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Duminda Ratnayake
A Sri Lankan boy who from the age of three said he had been a chief monk at the Asgiriya temple in Kandy, behaved like a monk and chanted Pali verses; his statements best fitted Gunnepana Saranankara, abbot from 1921 to 1929, whom he later picked out in an old photograph.
Gnanatilleka Baddewithana
A Sri Lankan girl who said she had been a boy from the hill town of Talawakele; dozens of her statements were written down before the family was traced, and they matched Tillekeratne, a 13-year-old who died in 1954, whose relatives she identified at a recorded meeting.
Jagdish Chandra
A boy from Bareilly whose statements, from the age of three, about a life in Benares as Jai Gopal, son of Babu Pandey, who supervised a bathing ghat there, were written down by his lawyer father and published in a newspaper in 1926 before anyone checked them.
James Leininger
An American boy whose nightmares and statements about being a Second World War navy pilot were matched to James Huston Jr, shot down during the Iwo Jima campaign in 1945; one of the best-known Western cases, and one of the most debated.
Kemal Atasoy
A Turkish boy from Hatay whose statements, written down by Jürgen Keil before any checking, described a wealthy Armenian named Karakas in a waterside house in Istanbul, 850 kilometres away; a local historian later confirmed that such a man had lived in the house and died about fifty years before the boy was born.
Kumkum Verma
An Indian girl from a Bihar village who spoke of a life as Sundari, a woman of a blacksmith family in Urdu Bazar, Darbhanga; her aunt wrote down many of her statements before any were checked.
Pretiba Gunawardana
A Sri Lankan boy who gave 42 detailed statements about a life in Kandy ending in a car fire; no matching person or street was ever found, making it a well-documented unsolved case.
Ryan Hammons
An Oklahoma boy whose memories of Hollywood were traced, through a still from a 1932 film, to Marty Martyn, a minor actor turned talent agent who died in 1964.
Rylann O’Bannion
An Oklahoma girl who from the age of three said she had died in the rain after a loud noise; at five she spoke of a plane crash, and her mother found Jennifer Schultz, an eleven-year-old killed in her carport when a Pan Am jet crashed into Kenner, Louisiana, in 1982.
Shanti Devi
A Delhi girl who in the 1930s remembered being Lugdi, a young wife in Mathura who died after childbirth; she recognized her former husband, and a committee formed on Gandhi's advice took her to Mathura, making hers perhaps the most famous case in India.
Sujith Lakmal Jayaratne
A Sri Lankan boy whose statements about being 'Gorakana Sammy' were written down by a monk before any checking and matched Sammy Fernando, an arrack distiller killed by a lorry in 1969; as a toddler Sujith asked for arrack and acted out a drunkard's habits.