Original subtitles

She was screaming, I have to go back!

He said, I chose you to be my mom again.

She can remember descending the staircase looking down

at the man, and he's waiting for her.

He just matter-of-factly turned to me and said, Mommy,

my brother died in the army.

How he knows even about death at the time, it was scary.

He would just start screaming, and he would not stop.

I couldn't believe my own daughter had accused me

of kidnapping her.

Is there something going on that I don't know about?

I felt helpless.

It was distressing that she was so adamant

about this place.

He might be having a past life memory.

Indianapolis is a big city.

There's a good mixture of people around.

It's a big melting pot.

We have the Children's Museum.

We have a lot of parks around.

It's a good place to raise a family.

I'm originally from Senegal, West Africa.

I come here after I retire from the army.

Just come for a better life.

When I was pregnant with Elhadji, he was my firstborn,

but he was my second pregnancy.

When he made it to term, I was relieved.

And we got to take him home the next day.

I name Elhadji after a good friend of mine.

Elhadji is an Islamic name.

It's a title for the pilgrim after they come from the Mecca.

More often than not, I would find him just

in his own little world.

If you called out his name, he would not respond at all.

When Elhadji was in the zone, nothing could pull him out

of it.

If I tried to get him to focus, he would just have a fit.

He would just start screaming at the top of his lungs,

and he would not stop.

I just figured that he was thinking about little boy

stuff, because what could possibly be in his little world

other than cartoons and games?

Elhadji was born with knowledge.

He was born different than other kids.

Elhadji can do calculations in his head

that most people need a calculator for.

At the end of his last school year came the multiplication

paper, and the teacher just wanted to know what their skill

level is.

And so I couldn't help him at all really.

I explained what multiplication was.

He got the concept pretty quick.

He totally did that whole worksheet

in like less than a minute.

He just whizzed through it.

I didn't help him at all.

And I was like, wow, how did he do that?

So I asked him, I said, how do you--

how did you do that so fast?

And he said, I used to work on the old computers.

I was like, what are you talking about?

I thought, well, maybe he did work on an old IBM computer

in school or something.

So I asked his teacher.

She said, no, we don't have any computers like that.

So I had him describe it, and he said that they were tan

and they were huge computers.

They were big.

That's all I could get out of him.

I just didn't know what to think.

Elhadji is very attracted to military objects, toys, themes.

Elhadji would build things out of Tinkertoys and blocks,

but he particularly likes to build guns and machine guns

and pretends like they're machine guns

and make machine gun noises.

We're not a gun family at all.

We don't own a gun.

So I didn't know where it was coming from.

He started talking a lot about his brother,

and I attributed it to the fact that he was talking

about his half-brother that was still, at that time,

living in Senegal.

At the time, I have a son who was still back in Africa.

That's what I was thinking he was talking about.

I would show pictures to Elhadji about his brother.

Yeah, you do have a brother.

We would look at the pictures, but he would

talk about some other brother.

I'm like, what other brother?

He told me that his brother was 19 years old.

His brother in Senegal at that time was 11 or 12.

One time, Elhadji and I were playing,

and he just matter-of-factly turned to me and said,

Mommy, my brother died in the army.

This brother was shot.

That is when I realized that he must not be talking

about his half-brother.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

Central Georgia is in the heart of the Bible Belt

and is quite religious.

Centerville is a small town in the center of Georgia.

It has a small town charm to it.

Most people know each other, and they're quite friendly.

My name is Medley, and I am a stay-at-home mom.

Riley was born on March 12, 1996.

After a pretty normal pregnancy, I had a difficult delivery

with Riley.

During delivery, Riley's head was fused.

The bones were fused so they didn't lap over.

When they're fused together, it's hard for her

to come down the birth canal.

It was a painful delivery.

After I gave birth, I was incapable of doing anything

for a long time.

I still have problems to this day.

Riley was born with gray hair, which was really

surprising to all of us.

The doctors could not explain it.

At the age of six months, Riley's hair

began to change color.

That was a relief that she had color to her hair.

My name is Kimberly.

I've known Riley since she was two years old.

I'm a friend of the family.

Riley had a tendency to act older than what she really was.

She was very articulate.

Her speech patterns were more of an adult as

opposed to a child her age.

And when we went to the grocery store,

at school, anywhere, she could start talking to people

in these full conversations, and they'd

be shocked at such a small child talking to them.

Riley was the type of child that you never knew what she was

going to do next or say next.

And then what happened confused me.

When the movie "Titanic" came out,

Riley was around three years of age.

And her stepsisters were discussing the movie.

Riley seemed to know a lot about the "Titanic."

Riley had began telling them about what had occurred.

She was not talking about the movie stars of the day.

She was talking about the real "Titanic."

She was talking about people coming back to the docks

and people looking to find out if their family's names were

on the roster of the dead.

It was shocking that she knew any of this.

Riley had never seen the movie "Titanic."

I don't even believe to this day she's seen "Titanic."

She was always advanced for her age,

but one of the most shocking moments

occurred when she was three.

Riley's stepsister took her outside to see a full moon,

and Riley began singing a song.

And I've never heard this song before.

It's never been on our television.

I asked at school, and no one could recall this song.

I see the moon.

The moon sees me.

Please, Mr. Moon, don't you tell on me.

The song had an air of age to it,

like it come from another time period.

Hey, hey.

Trying to locate this song, for several years,

I looked and I could not find it.

Hey, hey.

And then my son Noah found the song.

The song was from the early '30s.

The name was "Please, Mr. Moon, Don't Tell On Me"

by Hartman's Heart Breakers.

I knew this was the song because I could remember the tune.

Then when we heard the rest of it, I was in shock.

But it feels so good.

The song has a lot of sexual innuendo.

It was shocking.

Part of the lyrics in the song say, "I want a daddy,

I want his bed."

And those type of lyrics are not something

you're going to hear in "Ring Around the Rosies."

It's not something a three-year-old would be exposed

to at the time.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

I wanted to put it away and just forget this was occurring.

Why would my toddler know this song?

It didn't make any sense that my daughter was

talking about this "Titanic" and singing a song from the '30s.

But nothing could have prepared us for what went wrong

on our next family vacation.

From the moment Elhadji could speak, he talked about an older

brother.

I didn't really think much of it,

but then he started saying other weird things.

One time Elhadji and I were playing,

and he just matter-of-factly turned to me and said,

Mommy, my brother died in the army.

He was shot.

Up until that time, I had been reassuring him about his older

brother in Senegal.

But this was something else.

This was something new.

I never have a son who could just got killed.

And I started, like, just thinking about how he knows

even about death at the time.

It was-- it was just so scary and confusing.

He seemed to be concerned, and we

would have to explain to him, honey,

we don't know this brother you're talking about.

Your brother that you have is in Senegal, and he's alive

and he's fine.

And he would say, no.

No.

He wanted me to tell him what happened,

but I had to explain to him I don't know what happened.

This was all before he started daycare.

He wasn't watching anything other than these two kids'

shows that he was obsessed with, and that's all he ever watched.

So it was scary to hear him say things like that,

and I didn't know where he was picking it up, you know,

and who from.

And I felt helpless.

I was in the army, and I went to some wars.

I don't know how a two-year-old going to be starting talking

about war.

And I never told him about me being in the army.

I don't know where he really got it.

He was mentioning people getting killed.

I just played it off and hoped that he would forget about it

and change the subject.

Between ages two and four, he started with something else.

And he just matter-of-factly said, well, you know,

God makes us learn lessons in life.

If we don't learn them, we have to--

to go again.

He has very intricate details about this whole process

he says everyone goes through with God.

We come from a mixed family.

And I'm American, and my husband is Senegalese.

His religion is Muslim, and so is mine.

We have taught our children basic Muslim beliefs.

What Elhadji was saying that we have to choose our families

again and going through a process with God

to see if we learned our lessons or not, and that determining

that we go to live again or not, that's

not part of the Muslim belief.

I didn't know where this was coming from at all.

It was just kind of shocking, like, wow, he's actually

thinking about these deep concepts.

I want him to be a believer like me, believe in God,

believe in life and death.

I started to wonder what was happening to my little boy.

My daughter Riley was born with gray hair,

knew about the "Titanic," and also sang a burlesque song

from the 1930s by heart.

I wondered where was this all coming from.

And time went on and life was pretty normal.

When Riley was around three, we decided to take a trip

to Jekyll Island.

Jekyll Island is located off the coast of Georgia.

It's a small island with a lot of nature and animals

around it, but it also has a lot of history.

In the 1920s, in the turn of the century, people from up north,

they had many vacation homes that are on Jekyll Island.

The first morning of our vacation,

we went to a natural beach.

We were walking down the beach, and Riley made an announcement

that she'd been here before.

And I told her, you have never been here, honey--

thinking that maybe she'd been mistaken about it.

And she says, no, Mama, it's not when you were alive,

not when you were here.

She says, you weren't my mama then.

I was confused about what she was saying to me.

It was hard to hear her say, you're not my mom.

She was very adamant in saying that she had been to that beach

before.

She's never been to Jekyll prior to that moment.

After lunch, we decided that we were going

to take a historic tour, and the first house that we stopped at

was the Rockefeller Cottage.

Riley was running up the steps.

And she ran inside, and there are these velvet ropes.

She tried to go through them, which the tour director stopped

her.

She was so happy to be in there, and she's just running around

and I'm trying to get ahold of her to calm her down.

Riley's never been that happy or excited to be someplace,

and she never acted like that anywhere else.

She was telling us, we sat over here for reading,

we ate over here.

And then she started saying, this isn't the right furniture,

that the plateware wasn't their plateware.

The tour director started laughing and he says,

has she been on the tour before?

And I said, she's never been here before.

How does Riley know that this is not the correct dinnerware?

A three-year-old would normally not even think

about something like that.

When we were trying to get her out,

at first like, come on, it's time to go.

She was like, I'm not leaving.

This is where I belong.

She was just pulling and refusing to come.

Finally, I ended up having to pick her up physically

and carry her out.

No!

No!

And she immediately says, I have to go back there.

That's my home.

That's where I lived.

That's where my real family is.

I was embarrassed, first of all, that she was acting this way,

thinking that she's never had a fit before.

And I was like, I have to stop this, I have to calm her down.

And so I forbid the mention of Jekyll Island in the home.

When Riley came back from Jekyll Island,

she wasn't playing with the children.

You could tell that she was upset.

After she went back to preschool,

I was stopped in the hall by her teacher.

And she told me, was there something going on?

Because Riley had been talking about being taken away

from her real home and her real family.

She had the teacher convinced something was wrong

and something was going on.

I couldn't believe my own daughter

had accused me of kidnapping her.

On a trip to Jekyll Island, Georgia,

my three-year-old daughter was convinced that the Rockefeller

Cottage was her home.

She refused to leave and told her preschool teacher

that I had kidnapped her from her real family.

Well, I was shocked.

I can't believe Riley is telling everybody that we took her away

from her real home, her family.

And I'm having to go around explaining to people when it

started and when it happened.

I never thought I would have to defend that my daughter

Riley was my daughter.

I was starting to get really worried.

Medley is a very loving mother, very attentive mother.

It never crossed my mind that something

would be wrong at home because they were just

that kind of a family.

My belief is that time is not a straight line,

but it's a circle and that we all come around.

The first thing that popped into my mind

was, did she have a past life coming back to her?

It just was very confusing that this is happening

at our house with our child, and she is really

having a hard time.

So as a mother, you're trying to rationalize it.

But I kind of have a strict religious upbringing.

It was hard for me to believe that my child was going

through this.

When I suggested to Medley that it could have been

a past life, the thought had never crossed her mind

that that could possibly have been what the problem was.

That was the first moment when I considered

that this was some type of reincarnation or a past life

experience.

Couldn't understand where it came from,

but I'm starting to believe this is happening.

But I just still want to just put it in a box and forget it.

Things started taking a scary turn at this point.

Riley started telling her stepsisters

that there was a man appearing.

She said she'd see him materialize in the bedroom,

and sometimes he would walk from the closet to the door.

And I couldn't see him, they couldn't see him.

But she firmly believed he was there.

She wasn't frightened of the figure.

This was somebody she felt like she had known before.

The only thing she was frightened of was the dreams.

She described to me a wooden staircase.

She can remember descending the staircase looking down

at the man, and he's waiting for her.

She said she didn't understand the meaning of the dream.

She just felt like she needed to get

to the bottom of the staircase to this person.

The dream just ends right there.

When Riley had woke up from her dream, she had, like, anxiety.

She would be streaming tears and shaking

and just didn't want to talk.

I wondered what was happening to my child.

I couldn't help her, and I didn't know what was going on.

My son Elhadji talked about an older brother who was killed.

He was so upset when he would speak of this,

I didn't know how to help him.

Then he described talking to God in heaven.

Things were quiet for a while, and then something else

happened.

Elhadji started telling me about dreaming.

It started to get a little more intense when he was older.

He would scream in the middle of the night,

and I would have to come in his room and console him.

He would say that he dreamed about war.

He going to be talking about the killings and all

those people coming to him.

I'm trying to explain to him not to believe in whatever he's

seeing.

He's so scared sometimes even he couldn't get up

in the middle of the night.

He has to have the lights on all the time

or the TV on all the time.

He would say that he dreamt about war,

and he would still say things about his brother.

I just don't want him to believe in that.

And I always explain to him, no, you don't have a brother.

You are Elhadji.

You are my son.

But sometimes he is just saying it

like he know what he is saying.

All of the details that Elhadji

has been saying throughout the years have been consistent.

They haven't changed at all.

I started to wonder, is he remembering a past life?

My brother died when he was 19.

I have dreams about, like, what happened with my brother.

I was trying to get answers, a piece--

more pieces to the puzzle.

So I asked him, is there anything else

that you remember?

He told me that he thinks he was 45 when he died.

And he says, well, I do remember these numbers--

1-9-5-9.

When I put it together in my head, I said, that's a year.

I thought, well, it could be his year of birth.

If he was really born in 1959, and like he says,

died at age 45, that would have meant he would have died

around 2004, 2005.

Elhadji was born in 2006.

I researched war and the 1959 that he was talking about,

and Vietnam War era popped up.

1959 was the start of the Vietnam War.

If who Elhadji was was born in 1959

and he was around four or five when his brother supposedly

died, that would have meant his brother was fighting in a war

during the Vietnam War era.

There were many men that died at 19 in the Vietnam War.

That was the moment when I realized

he must be telling about something that did really

happen.

My son Elhadji was constantly talking about his brother being

shot in the war at age 19.

I started to wonder if he was remembering a past life

and if his brother had died in the Vietnam War.

It was a really emotional time for us.

I said, if you really can remember that your brother did

go to the military, do you remember where

you lived, about your life?

And he said, yeah, I lived in Canada.

Just like that.

All I know is that US men fled to Canada in order

to not go to Vietnam.

It just wasn't adding up.

I lived in Canada, but I died when I was 45.

I remember how I died.

When he told me that, I thought maybe

it wasn't the Vietnam War because Canada didn't fight

in it.

But then I thought, let me just do some research.

I found out that although Canada was neutral in the war,

about 30,000 Canadians actually joined the war in the Vietnam.

Of those men, 110 died and seven were missing in action.

It all started coming together real quick.

And that was a big moment for me, that--

to find out that what he was actually saying was true.

Monica just think maybe Elhadji was here

in another life and just come back,

but my religion does not allow me to believe in that.

I do believe that one of those 110 men

were probably Elhadji's brother that were killed in action.

It makes me sad when I think about him dying.

Like, I still think about him.

There must have been some trauma in his other life

for him to carry it over to this life, remember it.

It must have went deep.

Maybe he just never got to say goodbye.

You have to live a lot of lives before you get it right.

Elhadji scare me right now.

As a father, I want him to have a normal life.

He's not going to be just scared all his life thinking

about those things.

I want to take him to a place where these fallen soldiers

have-- are honored and so they aren't forgotten.

Maybe seeing that they aren't forgotten

will allow him to move on.

I'm really hoping that I can finally help him find closure.

From the time my daughter Riley

was a toddler, she's been saying and doing

things we could not explain.

She had an intense connection to Jekyll Island and a memory

of who she was when she lived there.

I've made a conscious effort not to take her back to Jekyll

Island because I thought that it would cause problems.

She started having nightmares.

The way Riley described the dreams to me,

I knew she was seeing something.

I was frustrated.

It was something we just couldn't understand.

My name is Riley, and I'm 18 years old.

I've been having this dream since I went to Jekyll Island

of me descending down to this man with a little hat on.

Then my dream just kind of stops,

and I never make it to the guy.

I think it means in my past life I died in a situation

where I didn't get to finish something with this guy.

Or I had an ending that wasn't the way it was supposed to go.

Maybe it's because she hasn't completed something.

It's so frustrating to her, and she just feels

like she needs to finish it.

It frightens me because I'm wondering if something

traumatic happened.

Did somebody hurt her in a past life?

It was something we just couldn't understand.

If she did have a past life, who was she?

When she was older, and she was like,

why didn't you help me find the answers?

And then I was like, oh, I should have done that.

Because I thought I was protecting her.

I hope I didn't miss a chance for her to get the answers.

And that bothers me because she really wants the answers.

And I hope it's not too late to find them.

Riley is now 18 years old.

She just graduated from high school.

And she really wants to go back to Jekyll Island,

and we have planned a trip to return to Jekyll Island.

When I speak about Jekyll Island

or talk about it or even bring up the dreams

and stuff that I had, I tend to get upset.

Sometimes I'll cry.

Sometimes it'll make me happy.

It just changes emotions within.

But I know that I need to go on discovering what happened.

I'm hoping that learning more about it will help me move on.

I'm nervous about just finding out

something I don't want to find out, it changing me somehow.

There's multiple things that can happen, and it scares me.

I hope this trip is not going to be a big mistake.

My son Elhadji was constantly talking about his brother being

shot in the war at age 19.

And he says, well, I do remember these numbers--

1-9-5-9.

I researched war.

And if who Elhadji was was born in 1959,

that would have meant his brother

was fighting in Vietnam War era.

My kids, I love them, and I want them to have normal life.

Keep out of fountain.

We're going to go down this way because I have something

to show you.

Right now, we're at the Veterans Memorial Park.

I really wanted to take Elhadji here so that we can kind

of acknowledge the facts that he did have this past life.

I'm not denying it in any way.

That way, he can move on and have some closure with it.

There's a special reason we could be here today.

We're here to honor your brother that was a soldier.

Well, soldiers actually fought in different wars,

and we're going to go to the Vietnam Memorial.

I don't want him to feel sad anymore.

I want him to be Elhadji.

I want him to know who he is in this life,

that he has a purpose in this life and be Elhadji, be my son.

Look at all these names.

Dang.

These are all names of people that died serving their country

in the Vietnam War.

Someone left something here special.

I know your brother's name is not on this list, probably.

I guess it could be.

You never know.

There's years up here--

1962, '63, '64--

No, it was '63.

You think it was?

It was '63.

- When he died? - Uh-huh.

You can say goodbye to your brother.

No.

Why not, buddy?

You don't want to focus on living this life?

I kind of do, but not too much.

This is a memorial and it's a place to remember.

So we're never going to forget him.

You can say goodbye to your brother

so that you can focus on this life.

It's OK to let go now because that was the last life,

and this is this life.

Understand that?

Mm-hmm.

I understand.

Good.

You can just say goodbye.

And when we put our soldier down,

I hope that gives you some peace.

This is about Elhadji having closure with his life.

I don't want him to forget his past life at all,

but I need him to focus on the now.

And basically the whole point of what we did

today was to remember that he did have a brother,

but he doesn't have to be sad about it anymore.

He can move on.

We are at Jekyll Island, and we

are trying to help Riley come to terms with what has been

bothering her over the years.

As we were pulling into the compound,

I started getting really nervous about how

she was going to react and how this was going to be for her.

This trip, I hope, will help her.

Maybe it'll help me feel better about not asking her questions

in the past or talking about it.

I'm feeling different emotions.

You all right?

Excited and nervous.

You all right?

Yeah.

All my life I'd had this feeling that there was something

missing from me.

I'm hoping by coming back to Jekyll Island

that I will find what was missing

or finish something that will cause me to feel 100%.

I'm hoping to find a name and find out more about my memories

and maybe connect to my past life

in the way I did when I was younger.

- Hello. - Hi.

Hi, I'm Riley.

Riley, I'm John Hunter.

I'm Medley.

Medley, nice to meet y'all.

Good to have you back on Jekyll.

Yeah.

It's great to be back.

Let's take a stroll and take a look inside

and I'll show you a little bit of the cottage.

Come on in.

That hat over there is kind of like the one in my dream

from the bottom, but I think it was shorter.

Well, if it was shorter, it may have been a--

a bowler hat, which would've been rounded a little bit more.

I do definitely feel like I have lived here before.

Oh, I really like those beds.

I even had the random memory of sleeping in that bed

and waking up in it.

That's the ones that we know have been in the house.

Yeah, I definitely feel like a lot of the furniture

is in the wrong place.

It seemed like I was getting so many different vibes

from different rooms.

I'm just like-- I'm happy to be here.

And at the same time, for some reason,

it's like this feeling of like just being mad.

We're at Jekyll Island, and I do feel like I belong here.

It seemed like I was getting so many different vibes

from different rooms.

I'm just like-- I'm happy to be here.

And at the same time, for some reason,

it's like this feeling of like just being

mad that the house has been, like,

moved around type of feeling.

It's really weird.

Right now, I can't even process everything because it's just

so much at one time.

You want to go into the--

Yeah, we'll go into the next one.

OK.

Wow.

I think these are actually the stairs from the dream because

of the stained glass window and the shape of this.

Yeah.

The fact that I got to see the staircase

really was the emotional part.

That was such a major detail.

Always looking down and seeing the rug

like almost a pathway to the guy at the end.

Can you do it?

Can you go up?

Yeah, I think I can.

OK.

It confirmed also the fact that something probably

happened on the staircase.

Yeah, the railing feels the same in the dream.

Possibly my death or possibly I fell and got hurt.

Wow.

And I definitely feel like I didn't get

to finish the staircase ever.

I'm so happy I found it.

I'm really looking forward to sitting down and getting

to look at pictures and names, and I'm

nervous and excited about if he's going to have something

for me that pops out.

The peak of the Jekyll Island Club was during really

the '20s and early '30s.

The home was purchased by William Rockefeller.

His idea really was to have a place that was big enough

to bring all of his-- his children or grandchildren

at one time.

And so from 1917 until his death in 1922,

the family came pretty much every winter.

Well, I've always been drawn to the '20s style clothing

as well.

Maybe that's where it's coming from.

And the song was late '20s, early '30s.

Things started to make sense--

why she knew the "Titanic" sunk and why she knew a risque song

from the 1930s.

So we have a few things that we gathered up.

These are some of the members of the Rockefeller family, William

and Almira Rockefeller.

Wow.

This photograph, we have William Rockefeller again

with his daughter Emma.

She seemed very familiar to me.

Just the name Emma caught me.

Yeah, this hat looks like the one

that the guy was wearing at the bottom of the stairs.

It's very familiar.

Then, of course, they had some of their grandchildren here.

In this photo here, we have Geraldine.

She was a granddaughter of William Rockefeller, daughter

of Emma, who you saw in the picture.

Her face looks really familiar to me.

There is a gut instinct about Geraldine.

The name even sounded kind of familiar, too.

I'm thinking she had a strong influence in my past life.

And Emma Rockefeller is actually Geraldine's mother,

which was very interesting to me because both of them

stood out to me.

Do you know if anybody died in this house?

Yes, actually.

Almira Rockefeller passed away here in 1920,

and William passed away two years later.

So the family almost abandoned the house after that point

and then sold it.

Wow.

The fact that I got these names and got

to see pictures of them, I feel more connected now.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this for me.

I feel like it helped very much.

It was nice meeting you.

Nice meeting you.

The fact that I was able to finish going down the stairs

was a really big thing to me because maybe possibly

that was what I was supposed to complete in my past life.

And now that I have, it feels like a huge burden

has been lifted.

Initially, I felt nervous about bringing her back

to Jekyll Island.

But at the end of the day, I feel

like it was a good experience.

I feel that I have closure now about my past life

and that I'm going to be able to move on when I get back home.

I hope that my dream will be complete

and I'll get to go down the stairs

or see what happened while going downstairs.