About the series
The Reincarnation Records is the third season of The Telepathy Tapes, the documentary podcast created and hosted by the filmmaker Ky Dickens. The first episode was released on 7 October 2026 and the second a week later.12
The season asks whether memory begins at birth. It follows families whose young children describe lives they could not have known about, and the researchers who try to check those details, and asks whether such cases say anything about the survival of consciousness.3
According to the season trailer, the investigation spans France, Nepal, Vietnam, Germany, Brazil, Tibet, Sri Lanka and the United States, draws on scholars affiliated with the University of Virginia and Harvard, and looks at the Tibetan Buddhist process for identifying the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.4
Episodes
1. ‘The Boy Who Remembered Dying’ (7 October 2026). Carol Bowman’s five-year-old son Chase developed an intense fear of loud, booming sounds, and one day, sitting on her lap at the kitchen table, described dying as a soldier on a battlefield, with a gun, a bayonet and a wound to the wrist. Afterwards his fear went and the eczema on his wrist cleared. Bowman, then a stay-at-home mother with no background in the subject, went looking for answers, which led her to Ian Stevenson’s research and to other American families.1 She told the story in her book Children’s Past Lives (1997).5
2. ‘When Reincarnation Leaves a Paper Trail’ (14 October 2026). Bowman, by now researching children’s memories, is called by the mother of a three-year-old, Blake, who had months of unexplained pain and spoke of being killed by a truck; after one conversation his distress seemed to lift. The episode then turns to a Louisiana boy with nightmares of dying in a burning plane, whose father’s search turned up military records, eyewitnesses and a dead Second World War pilot who seemed to match. The episode description does not name him, but the details are those of the James Leininger case.26
Background and reception
The Telepathy Tapes began in September 2024 with a season about non-speaking autistic people said to communicate telepathically. It briefly topped podcast charts in the United States and Britain and won the Webby Award for best independent podcast in 2025. Scientists and autism organisations criticised it for relying on parents’ accounts and on methods resembling facilitated communication, in which the person helping may unknowingly guide the answers.7
Listen
https://thetelepathytapes.com/podcast/the-telepathy-tapes-s3-e01