On the evening of December 23, 1973, Lionel Ennoyer went out on his motorcycle with a friend riding pillion behind him. Other friends followed in a car. It was around nine o’clock in the evening, and Lionel was home in France for the Christmas holidays, released temporarily from his military posting. Somehow the ride went wrong.

Lionel crashed, struck his head on a roadside bench, and died almost instantly. His passenger escaped with a broken arm. The only witnesses were the friends in the following car, and their accounts of what happened did not agree. Lionel’s mother, Yvonne, and the family came to believe that the driver of that car had been playfully crowding Lionel’s motorcycle, forcing him onto the sidewalk, where he lost control and was thrown headfirst into the bench.

Lionel was twenty years old. He had been born in Chelles, France, on August 22, 1953, the youngest child of Francis and Yvonne Ennoyer, and the younger brother of two sisters, Viviane and Lydia. His childhood had been ordinary, though marked by high energy that bordered on restlessness. His adventurousness and love of risk-taking led his parents to send him to boarding school in his middle childhood years, but after two years they missed him enough to bring him home to finish as a day student.

He was more sociable than studious and did not pass the baccalaureate, the examination required in France for entry into higher education. Instead he trained as an electrician. At twenty he was called up for his year of compulsory military service and chose to serve with the Chasseurs Alpins so he could spend his time in the mountains. He had many friends and often chose their company over his family’s, once turning down a trip to the United States with his parents to attend a summer camp instead.

He progressed through bicycles, then mopeds, then finally motorcycles. He was known above all for two traits: generosity, often lending or giving away his possessions and money to friends, and a love of sport, including skating, skiing, tennis, swimming, shooting, and cycling. Lionel’s death left his mother in inconsolable grief. Yvonne held a belief in reincarnation, and she found some relief in hoping that her son would be reborn as a child of her daughter Viviane.

Viviane had married an Algerian man, Patrick Gejou, and the couple had been married for five years without children. After Lionel’s death, Viviane’s wish for a child grew stronger, and she became pregnant. Nadjeschda Gejou was born in Neuilly-sur-Marne, France, on December 30, 1974, just over a year after her uncle’s death. A younger brother, Jarris, followed in 1979.

The couple divorced in 1989. Nadège, as she was called, began speaking clearly at around two years old, and soon after began making statements that appeared to reference the life of her maternal uncle Lionel. Yvonne started to notice unusual traits in her granddaughter. In October 1978 she wrote to a friend, Isolde Bisani, describing what she had observed.

Isolde Bisani forwarded the letter to a well-known psychiatrist, Professor Ian Stevenson, who met Yvonne in Paris for a long interview on November 22, 1979. The two corresponded afterwards, with Yvonne sending additional reports on Nadège’s statements and behavior as they occurred. On March 12, 1981, Stevenson again met Yvonne, along with her husband Francis and Nadège’s mother Viviane. Nadège was present at this meeting but said little.

In effect, Yvonne and her daughter Viviane were the only informants for the case. Stevenson continued corresponding with the family between 1981 and 1998, meeting them again in 1984 and 1993. The latter meeting was held at lunch, with Nadège present. In October 1998 he hoped to meet Yvonne again in Paris, but she was unwell, and he instead sent a small number of follow-up questions by mail.

Nadège made twelve statements referencing the previous life between the ages of two and roughly nine and a half, with most concentrated between ages three and five. She first spoke spontaneously about Lionel’s accident as though it had happened to her, saying a friend had pushed her and the motorcycle had fallen onto a bench. She did not specify where she had been injured. She returned to this topic periodically, appearing each time to relive the event.

At about three and a half, when shown a photograph of Lionel and told it was of Yoyo, his family nickname, she replied, “No, it is of Nana,” her own pet name for herself at the time. She repeated this on a later occasion. At about four, watching television with her grandmother, a segment showed the passage Jouffroy, a covered shopping arcade in Paris, and Nadège said, “That is near where Mama works. ” Viviane denied having told her this, and Yvonne recalled that Lionel and Viviane had often met at that arcade, which was also near Viviane’s workplace.

Also at four, when Yvonne opened a foldaway bed of Lionel’s that had remained closed since his death, Nadège said, “I slept there when I was small. ” Told she never had, she replied, “Before I became small. ”

At about four and a half, Nadège remarked, “When I was Lionel, I used to buy caramel bars,” and then asked her grandmother what caramel bars were, apparently surprised at her own words. These were caramel stick candies Lionel had been fond of, and Yvonne had never bought them for Nadège.

She followed this by saying she used to buy black things with white candy inside for her mother, matching Yvonne’s fondness for black licorice rolls with white centers, a candy Nadège herself disliked. At around the same age, when her six-year-old cousin found plush toy monkeys belonging to Lionel in a cupboard, and Viviane explained he had won them at a shooting contest, Nadège said, someone angrily, “No, it was I who won them at the fair. ” Yvonne was confident Nadège had never seen the toys before. Just under five, Nadège told her mother, “Before I was in your heart, I had died,” a statement Yvonne received secondhand.

At five, looking at an infant photograph of Lionel, she told her grandmother, “You know, when I was Yoyo, I wore this white blouse with blue embroidery,” describing a blouse that had long since disappeared and that Yvonne was certain had never been mentioned in Nadège’s presence. In 1981, during one of Stevenson’s Paris visits, Nadège, then five and a half, said afterwards that she knew a restaurant in the 6th arrondissement, an area she had never visited, but where Lionel had eaten at a Chinese restaurant, later coming away with a plate still held by Viviane. Not quite nine, on seeing a slide of a footbridge in a grotto near Annecy shown by her grandfather Francis, Nadège exclaimed, “I’ve been there. I remember it very well.

” Lionel had visited the site at age six, but Nadège never had. At around nine and a half, returning from a summer camp in Savoy that Lionel had also once attended, she mentioned to her grandmother a small path there that she had walked before. Three further statements concerned death itself. Nadège’s father, Patrick Gejou, told Yvonne that Nadège once said to him on a beach, “You know, Daddy, it is warm here in the sand, but when we were both dead, it was very cold on the earth.

”

In 1981, at about seven, watching a television scene of a wounded person being taken to hospital by ambulance, Nadège remarked, “This is not the music here when you have died. ”

Of the twelve statements, eight occurred when Nadège encountered an object or place associated with Lionel, such as a photograph or location, which appeared to trigger the remark. She rarely raised the subject without such a prompt. Beyond her statements, Nadège displayed behavior and mannerisms Yvonne associated with Lionel.

Lionel had a habit of pushing his lower lip forward in a grimace. He called this “tortoise face,” and it was documented in a photograph. At around two, Nadège spontaneously made the same grimace, which her mother also recalled witnessing. Lionel signed his personal letters with a small drawing of a pipe with a curl of smoke.

Nadège had seen these letters but was never told to imitate them, yet she began ending her own letters the same way. After Viviane’s marriage, an annoyed Lionel had addressed envelopes to her and her husband as “Mr. and Miss Chichou,” rather than “Mr. and Mrs.

Chichou. ” Nadège, writing her parents while away from home, addressed her envelopes identically. Lionel’s defining interest in sport was mirrored in Nadège, who took to swimming, diving, and skating. She began diving into water at two and a half, and by three and a half was diving from a height of three meters.

Lionel’s generosity towards others was likewise matched in Nadège. Nadège showed no preference for male clothing or boys’ activities, and while she once expressed a wish to be a boy, this was not treated as unusual. She had no phobias. When Nadège was five and a half, Yvonne once said, almost reproachfully, “You no longer speak to me about Lionel.

” To which Nadège replied, “I’ve told you everything. ”

In April 1979, Yvonne reported asking Nadège what she had done “when you were Yoyo,” and Nadège answered, “I was Lionel, and I did foolish things. ” Yvonne acknowledged that by the time Nadège was five and a half, she had already been prompting her to speak about Lionel for at least a year. Yvonne further linked Nadège’s childhood headaches to Lionel’s fatal head injury.

Nadège suffered from severe headaches in early childhood, and in 1991 she was admitted to a pediatric neurology ward. Tests, including an electroencephalogram, showed no significant abnormality. Her parents divorced when she was fifteen, a circumstance Yvonne felt affected her no more than was typical in similar family situations. At eighteen she had a cyst removed from near her thyroid gland.

She passed the baccalaureate in the summer of 1993, at eighteen and a half, and went on to study English at university. Professor Stevenson noted that Yvonne was almost the sole witness for the case, and he noted Yvonne’s repeated denials in her letters that Nadège had been given clues about Lionel’s life.