Interview With a Person Who Thought She Was Reincarnated

Savannah is a 26-year-old woman who grew up believing that she was the reincarnation of her dead aunt Laura.

Hi Savannah! What are you doing right at this moment?

Hi! I’m lying in a hammock with my beagle.

What?? I am … very jealous. Let’s just get right into it. Do you remember ever not believing that you were your aunt Laura? Did anyone have to convince you, or did you always think it was true?

I always believed it. It was always, always a thing. It started when I was a newborn and my parents brought me to meet the family. When they handed me to my great-grandmother — who was over 100 and reportedly very bright and with it, but also, you know, she was over 100 — she looked at me, then looked up at the family and solemnly pronounced, “Isn’t it wonderful that God has given her back to us.”

And after that, that’s what everyone believed.

Wow. Where was this? Where did you grow up?

I grew up in a really small town about an hour out of Portland, where I live now. My area is sort of turning into wine country, but when I was a kid it was 800 people, a lot of farmers, definitely no fancy vineyards.

And has your family always lived there?

Yes. My great-great-grandmother on my dad’s side came out here at the tail end of the Oregon Trail. Basically, five generations of my family have lived within 10 minutes of where my parents live now.

Do you have a big family?

Oh yeah. My parents are both the youngest of seven, and most of their siblings have tons of kids. I only have one full sibling, but I have a half-brother and enough step-siblings to make me the oldest of 11 in total. Basically, when I go back home I’m related to like one in 10 people in this town.

Is your family especially superstitious or religious? Did they just believe your grandmother, no questions asked?

My family is religious-ish, though not churchgoing — they’re Christian in terms of having a place to take their morals from. They’re very practical, hard-working, no-nonsense people, and they consider themselves badasses but are nevertheless very, very superstitious. They all, without a doubt, believe in ghosts. When I was afraid of ghosts as a kid, they would never tell me not to be afraid, they’d just start telling me ghost stories. And they’re not interested in researching ghosts or hunting ghosts or anything — it’s just a practical thing, like, “Yes, there are ghosts.”

I’m not sure how hard they questioned my grandmother, but as long as I can remember, it was just accepted that I really was the second coming of Laura.

How had Laura died?

A car accident, when she was 17, in 1979.

Had your family believed that she was still around in spirit before you were born?

Definitely. There’s this story they tell, about when my dad was a young teenager and the whole family was sitting around the dinner table. They heard someone walking up the stairs from the basement, and the door flew open and nobody was behind it. They were all sure that it was Laura telling them that she was still there.

What was it about you that made them so sure?

Well, I don’t know what my great-grandmother saw. But after she said that, the rest of my family started to see certain things I did as meaningful in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise. They say that I used to go into my aunt’s old bedroom and talk to myself — and of course all kids talk to themselves, but they thought I was “channeling.”

There were other factors. My dad’s family all has dark complexions, with black hair — my grandmother is a quarter Native American — but Laura had had pale skin, freckles, and red hair. And so did I. And our faces resembled each other’s.

Also, my paternal grandmother’s kids were all sort of hillbilly types who ran around stabbing each other with forks and climbing trees, but Laura was bookish and nosy and a know-it-all. I was like that, also sort of unusual in my family. My dad used to call her “Newspaper” whenever she was being too much of a know-it-all, and he called me that too.

Do you think your dad believed it?

I don’t know if he believed it, but I think he liked the idea that Laura was alive in me. Laura had been one of his favorite siblings, I know — she’d always been really kind to him, where his brothers picked on him for being the youngest.

So, how did you feel about all of this?

I really liked it, actually! I felt like I had something special. I’m not sure what the dynamic within the family had been like when she was alive, but everyone talked about Laura in the most glowing of terms. They remembered only the best of her, and so I loved that they thought I was this amazing person too. I was doted upon in a way that my millions of cousins were not.

It was a major part of my identity in early childhood. I felt like she was my role model, and I worked hard to not disappoint her. I wanted to be kind and smart too, and it’s part of why I was a nerd and worked hard in school and tried to be the nice cousin. I didn’t always fit in with everyone, so it was really wonderful to have Laura as someone who was like my friend even though she wasn’t actually around at all.

What exactly did your family mean by reincarnation? How literally did they take this concept?

It always seemed very plain and basic, the way they believed it. A person had come back as somebody else. Her soul had started again in my body.

Did they expect you to have her memories or anything?

No, nothing like that. But — this is so embarrassing — sometimes I pretended to. I very clearly remember being 6 or 7 and pretending to go into a trance in front of my cousins. I faked this vision of the car accident that killed her. I knew I was making it up, but I also felt like it was real — I thought that whatever I made up would be accurate because she was me.

I think I did this, fake-hallucinated car accidents, a few times. I really wanted it all to be real. I was going through a phase of being paralyzed by the idea of death, and it was so comforting to me, to think that after you die you could come back as a member of your family and be exactly who you were before.

Sure. Those early childhood fears! They totally govern your life and you just never even think about telling anybody.

Yeah. I remember standing in line for Fern Gully and thinking, “When I die, I will never be able to see another movie,” and I just broke down sobbing hysterically and I could not tell my mom why I was upset.

Fern Gully, man. So how did you stop believing that you were Laura?

I spent a lot of my summer days holed up at my grandma’s house with my cousins, and she’d teach us how to crochet and smoke and tell us the craziest stories — and around 10 or 11, I started to realize that she was lying about some things. She’d say that people in the family had cancer when they didn’t. She’d just throw around this doom and gloom stuff and eat up the attention we gave her. And my dad started to acknowledge the fact that his mom sometimes was lying.

So I started to see that not everything adults said was true. I realized the way she talked about me being Laura was the same way she talked about some uncle or another having cancer. And I do think she really believed everything she was saying, but I just realized it was time for me to get information from sources other than my family.

Did you tell anyone that you’d stopped believing it?

No. For a while, it was like that intermediary phase where you don’t believe in Santa but don’t want to articulate it because it still might be true. I just quietly stopped talking about it, and slowly I stopped defining myself on her terms.

As you grew up, did your family stop talking about it, too? Was it strange to pass the age that Laura was when she died?

Yes to both questions. People have talked about her less as time has gone on. But actually, on the anniversary of the day she died, when I was 17, my dad got really freaked out. He’s a very tough guy — it’s important for him to be and act tough — but I was supposed to go to his house from my mom’s that day, and he called me in tears. He refused to let me drive. He thought that I would die.

Wow. Yeah, I might be a little superstitious about that, too.

Definitely. I was like, “Of course, of course, whatever you want, I won’t drive.”

Actually, I do think I’m sort of superstitious too, or maybe I just have a lot of anxiety — there’s a fuzzy line between those two things. Anyway, I try to recognize this tendency and ignore it, but that day, I understood.

Did you continue to look like Laura in your teens?

Yes. My family, they were really poor, so there aren’t a lot of pictures of her — just three that I know of, and two of them are from when she was 15. Even though my hair turned brown in high school, our faces were still very similar. And as I’ve gotten older, I think that what Laura looked like, what she might have looked like, and what I actually look like have sort of melded together in everyone’s mind.

I still think that the whole thing is kind of cool. I feel a connection to her, not because of something supernatural, but because her influence on me has been real.

Yes. What I love about this is that genetics is its own sort of non-supernatural reincarnation, right? You have a lot of Laura’s genes, you were raised to accentuate her tendencies. In some very real way, you have effectively brought your aunt back from the dead.

Yeah! Even if there was nothing actually there, I thought there was, and that in itself is important.

Do you want to carry this on? Have a girl baby and name her Laura?

Well, this is something funny. My favorite girl name is June — it was supposed to be my middle name, and it was Laura’s middle name. I was always really mad that my parents had picked something else, because I liked the idea of having that extra connection to her. So yeah, if I ever have a girl, I might just pick June.

Previously: Interview With a Virgin: Bette

Jia Tolentino is a writer in Michigan.