When Lee was 2 ½ years old, he started talking about his “other mommy.” When he was 3 ½, he started becoming upset because he couldn’t go to his “other house,” and he needed to get back to work.
He would argue that his middle name was Coe, though it wasn’t, and that his birthday was June 26, though it was actually June 21. He said he had a daughter named Jennifer. He developed an obsession with Hollywood, and he said that’s where he lived.
His parents realized he may be talking about a past life. They asked him what he did in Hollywood. He said he made movies. They asked if he acted, and he said he didn’t, he wrote movies. They started naming off movies, and about the 5th or 6th movie they named was “Gone With the Wind.”
“Yes, that was my movie. I wrote that movie,” he said.
As they were looking up “Gone With the Wind” on the Internet to see who wrote the screenplay and if the information matched up, Lee’s sister asked him how old he was when he died. He said he was 48 years old.
When Lee’s parents pulled up the information they were looking for online, they were amazed to see the correlations. Sidney Coe Howard wrote the screenplay for “Gone With the Wind.” The middle name Coe matched what Lee had said. Howard died at the age of 48, the age Lee said he died. Howard had a daughter named Jennifer, as Lee had said, and Howard’s birthday was June 26, again as Lee had said.
Dr. Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia investigated this story, visiting this family in their home town of about 2,000 in the American Midwest, and he wrote about it in his book, “Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives.” Dr. Tucker is a prominent reincarnation researcher, having worked with the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, also at the University of Virginia, who gathered thousands of cases of children who report memories of past lives. In many cases, these memories were verified to some degree.
While this is not the strongest case in the Stevenson-Tucker dossier, since Lee could not provide any information that could be verified with certainty that was not readily available online, Dr. Tucker noted: “The case as a whole remains somewhat unresolved but intriguing nonetheless.”
