Overview
Corliss Chotkin Jr was born on 15 December 1947 in Sitka, Alaska, to a Caucasian father and a mother, Irene, of mixed Tlingit and Caucasian descent. The previous person was her uncle (the boy’s great-uncle) Victor Vincent, a full-blooded Tlingit fisherman and Salvation Army worker, who died at Angoon in spring 1946, about eighteen months before Corliss was born 12. Ian Stevenson investigated the case on three visits to Alaska between 1962 and 1965 and saw the family again in 1972 12.
The prediction
In 1945, about a year before he died, Victor Vincent, then 69 and in poor health, was staying with his niece in Sitka. According to her, he told her he would come back as her next son, that he hoped not to stutter so much then, and that the boy would have his scars. He pulled up his shirt to show her an operation scar on his back, with the small stitch holes still visible, and pointed to another scar at the right side of the base of his nose 12. He also said he preferred her sober household, and wanted to grow up again with a sister he believed had been reborn as Irene’s daughter 1.
Birthmarks
Both parents said the baby had two marks at birth in the same places as the scars; even so, he was named after his father, not his great-uncle. The nose mark, deep red at birth according to his father, lay near the inner corner of the right eye; as Corliss grew it moved down, and at fifteen it was on the right nostril, slightly sunken, puckered and a little darker than the skin around it. By 1972 it had faded and was barely visible 21.
The back mark, on the upper right back, was reddish at birth and looked to his father like a small scar. In 1962 Stevenson found it raised and heavily pigmented, about 2 centimetres long and 5 millimetres wide, with six small dark dots along its edges, four of them in a line on one side like the marks of surgical stitches. It too had moved down. Itching and scratching had caused infection and darker pigment, and it was removed surgically in about 1969 21.
The child's statements and recognitions
At thirteen months, while his mother was trying to get him to say his name, Corliss said, ‘Don’t you know me? I’m Kahkody’, Victor Vincent’s Tlingit name, which he pronounced with a good Tlingit accent; the family then gave him that name. Between two and six, according to his mother, he picked out Vincent’s stepdaughter Susie at the docks, his son William, who was visiting Sitka unannounced, and, at a large Tlingit gathering, Vincent’s widow, calling her Rose and ‘the old lady’, as Vincent had; three times he did so before his mother had seen the person. He called a friend of Vincent’s, Alice Roberts, by her pet name and recognized three other friends from Angoon, two of them only by unusual familiarity 1.
He told a detailed story, which his mother had heard only from Vincent himself, of Vincent’s boat breaking down and of his putting on his Salvation Army uniform to attract a passing ship, the North Star. In the family’s former home, by then put to other uses, he pointed out the room where Vincent and his wife had slept on visits. His mother also saw Vincent in his habits: a stutter, combing his hair forward, a strong interest in religion, a love of boats, a self-taught skill with engines and, as a small child, left-handedness (though two of his mother’s brothers were also left-handed). He spoke less of the previous life from about nine, and at fifteen said he remembered nothing of it 1.
Verification
Corliss’s father confirmed that the marks were present at birth, but did not remember the prediction or the scars; Vincent and his niece often spoke Tlingit, which he did not understand. A friend of Vincent’s, the Rev. William Potts, recalled a scar at the right base of his nose, and a 1938 record from the US Public Health Service Hospital in Seattle showed an operation to remove his right tear sac, which would leave a scar at that spot 12. No record of a back operation was found, though a 1940 admission showed tuberculosis at the top of the right lung, under the site of Corliss’s back mark; Irene thought he had had a back operation for pleurisy a couple of years before he died, and Stevenson thought a later operation in Alaska probable but could not confirm it 2.
Much of the account rests on the mother, whose reliability some informants questioned in general terms while others trusted her. Retold nine months later, her story matched the first telling in its main points, and her own daughter knew nothing of the case, so she had not spread it about. Of 21 checkable details, 16 were corroborated. The one recognized person Stevenson could interview, a schoolteacher, did not remember being recognized. The mother had given information that conflicted with other witnesses in two other cases, but Stevenson accepted her account in its main features, while allowing that she may have unconsciously elaborated some details 1.
Assessment and later life
Stevenson regarded the match between the nose mark and Vincent’s scar as established, and that for the back mark as probable. Heredity could not explain them: they did not look like moles, Corliss was not Vincent’s descendant, and Vincent’s scars had come from operations. He could think of no event in the womb that would produce a mark like a stitched scar, and suggested the influence of a mind, either Vincent’s or, alternatively, the mother’s wish. She gave the Tlingit name only after the boy used it and gained nothing from the story, which in his view made it less likely, though not impossible, that she had imposed the identification; he also argued that extrasensory perception would not explain why the recognitions all fitted Vincent’s relationships 1.
In 1972 Corliss, then 24, was working at a pulp mill in Sitka. He had served in the army in Vietnam, where an enemy shell hit his gun and damaged his hearing. He had no memories of the previous life, but still loved engines, still stuttered a little when excited, and had turned away from formal religion after the war 1.