Birthmarks and Past Lives: What Stevenson's Cases Reveal

In a wooden display case at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, a photograph of a Thai boy hangs beside a machete. The boy has a mark on the back left of his head, and the researcher who photographed him, Ian Stevenson, spent years checking whether that mark matched the wound of a dead man the child said he had once been. This is the territory of the fourth episode of The Telepathy Tapes' Reincarnation Records, which follows a single question into the archive: when a young child is born with a birthmark or birth defect in the exact place where a previous person was fatally injured, what does that correspondence actually mean? The episode does not hand down a verdict. What it does is lay out the method, the numbers, and the cases that held Stevenson's attention for decades, and show why the body itself has become part of the argument about whether consciousness survives death.

Why Start With the Memory and Not the Mark?

The most important thing to understand about this research is the order of operations. Host Kai Dickens returns to it more than once in the episode, and it is the detail that separates these investigations from a folk belief about marks on the skin. Investigators do not begin with a strange birthmark and go looking for a matching death. They begin with what the child says.

Families who contacted the division often reported specific details: an alleged past name, a village, the names of relatives, a previous profession, and in a majority of the archive's cases, how the earlier person died. Only after a deceased person has been identified from those details do researchers compare the child's body against that person's documented injuries. In Dickens's words, "The child's specific memories lead investigators to a deceased person first. Only after that identification is made do they compare any birthmarks or birth defects with documented verified injuries on that deceased person."

That sequencing matters because it limits the room for after-the-fact storytelling. A mark can look like almost anything once you already know how a person died. Starting with the memory, then checking the body, gives the investigation a fixed point.

What Counts as a Reincarnation-Linked Birthmark?

Ordinary birthmarks, the kind most people picture, are not what this research is about. Anthropologist Dr. Jim Matlock, who spent years studying Stevenson's work and investigating his own cases, drew the line sharply in the episode:

"Reincarnation-linked birthmarks tend to be not the usual kinds, not the kinds that come about through bumps in the birthing process or genetic. They're odd-looking things in odd places and they tend to be in the same place as the wound and very often it's a mortal wound."
— Dr. Jim Matlock, The Telepathy Tapes, Reincarnation Records Ep. 4 (approx. 1:39)

Matlock also made the skeptic's case for them. Marks on the skin have many ordinary origins. "An earring hole can produce a birthmark. Tattoo can produce a birthmark, right? Surgical scar can produce a birthmark and the thing is these birthmarks look identical to those scars," he said in the episode (approx. 2:27). Stevenson, according to Matlock, once documented a case involving a surgical scar on a man's back where the stitch holes were still visible. The lesson is that a scar's appearance alone proves nothing. The evidence depends on whether the mark lines up with a documented wound on a specific, identified person.

How Common Are These Marks in the Children Studied?

Dr. Philip Cosolino, who now co-leads the Past Life Memory Research Program at the division, gave the numbers that anchor the episode. Speaking in the episode (approx. 3:21), he said that "61% of our children can tell you how they think they died in this past life and of those 75% claim an unnatural often violent death. The raw numbers of those that have birthmarks is 44% of them and birth defects is 11% of them."

Those figures describe the archive, not a proof. They tell you that in the division's collection, a large share of children who report a past life also describe a violent death, and that many carry marks or defects. Dickens noted that the birthmark material is "no small thing," and Cosolino explained why Stevenson returned to it again and again.

"Everything else probably could have multiple explanations, but it becomes harder to make sense of how someone's fatal wound in another country years ago somehow shows up in a child and I think that to him was probably why you'd spend this much effort to write books of this size is that there's something here that he couldn't wrap his head around and neither can we."
— Dr. Philip Cosolino, The Telepathy Tapes, Reincarnation Records Ep. 4 (approx. 3:21)

Dickens put the scale of that effort in concrete terms: Stevenson's two volumes on the subject, Reincarnation and Biology, run to more than 2,000 pages together. That is the work of a researcher who kept finding the same pattern and could not set it aside.

What Did the Display Cases Show, and Who Was Ting?

The division keeps wooden display cases from Stevenson's fieldwork around the world. They hold photographs of children with missing digits and limbs, wounds, birthmarks, and defects, alongside weapons that match the injuries described in the cases. Dickens admitted the cases were unsettling, and that it was hard not to be pulled into the first photograph and trying to connect it to the weapons on the wall (approx. 4:08).

The case that anchors that photograph is Ting, a boy born in Thailand in 1924 with a mark at the back left of his head. Cosolino and his colleague walked Dickens through it on a follow-up call (approx. 4:55). Both of his parents, the episode says, had announcing dreams before he was born, in which a deceased person told them he was coming to them in a new life. The dream figure was the father's older brother, Pho. Stevenson's account of the family's reports rested on multiple sources, and by the time he became involved, the parents had already died.

The fatal wound is the core of the case. According to the episode, Ting's birthmark matched a machete blow to the back of the head suffered by a man in the community, and the autopsy report documented that injury. Dickens described the scar on the photograph as looking like a healed gash, and the machete displayed above it as the kind allegedly used. The point the researchers stressed is that the evidence was not an impression. It was a specific injury in a specific location, recorded before anyone compared it to the child.

What Does Announcing a Birth Look Like in These Families?

Dickens reminded listeners of a theme from the earlier episodes. Families often report two kinds of dreams. An announcing dream, in the episode's description, is one in which the consciousness of someone recently deceased alerts a parent that they have chosen that parent and are coming to be their baby. A departing dream usually features a recently dead person comforting a grieving relative and saying they will be reborn and can be found in a particular place. Dickens called them "wild" and "common" in these archives.

In Ting's case, the announcing dreams were the reason his family's story was told as a set of connected reports rather than a single memory. That structure is part of why the case remains a reference point for the division.

Why Does the Body Question Remain Open?

The episode is careful not to resolve the big question in the description: could the human body carry physical evidence that consciousness survives death? The researchers in the episode treat the birthmark correspondences as a serious problem for explanations based on coincidence, imagination, or suggestion, which is the same framing the episode's description uses. They do not claim the cases are settled. Cosolino's own phrasing, "neither can we," is an admission that the question still runs into a wall.

That wall is where the material becomes most useful for a reader. The cases raise questions about how a mark forms, how memories form, how families talk about the dead, and how investigators check what they are told. Each of those is a place where an honest skeptic and an honest believer can keep working. A reader does not need to decide the metaphysics in order to see that these records are unusually specific, and that the method of checking the body against an identified death is the piece that gives them weight.

Where to go from here

If the episode leaves you wanting the primary material, Stevenson's own books are where the cases are written out in full. The Telepathy Tapes' episode description points to several: Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation; the four-volume Cases of the Reincarnation Type, covering cases in India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Turkey, and Thailand and Burma; and the two-volume Reincarnation and Biology, which is where the birthmark material is concentrated. Reading the cases themselves, with their autopsy references and family interviews, is the fastest way to test what the episode claims against the record.

To follow the rest of the season, start with the earlier episodes. Dickens says each one builds on the last, and this episode depends on the announcing-dream and identification method introduced before it. Pay attention to how the researchers handle the difference between a memory that points to a person and a mark that points to a wound. That distinction is the spine of the whole conversation.