This programme in the main sought to evaluate the evidence behind the claims of a previous life on the island of Barra made by a five year old Glaswegian boy. His mother stated that at the age of two, ever since he could talk he repeated claims to everyone that he had had another mother and father and he used to play on the nearby beach with his black and white dog and other brothers and sister. Cameron claimed that small aeroplanes landed on the beach besides their white house.

Family, neighbours and school friends learned about his Barra family and that Cameron had tragically witnessed his father being run down by a car because his father did not look right and left at the road side. So confident were Cameron’s claims everyone had to be informed that Cameron had not been adopted by his Glasgow family.

One of Cameron’s earliest comments to his mother Norma was that he had dropped through apparently from Barra, the remote island of the Hebrides, two hundred miles away and then he had found himself with his new mother and new six year old brother Martin in Glasgow. Cameron’s account became more detailed as he grew older, which included him recalling the name of his Barra father as Shane Robertson.

 For Cameron these apparent memories were a living reality. This is exemplified by the fact that one day at his nursery Cameron was found to be terribly distressed as he was apparently hit with the emotional shock of losing his Barra mother whom he missed terribly and presumably the shock at gaining a new family. He told his Glasgow mother that she would have liked his Barra mother.

Ian Watson, Cameron’s uncle dismissed Cameron’s claims at first but over time became convinced about the boy’s apparent previous life experiences. Norma, Cameron’s mother did not believe that Cameron had unconsciously taken this information unconsciously from stories or television by the age of two. Norma could not account for how Cameron had this information about Barra and her other older son, Martin had not.

The verdict of the educational psychologist was that Cameron’s experiences did not fit into the usual pattern of imaginary friends and that for her, Cameron was an unusual case. The psychiatrist Dr Jim Tucker, the Director of Research at the University of Virginia in the USA was interviewed.  His aim was to determine whether there was a rational explanation for Cameron’s beliefs or as he put it, “were there strange forces at work?” In this context it was stated that he and other researchers were aware of over 2,500 children who had reported memories of past lives, some used great emotion as they recounted events, others reiterated past memories in a very matter of fact manner.

The second child referred to in the programme was named Gus Taylor who was from mid west America. Gus said that God had given him a card to come back and that he was his own grandfather in his past life. Gus’s parents, Cathy and Ron Taylor said Gus had never known his grandfather. One day when he was having his nappy changed by one of his parents he said “I used to change your nappy.” I think it reasonable to suggest that this is an unusual thing for a baby or small toddler of nappy age to say.

When tested with old photographs the child Gus pointed out his grandfather, he went on to point out his grandfather’s first car. This appeared to be interesting evidence. Gus’s parents said that they were shocked speechless when their son spoke of his sister from his previous life, stating that she had died “because of some bad guys.” They said that their son, Gus had no knowledge that this relative had been murdered and dumped in the San Francisco Bay, as this had never been discussed.

Interestingly, this American family were southern Baptists and reincarnation is not part of Baptist teachings. Their son Gus said “I used to be big, now I am a kid again. I came through a port hole to be here.”

Significantly, there are parallels between the apparent claims and terminologies used by these two youngsters as they apparently arrived to take up a further incarnation. The following descriptive phrases are interesting as their choice of words described what they sensed or understood regarding their return to live another life; returned through“a port hole,”or  “dropped through to return” and “God gave me a card so that I could come back.”

 A first impression might be to dismiss these remarks as childish nonsense. However in some respects there are similarities with the apparent highly personal idiosyncratic symbolic visions that are apparently malleable to thought and emotion and meaningful to both near death experiencers and those who have experiences of angels. I would suggest that a reoccurring feature inherent in various forms of transformative psychic experiences is that people see or recall that which they need, expect or can understand this often affects the psychic vision or experience which arranges itself in a way that is meaningful and understandable to them at a very personal idiosyncratic level. Consequently, the above phrases describing apparent experiences were meaningful to these two people.

The programme then returned to evaluate Cameron’s apparent past life memories. Cameron was taken to Barra for the first time in this life by his mother and Dr Tucker despite the fears of some of Cameron’s family and friends. It is possible that they thought a “return” to Barra would further fuel his apparent memories of the place. Emotionally he was very excited to “return” and appeared to immediately recognise the place.  As he disembarked from the plane at Barra he said “You see I told you it is all true.”

The local historian, Cameron MacNeil of the Heritage Centre helped them find a white house bordering on the beach, in northern Barra, owned by a Roberston family who had owned a black and white dog, there had been sons and a daughter and rock pools nearby on the beach. This family had had holidays in their home in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  However, this historian could find no record of a Shane Robertson being knocked down by a car.

At this point I would like to make a few comments, the first is that the historian would have been looking only at the Barra island records for a car accident involving a male pedestrian of that name. His search would have therefore been limited to the name Shane Robertson and an accident on the island of Barra. 

If we start with the premise that this boy did live before it is interesting and possibly more understandable that Cameron’s possible past life recall should focus on his exciting summer holiday home rather than the more mundane home of day to day activities. Hence he believed the accident was in Barra rather than elsewhere, as Barra was the focus of his memories.

I suggest if Cameron had lived before he might have witnessed a man being knocked down elsewhere and confused this apparent memory of the death of a male with later memories of losing his father later in that life, I would like to have asked the surviving sister had any brother been particularly close or alike, in order to explore this possible memory mergure to have occurred?

In the programme Cameron was taken to the house of the Robertson’s that appeared to fit the boy’s apparent memories. The boy was reassured by his mother that he did not have to remember, in order to take the pressure off him. After initial excitement the usually chatty Cameron became strangely subdued in the white house besides the beach that fitted so many of his memories. For example the fire was the same but he remembered different furniture, this was also found to be accurate. Cameron remembered the window that he used to look through in order to watch his brothers, sister and dog play on the beach.  Trying to understand the change in Cameron’s mood, his mother wondered if he might have thought that his Barra mother might still be there. He said he understood that she would not be there but that it made him sad in a way to be in that house “again”.

Upon returning to Glasgow Cameron’s mother, Norma visited a local genealogist, Ruth Boreham who discovered that a Gillie Robertson was a surviving member of the Robertson family. Cameron was interested to know that his ‘past life sister’ was still alive. As a result of this information Cameron and his mother visited Gillie Robertson who kindly showed them photographs of the Robertson family on the beach besides their white house with their black and white dog. Cameron and his mother learnt that the father was not Shane Robertson but James Robertson. The surviving sister Gillie Robertson and Cameron’s mother discussed the similarities between the names James, Shane and Shamus.

Gillie Robertson was asked if her father was knocked down by a car and passed on, presumably they were looking to verify Cameron’s belief that he saw his father being knocked down by a car, her answer was “no.” She was also asked if she knew of a child who had passed on, her answer was no. Presumably they were trying to see if the child who had passed on might have been the present day Cameron. My suggestion is that he may have passed on at a later age and become the present day Cameron and only retained childhood memories as they may have been happier. I believe it would have been interesting to have asked more questions about her brothers and their lives. The interval between a claimed former life and the present life can vary, obviously if Cameron was an adult when he passed on rather than a child there would have been fewer years in the interval between that life and his present life.

It is interesting that many of Cameron’s memories seemed to be verified by the visit if not all, such as the white house besides the beach, the name Robertson, the black and white dog, the brothers, the sister, the fireplace, the window, the rock pools and apparently the small aeroplanes that used to land on the beach. It is also interesting that the visit affected Cameron emotionally from excitement to depression.

Dr Jim Tucker said from his experience when a child gets the opportunity to “revisit” the place of their apparent memories it helps them to put the memories in perspective and then to let them go. It is significant that memories of former lives in children often disappear as they grow older.

The visit to Barra appeared to give Cameron a sense of closure.  Consequently not everything from Cameron’s memories was verified in this trip which left the investigation somewhat inconclusive. Cameron’s mother stated that a short while after their trip to Barra her son’s previously persistent memories of Barra troubled him no longer and his mother found him to be a remarkably changed child who has become notably much calmer. I found this to be a reasonably interesting programme which looked in some measure for evidence to support two children’s apparent memories of a former life.

Cameron Macauley is a Glaswegian who as a young child experienced memories that seemed to relate to a past life on a remote Scottish island. A documentary on the episode was broadcast in 2006.

Background

Cameron Macauley was born near Glasgow on 23 August 2000.1 At the age of five, he lived with his mother Norma and his six-year-old brother Martin in Glasgow. According to Norma, Cameron began at the age of two to make statements seemingly connected with a past life on Barra, an island among the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, inhabited by little over a thousand people. No one in his family had been there or had any connections to it.2

At age three he talked about it even more, and in nursery school mentioned Barra daily, insistently saying, ‘I want to go to Barra to my other family.’  He told his mother his father’s name had been Shane Robertson; an uncle also said that he’d referred to his father as Sean or Shane. Cameron said very definitely that his father had stepped onto a roadway and was fatally struck by a car that he remembered as either green and silver or greenish silver.

His ‘Barra mother’, he said, had long brown hair, then had it cut short. He said he had had three brothers and three sisters, one of whom was named Lindsay, and they would play tag together; they also had a black dog with white hair on its chest. The family lived in a white house much bigger than his current one, he said, with multiple toilets and large stacks of boxes placed outside it. He recalled swimming in rock pools, playing with friends on the beach, and sometimes going on holiday with his family. He once mentioned using a black phone and mimed dialing it, suggesting it was a dial phone. He said that he watched planes landing on the beach.

Cameron described no memories of adulthood, apparently remembering being a boy a little older than himself. Nor did he ever mention dying, only that he ‘fell through’ a hole somehow connected with the white house and came into Norma’s ‘tummy’. He said, ‘I was in Barra and now I’m here.’

Investigations

In 2005/6, a TV production company planning to make a reincarnation documentary contacted the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia, where Ian Stevenson, the pioneer of reincarnation studies, was based. Stevenson’s colleague Jim B Tucker agreed to participate. The company advertised for reincarnation cases in Scotland and was contacted by Norma Macauley. A producer interviewed the boy, who was then aged five, and carefully documented his memories. Tucker then flew to Glasgow to meet Cameron and his family. The three then travelled together with a camera crew to Barra (see below).

Many young children with past-life memories are hesitant to talk about them. Cameron was untypical this way, telling them to anyone who would listen. He was very forthcoming when interviewed by Tucker, adding more details: he remembered picking apples, playing with friends in the front garden, and staying away from crabs on the beach to avoid being nipped. He said his father, Shane Robertson, had black spiky hair, and he changed a detail about the car that had fatally hit him, saying it was blue and green. He described the house as one-storey and said that as well as the dog, the family had had an orange cat. The boxes outside the house, he said, contained water and fish. He said that at age four he had fallen out of bed and through the hole leading to his current mother. Tucker wrote a narrative of the case in his 2013 book Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives.3

In 2007, survival researcher and writer Tricia Robertson (no relation) was asked by the Society for Psychical Research to further investigate the case. Accompanied by Archie Roy, she interviewed the Macauley family and associates, videorecording and date-stamping all the interviews. Her case narrative is given in her 2013 book Things You Can Do While You’re Dead!4

Barra Visit

In Barra, the first verification of a statement by Cameron came very soon. The small plane carrying them landed on the island’s beach of Barra, said by the airport authority to be the only one in the world to be used as a runway for scheduled flights. ‘I told you it was true!’ Cameron declares triumphantly in the documentary.

A local historian, Calum MacNeil, placed the past life in the 60s at the earliest, based on Cameron’s description of the dial phone and claim that the house had had three toilets. He could not verify Shane Robertson’s death, though; he knew of no one who had died as Cameron described on Barra, and a search in local records indicated that on the island there had been only one man named Robertson in the 1930s and a Robertson family which had arrived too recently to be the past-life family.

However after checking more carefully, MacNeil found that a Robertson family from the mainland had vacationed on Barra in a house they owned at northern end of the island in the 1960s and 70s. This location gave a view of planes landing on the beach. On approaching the house, which was now unoccupied, Cameron recognized it and the layout seemed familiar to him: he easily found all three bathrooms, as shown in the documentary, and commented on features that had changed.

Tucker returned to the USA but the producers continued the investigation, contacting one member of the Robertson family, Gillian Robertson. She confirmed the existence of the black and white dog in a photograph (shown in the documentary) but knew of no man in the family who had been hit by a car and no child who had died young. Thus the case remains unsolved.

Behavioural Signs

Cameron showed behavioural signs typical of children with strong past-life memories, who often miss their former families and lives, and insist on being taken to former residences. As shown in the documentary, he started to miss his Barra mother so badly that he cried and asked for her instead of Norma to pick him up from nursery school. In the documentary he is shown saying insistently, ‘I have to go to Barra, I have to go to Barra, my family are missing me.’

On visiting the house where he had apparently lived before, Cameron became subdued and clearly sad, and said he missed his Barra mother. However the visit ultimately proved therapeutic. He became more calm about his memories, apparently glad to have the opportunity to validate them.

Interpretations

Tucker maintains that the case is a genuine one, noting that for Cameron himself the memories are absolutely real, affecting him emotionally. Tucker points out that in psychological testing, children claiming past-life memories generally are not unusually fantasy prone or suggestible. Tucker was contacted by several people who noted that in Gaelic, ‘sean’ means ‘old’, making it possible that Cameron’s past-life father was addressed as Sean or Shane even though that was not his real name. Tucker wonders in his account whether the name ‘Robertson’ was an error and the team should have searched harder for a man fatally struck by a car, noting that the historian MacLean was less familiar with the northern part of the island. A last possibility Tucker posits is that Cameron mixed together memories from two past lives, resulting in the errors.

Robertson believes the name Robertson and the house are correct, noting that an album shown by Gillian Robertson in the documentary shows a big black car, verifying Cameron’s memory of that. She points out that Cameron said repeatedly ‘I was part of the family’, which might imply that he was considered or treated as such, rather than being an actual member.

Documentary

The documentary was broadcast on 18 September 2006 on Channel 5 as Episode 1 of the sixth season of the show Extraordinary People, entitled The Boy Who Lived Before.5 On YouTube it can now be seen here or here.

Because Cameron was so open about his memories, family friend Diane Miller and Cameron’s uncle Ian Watson were both able to report his statements. In the documentary, Miller says that Cameron was ‘adamant’ and ‘he said it over and over, so you knew he wasn’t just making it up there and then’. Watson says, ‘Over three years he’s never wavered. If you look at his face, you can tell he believes they’re true.’

Cameron is recorded in the documentary saying many statements including:

• I lived in a white house with my mum and dad and my three brothers and sisters.

• My favourite place in Barra was the beach and I took my dog with me and I played with him and my brothers and sisters too played.

• The planes used to land on the beach.

• At Barra, it’s loads of place to run around but here [Glasgow] is not a lot because the houses are near each other.

• Dialogue with Norma: ‘Will we see your Barra dad?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because he’s dead.’

• My Barra dad got knocked down.

• (His father’s name was) Shane Robertson

• My Barra mom had long hair and she got it cut short.

• (The house had) one level.

• (His father had) black spiky hair and wore shorts.

• (On Barra) I feel happy to be back.

• (Pointing at a house) I know the person who lives there but I can’t remember (their name).

• (Pointing at a structure that seems to be on a tidal flat) It’s hard to get to that place – you might have to swim to get back.

• I recognize the beach.

• I could see the beach when I looked out the window and sometimes my brothers and sisters could go by themselves and I looked out the window to see them playing.

• (The girls slept in one room, the boys in another.)

Criticism

In the documentary, Norma is shown visiting Chris French, editor of The Skeptic magazine, which argues against the genuineness of paranormal phenomena. He tells her that Cameron’s utterances most likely reflect false memories drawn from his imagination inspired by other sources of information such as TV, the internet, or someone else in the family who told him stories about Barra. Norma points out that Cameron and Martin were raised almost as twins and exposed to the same sources of information, but only Cameron talks about a past life.

Norma is next shown visiting educational psychologist Karen Majors, who explains the differences between typical imaginary play in children and Cameron’s experiences. With imaginary play, the children are aware that it is just pretend and have control over it, she says, whereas Cameron ‘sounds like he does not direct what’s going on there at all’.

KM Wehrstein

Literature

IMDb (n.d.). Extraordinary People: The Boy Who Lived Before: Full Cast and Crew. [Webpage.]

Robertson, T. (2013). Things You Can Do While You’re Dead! Guildford, UK: White Crow Books.

Tucker, J.B. (2013). Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.

Endnotes

• 1.Robertson (2013), 107.

• 2.Tucker (2013), 47. All information in this article is drawn from either this source or Tucker (2013) except where otherwise noted.

• 3.Tucker (2013), 43-58.

• 4.Robertson (2013), 107-14.

• 5.IMDb (n.d.)

Source: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/cameron-macauley-reincarnation-case