Notes

hen I was your age, I changed your diaper,” said the dark-haired boy to his father. Ron looked down at his smiling son, who had not yet turned two. He thought it was a very strange thing to say, but he figured he had misheard him.

But as baby Sam made similar remarks over the next few months, Ron and his wife, Cathy, gradually pieced together an odd story: Sam believed that he was his deceased grandfather, Ron’s late father, who had returned to his family. More intrigued than alarmed, Ron and Cathy asked Sam, “How did you come back?”

“I just went whoosh and came out the portal,” he responded.

Although Sam was a precocious child—he’d been speaking in full sentences from the age of 18 months—his parents were stunned to hear him use a word like portal, and they encouraged him to say more. They asked Sam if he’d had any siblings, and he replied that he’d had a sister who “turned into a fish.”

“Who turned her into a fish?”

“Some bad guys. She died.”

Eerily enough, Sam’s grandfather had a sister who had been murdered 60 years earlier; her body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. Ron and Cathy then gently asked Sam, “Do you know how you died?”

Sam jerked back and slapped the top of his head as if in pain. One year before Sam was born, his grandfather had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.