This was all the more unusual given the fact that neither Byrd nor her husband had any interest in, or even much knowledge about, the sport. But baseball was America’s favorite past-time after all, and it wouldn’t have been beyond belief if a pass-by introduction to the sport sparked that interest.
Then one day, Christian said offhandedly, “I used to be a tall baseball player.”
Byrd tried to correct him; surely he meant he “would be” a tall baseball player one day. Christian brushed off the correction, and these odd comments would persist.
“Then one day, he just got so frustrated—that moment I‘ll never forget. He was standing in the living room and I was pitching him balls, and he said it: ’I used to be a tall baseball player.‘ And I said, ’Oh yeah, one day.‘ I said the thing, I corrected him, ’One day you‘ll be a tall baseball player.’ And he stomped his foot on the ground. And he said, ‘No! I was tall! Like Daddy!’”
“And it was the first time it really clicked with me—is this what he’s been trying to say? And we’ve been ignoring him?”
Babe Ruth Was Mean to Me
Little by little, usually right before bedtime when Christian was drowsy, he would share bits of information that Byrd started piecing together like a puzzle. Over the course of two or three years, that picture would become clear.He was a tall baseball player, and a good one. They wore metal cleats and no helmets. They traveled by train, not airplanes, and he stayed in hotels almost every night.
Byrd could surmise that Christian was speaking of a previous era, though he could not have known this information as he'd never been exposed to it. Still, she listened, and continued to support his tremendous love for baseball.
She took him to a Yankees and Red Sox game at Fenway Park, where a particularly memorable clue dropped into her lap. While passing by a giant photo of Babe Ruth, Christian stopped and got upset. “He was mean to me! I don’t like him!”
“And it was very embarrassing because people were walking by and they’re like, ‘Oh, this kid’s on to something. You know, Babe Ruth was kind of a jerk.’ I’m just laughing, and I’m kind of like hiding my face,” Byrd said.
“But really, these moments, they seem funny and silly, but he was so emotionally charged by these memories. We actually had to leave the stadium, even though we had tickets to see the game. He just was very upset.”
This clearly wasn’t make-believe, and Byrd said after this incident she started putting two and two together.
She discovered Carol Bowman’s book “Children’s Past Lives” and realized she was not alone—many other mothers across America had shared similar stories. This prompted her to call Bowman and ask for advice. Bowman said she could ask questions if Christian brought up one of these memories, and show him pictures from the time period and see if it prompts some identifying information.
With the Babe Ruth clue to go off on, Byrd started showing her son photos from that era. One of these was a New York Yankees photo from 1927, whereupon she asked, “Christian, do you see anyone in here who didn’t like Babe Ruth?”
“And he pointed to this guy with dimples who, at the time, I didn’t know who it was, and he said ‘him.’ Then he also said in the same sitting, ‘That’s me.’”
“When you’re getting these revelations, you’re not really taking it seriously, and you’re always looking for proof, right? You’re not like, ‘Oh, this was my son in a past life.’ It’s kind of the last place your mind goes.”
Children’s Past Lives
Bowman is a pioneer in the area of past-life therapy, the first to write a book addressing children’s past lives specifically. Different from memories that emerged from a past-life regression therapy session via hypnosis, children under the age of 7 sometimes naturally and spontaneously mention memories they could not have acquired postnatally, indicative, perhaps, of a past life. It had occurred with Bowman’s own son and daughter.But the phenomenon itself was not what spurred Bowman to research and write on the topic. It was the fact that Bowman saw, in her own children, that once the memories were addressed, they were healed of some related ailment. In the case of her daughter, a phobia completely disappeared. In the case of her son, his sudden-onset phobia left as quickly as it came once the memories were addressed, and a physical condition that had not responded to medical treatment disappeared as well. Perhaps, she thought, these memories and symptoms manifested because the soul needed healing.
Bowman is by no means the first to research children’s past lives. These spontaneous accounts make up the bulk of past-life research, which has been ongoing at the University of Virginia for 40 years, beginning with the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, who collected thousands of such cases from around the world, including over 1,000 “solved” cases where there was enough evidence to ascertain the identity of the person mentioned as a past life. Dr. Jim Tucker, who has continued Stevenson’s research at the University of Virginia, ended up interviewing Christian when he was 5.
The concept of past lives, or reincarnation, is one of humanity’s oldest beliefs and was once part of every major religion. It is a belief lesser known in the West, where the earliest accounts are attributed to Plato, but was stamped out during the time of Roman Emperor Constantine’s merging of church and state and banning of mentions of reincarnation in religion.
Lou Gehrig’s Mother
Byrd looked up the photo, and realized her son had pointed to Lou Gehrig when he said “That’s me.”All she knew of Gehrig was that he suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often called Lou Gehrig’s disease, and as a mother this gave her a pang of worry. Christian sometimes had trouble breathing and had gone to the hospital a few times because of it. Was there any connection?
The Major League Baseball player nicknamed “the iron horse” died young, at age 37, two years after his iconic “Luckiest Man” speech at Yankee Stadium. He was remembered and honored not only for his incredible record, but also for his integrity and good character.
Bowman advised Byrd that she could show him more photos and ask him more open-ended, not leading, questions to see what he could identify, and if his answers were accurate. They were.
As Christian mentioned bits and pieces about Gehrig’s relationships—with Ruth, with his wife, with his parents—Byrd followed up on each one, digging into sometimes obscure bits of history and uncovering family secrets, like how Gehrig’s wife, Eleanor, had not disclosed the fact that his illness was terminal to both Gehrig and his parents, the reasons behind her decisions with his estate, and the strained relationship they'd had. What Christian was saying could be confirmed.
Byrd was wary of sharing the fact that Christian had past life memories, and even more wary of others finding out her son saying he used to be Lou Gehrig. When Christian ended up mentioning it to other kids he played baseball with, not all of them were kind.
Then another bombshell came as Christian spoke of Gehrig’s mother one day.
Byrd was asking questions about Gehrig’s life when Christian brought up the topic, and to her surprise, he responded as if Byrd should know these answers because she was there too. She was his mother in that life too. Byrd discovered that Gehrig’s mother, Christina, was a German immigrant who worked as a maid, and she survived Gehrig by 13 years.
Reconciling Her Faith
The first person Byrd actually sought counsel from when she began suspecting her son was mentioning a past life was actually a pastor. She wrote to him, and he responded that he would pray for her, but that she shouldn’t share the story because it would affect how others in the church would perceive her. Some friends Byrd had mentioned this to said similar things, warning her not to be “on the wrong side of God.”Byrd took her Christian faith seriously, and this was deeply hurtful.
When she found Bowman’s book and contact information, it felt like a godsend.
“That really kind of helped me, freed me from the guilt. Maybe reincarnation is something real,” Byrd said.
“It led me on a path to do a lot of research. I looked into the history of reincarnation and all of the other religions and parts of the world where it’s just a totally accepted belief. And I actually did some reading on how, in the Gnostic scriptures, in the Old Testament, there were teachings about reincarnation and rebirth. And in the fourth century A.D., it was actually taken out of the Bible.”
“I went back to a lot of the ancient philosophers; Plato, Socrates, and even the early 1900s, a lot of the writers wrote about reincarnation. So I started going to other sources, and I saw how scriptures were taken out of the Bible that talked about reincarnation because the church was really not wanting people to believe that they had another chance at life. And so I could see the history of it,” Byrd said.
When Christian revealed that Byrd was also his mother in their past life, it spurred Byrd on a second journey of research. Eventually, with a lot of courage, she underwent a past-life regression session with a therapist her friend trusted. He had advised her not to go into it with specific expectations, to not be disappointed if no memories of Christina Gehrig arose.
However, Byrd said, in all three sessions she underwent, she did.
In these memories, she could feel the love Christina Gehrig had for her son. She could experience the love and loss in Christina Gehrig’s life, and incredibly specific details of what was in a certain house they lived in, pets, neighbors, a watch her son had given her, a charm bracelet she had wanted to gift to the little girl who lived next door and often played outside with her brother.
“That to me was really where the proof came through,” Byrd said. “Because even after Christian shared two years of memories with us, I still wasn’t sure, right? I was like, is this real? Is this not real?”
Byrd was able to track down the family that lived next door and confirm the bracelet eventually made it to the girl. And as it turned out, the little boy had grown up to be a reverend.
Byrd initially called him up, telling him she was doing some research on Mom Gehrig for a book, with the intention of confirming for herself some details she saw in her regression. By the grace of God, Byrd said that Reverend Ken’s words helped her realize that the nearly four-year journey she had been on was a sacred one, not something to be ashamed of.
Though Reverend Ken did not believe in reincarnation himself, he said he could see how God’s love, and power, were boundless. Perhaps they were stewards of the stories of these souls that were now with God, perhaps it was something else. Was God not showing her that the human soul is eternal?
“It was really a miraculous journey,” Byrd said.
Byrd has since written a book about this journey call“The Boy Who Knew Too Much.” Christian’s story is one of the more well-known cases of past-life memories. It was not an easy decision to share the story, and it was not easy to write the book, Byrd said.
“The hardest part of that was actually to share it with other people,” she said. “I had a lot of guilt around it.”
“But once we focused on the higher purpose and the message of the book, and why we were sharing the story—just to share that message that our soul survived death—there just seemed to be a reason that that story came to us,” she said. “So we kind of felt obliged to share it with the world.”
“[Something] it really opened up for me was that there is no ending and no beginning to the soul, we come into this like unencumbered by our past-life memories, so that we can be immersed in this life,” Byrd said.
When young children recall past lives, they do not do so forever. Usually by age 6, all of these memories are gone. Bowman notes that as the memories fade, so does the chance to help the soul reconcile issues, release trauma, or heal a physical condition associated with that trauma. Research shows that children with these memories tend to speak of a past life where one died young (the median age being 28) or abruptly; the lives were cut short.
Mothers who share their stories, Bowman notes in her books, will share that their child is their own person. When the children speak of past lives, they may speak of long-ago events as if they happened yesterday, but they do not become different people.
“That’s kind of what’s beautiful about kids these days that are coming through with these memories,” Byrd said. “They have the memories at a young age, they’re sharing it with the adults almost like a message for us on life before life, life after death. And yet these memories are dissipating. That’s a remarkable thing. It’s not that these kids have these memories and have to carry that with them for the rest of their lives, but it naturally dissipates.”
By the time Christian was 5 or 6, just beginning school, “you could literally see this stuff just disappearing,” Byrd said. Christian knows he used to speak of Lou Gehrig’s life, but he doesn’t remember being anyone but himself. After seeing a past-life regression therapist who helped Christian release his memories, his breathing issues were gone as well.
Today, the story is a distant memory, more than a decade old, Byrd said. Her children are in their teens and can laugh it off as well. It wasn’t always easy, because along with Byrd’s struggle to reconcile her experience with her faith at first, there was also bullying.
“He stayed really grounded through this whole process, because he really has a passion for baseball,” Byrd said. “It doesn’t upset us anymore. We’ve heard so much.”
Thankfully, she added, the responses have been more positive than negative.
“One of the great things about writing the book is that I do have parents and people reach out to me a lot with similar stories. And I think that’s something too that’s really validated, Christian is knowing that he’s not the only one,” she said.
Why Do We Come Back?
There’s a Mark Twain quote Byrd loves: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”“We can go through our life thinking we’re always 100 percent right, but I think we should always keep an open mind,” she said.
“I think that near-death experiences, children with past lives, things that give us insights into the mystery of life are there for us, these gems are there for us ... I believe these stories do come out in order to give us guidance and hope and faith, and just a little peek into the mystery of life.”
Byrd said this experience into understanding reincarnation has been a beautiful gift, that if one can come to realize that perhaps once we lived in a different body, were a different person, from a different part of the world with a different culture and belief, perhaps we can become more compassionate, less judgmental of others.
It also helped her cherish her life more.
“I still embrace the saying, ‘You only live once’ because you really have one chance at this life and to really make it into an adventure, and to really just enjoy this time, in this body, in space and time, around the people that are in your life.
“And just appreciate the little things like going to a baseball game, like eating an ice cream cone, like holding the hand of a loved one. These are things, if you’re a spirit, you can’t physically enjoy it, you can’t go surf on a wave, you can’t go ski on a mountain. So I really think in some ways, this physical experience of nature, of travel, having all these wonderful things that are at our disposal, of being able to change the world, to being able to set goals, being able to help people, being able to make the world a better place—that’s why we’re here.
“And I think that’s something I was always searching for,” Byrd said. “Even as a child, I searched for it through education, I got multiple degrees, through religion. And it’s just so ironic that when I had children is when this, really this proof came through to me of why we’re here.”
Byrd says her main message, in sharing her story and writing her book is that “love never dies.”
“And the love we give is multiplied in the universe,” she said. “I just think if people have this, they can have hope. And they can give love and receive love in a whole different way.”
“I really think, in the world right now, that a spiritual awakening is needed. I feel like there are so many lost souls,” Byrd said. Seeing so much strife, and the suffering in younger generations, she wants to help give hope. “I just feel like if we can really grasp the mystery of life—I think it’s escaping us—we’re getting so into this virtual world of technology, that people are losing their way of just the basics of life and why we’re here—and we’re here to love other people.”
“I don’t want to violate anyone else’s beliefs, but just share our story,” Byrd said. “We really feel like there’s a higher purpose to sharing the story, so that’s why we do it.”
