning novelist Michael Walsh writes romantic, real-life paranormal novels THE PHANTOM OF OPHELIA and SOUL MATES. Best read with an open mind. https://michaelwalshbooks.wordpress.com/