Some of the strangest things children say are the things adults have the hardest time explaining.
Young children sometimes describe memories, places, people, or experiences that their parents don’t remember ever teaching them about. Most of the time, there is an ordinary explanation.
But every once in a while, a child says something so specific and unexpected that the adults around them are left wondering where it came from.
Two such stories were shared by parents in a collection of children’s reported past-life memories.
One involved a little boy who talked about drowning in a flood.
The other involved a two-year-old girl who pointed at television footage of the September 11 attacks and said something that left her family stunned.
The Five-Year-Old Who Said He Had Drowned in a Flood
The first story came from a mother named Sally Gustafson, who described something her five-year-old son once told her.
According to her account, the boy casually said that when he was old, he had drowned in a flood.
For a parent, hearing a child talk about death in such a matter-of-fact way would already be unsettling.
But then he added something even stranger.
He said:
“But this time I’m learning how to swim and things will be different.”
The statement suggested to him that he had somehow experienced the same life before — and that this time he was determined to change the ending.
Then, according to his mother, he went swimming.
That was the entirety of the anecdote as originally submitted. There was no identified previous person, no location discovered later, and no investigation that established who the child supposedly had been.
It was simply a strange statement from a five-year-old that his mother remembered strongly enough to share.
And perhaps the strangest part was the confidence with which he seemed to say it.
He wasn’t describing a nightmare.
He wasn’t explaining something he’d seen on television.
He simply spoke as though drowning in a flood belonged to a memory from another time.
The story was later included in BuzzFeed’s collection of reader-submitted accounts of children who appeared to describe memories of past lives.
Then There Was the Two-Year-Old Watching the News
The second story involved an even younger child.
A two-year-old girl was watching television with her family when footage of the September 11 attacks appeared on the screen.
The television was showing images of the collapsing Twin Towers.
According to the family member who submitted the story, the little girl stared intently at the screen.
Then she pointed toward the buildings.
And she said:
“I die.”
That was all.
She was only two years old.
According to the account, the family had not been discussing the attacks with her beforehand. She simply reacted to what she was seeing on television.
For the adults watching, the words were disturbing because the child appeared to connect herself with the people in the images.
But there was no way for the family to know exactly what she meant.
A two-year-old’s understanding of television, death, and what she was seeing would naturally be very different from an adult’s.
The story therefore remained exactly what it was: a startling statement reported by a family member.
It was later published as one of the reader-submitted accounts in the same BuzzFeed collection.
Why Stories Like These Stay With People
Neither story proves that either child actually remembered a previous life.
And that’s an important distinction.
The accounts were shared as personal experiences, not as scientifically established cases of reincarnation. The original collection itself presented them as stories submitted by members of the BuzzFeed Community.
Still, the stories are memorable because of how naturally the children appeared to make their statements.
The five-year-old didn’t simply say that he was afraid of drowning. He spoke about having drowned before and then described learning to swim so that “this time” things would be different.
The two-year-old didn’t merely react to frightening images on television. According to her relative, she pointed at the collapsing towers and said, “I die.”
Whether these statements came from imagination, something the children had encountered previously, an unusual interpretation of what they were watching, or something their families could never explain, the moments clearly stayed with the people who heard them.
And perhaps that’s what makes childhood memories so fascinating.
Sometimes a child says one simple sentence, everyone in the room goes quiet, and years later the adults are still wondering what, exactly, the child meant.
