A father was changing his young son’s diaper when the toddler declared, ‘When I was your age, I used to change your diapers.’

Sam was about eighteen months old, and he continued to make unusual statements like this. ‘I used to be big, and now I’m small,’ he once reported.

Then, when Sam was four, his grandmother passed to the other side. She had lived far away, and Sam’s father flew to her home to recover some keepsakes.

When he brought them home, Sam began picking through a stack of his grandmother’s old photographs.

He pointed to an image of his grandfather. ‘That’s me!’ he said, adding, ‘Hey! That’s my car!’ when discovering a picture of a 1949 Pontiac.

Sam had identified his paternal grandfather in the image as well as his grandfather’s first car. The man had died nearly two years before Sam’s birth.

Could Sam have been accessing memories from his late grandfather’s life? His parents began to test the boy in search of an explanation.

They showed Sam a class picture of twenty-seven elementary school children.

Sam studied the faces and then pointed to his grandfather. ‘That’s me,’ he said.

Sam had never seen pictures of his grandfather as an adult before this day, let alone as a young child.

Still, the boy’s correct identification could have been a lucky guess. Sam’s parents needed to test their son’s knowledge of something more specific, something his grandfather would have known, but no one ever discussed.

They decided to question Sam about a murder.

Sam’s mother asked: Did your grandfather have any siblings? ‘Yeah, I had a sister,’ Sam answered. ‘She turned into a fish.’

Probing on this bizarre detail, Sam’s mother wanted to know who had turned this woman into a fish, to which Sam responded, ‘Some bad guys.’

In fact, Sam’s grandfather had had a sister whose husband had killed her as she slept over half a century before.

No one had ever mentioned the horrific crime to young Sam. Especially not the part about how the murderous husband had wrapped his wife’s body in a blanket and tossed it in the bay, where it sank to the bottom, surrounded by fish.

It’s astonishing to think of a deceased relative returning to the family in a new body. Even more strange is the idea of your own parent being reborn as your child.

If you have children, do they remind you of any of your late ancestors? If they’re still younger than age three or four, try asking them, ‘Do you remember when you were big?’ Perhaps their answer will surprise you.

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