Titus Rivas
Senior Registered
Journalist CHRIS MOONEY has written the following article in the Evening News of January 22nd 2004:
Does anyone have more information about this interesting case?
Titus
A SWEDISH man has stunned experts by claiming to have lived as boy in Dunbar 150 years ago. Jesper Bood, 29, was able to describe the town in astonishing detail after being hypnotised for a documentary about reincarnation, despite never having been to Scotland.
On a visit to the East Lothian town this week, he left locals open-mouthed with his intimate knowledge of a town he said he has never visited before.
He believes he once lived as an eight-year-old Dunbar schoolboy in 1860, and even drew a map of the town blind to prove it.
Local historian Roy Pugh, who has written a book on the history of the town, said he experienced a "shiver in the spine" when he met Mr Bood.
Mr Pugh, who had been invited to act as a researcher and adviser to TV crews from Swedish programme makers Strix Television AB, said: "It basically comes down to whether or not you believe in reincarnation.
"I have to be honest and say I was completely sceptical about the whole idea. But in two days when I walked about Dunbar with this young man,
I now know what it means to experience a shiver in the spine and a curious feeling in the hairs on the back of my neck."
Mr Pugh said he was convinced of Mr Bood’s sincerity, adding that some of the information he had to hand would be extremely difficult to find, particularly for someone living in Sweden.
Under hypnosis in Stockholm, Mr Bood said he’d been born John Smith in Dunbar in 1852, that he’d been a fisherman, and gave his parents’ names as blacksmith John Smith senior and Mary Craig. Local census and registrar records confirm these names really existed.
A later census gives the name of John Smith, aged 30, a fisherman married to Elizabeth. Mr Bood had called his wife Betsy or Bessie while hypnotised. The family lived in Public Road, Gateside, on what is now the A1 between West Barns and East Linton. The community no longer exists, but historical records show a blacksmith’s forge once operated there.
Mr Bood spoke of taking a 30-minute walk to school in the 19th century. Describing Dunbar Parish Church, he said: "It was the first building I saw when I went to school every morning. I knew it was close to the sea and that I could see it from my classroom window, it being diagonally opposite the school."
Mr Pugh said this, and more from Mr Bood, was an accurate description of the church and the former Woodbush School, which was knocked down after it closed in the 1950s.
He also described in detail the site of a fisherman’s tavern in Lamer Street, which had a green sign hanging from the door. The site he identified on his visit was The Creel Restaurant, which was once the Jersey Arms, a well-known fisherman’s haunt.
Archie Lawrie, secretary of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research, said he had come across similar cases before.
He said other explanations for a person having visions of a place they had never been to included a harmless form of possession of a human by spirits, a theory he said he believes in rather than reincarnation. "Reincarnation worries me because it says that you get another crack at life. I doubt this is the case and have personally not seen any cases I can consider to back this kind of thing up."
Does anyone have more information about this interesting case?
Titus