And now, a spooky story for you: Little Luke Ruehlman of Cincinnati, Ohio, claims to be the vessel for the reincarnated spirit of a woman named Pamela Robinson, who died in a Chicago fire in 1993—at least, that’s what his mother Erika said he told her.
“I was like ‘who is Pam?’” Erika Ruehlman told WJW earlier this month. “He turned to me and said, ‘Well I was.’ I said ‘What do you mean you were?’ He was like, ‘Well I used to be, but I died and I went up to heaven and I saw God and eventually God pushed me back down and when I woke up I was a baby and you named me Luke.’”
So Ruehlman did some diggin, presumably after she stopped shrieking into a hand towel:
In an amazing twist Luke's mother Erika found a woman, Pamela Robinson, who died in 1993 when the Paxton Hotel in Chicago caught fire in 1993, matching Luke's description. 1) She said: 'Luke used to say: 'When I was a girl, I had black hair' or he would say, 'I used to have earrings like that when I was a girl.' The fire at the Paxton Hotel killed at least 14 people, including three who jumped to their deaths rather than face the flames and smoke. Some of the 130 people registered at the Paxton remain. At least 15 people died and another 30 were injured Tuesday in an early morning fire that raced up stairways in a hotel for transients that housed about 130 people near this city’s downtown. After revealing that in his 'former life' as Pam he lived in Chicago, Erika found an old news story which mentioned a Pamela Robinson, who died when the Paxton Hotel in the city caught light in 1993. An investigation by a paranormal investigations TV show also claimed to prove the veracity of Luke's story.
Ruehlman said she was able to talk to Luke about Pam. She figured out Pam lived in Chicago and died in a fire.
“That’s when I came across the Paxton Hotel,” Ruehlman said. A woman named Pamela Robinson died in a March 1993 fire at the Chicago apartment building.
“I had found a picture of Pam, we had put it on a piece of paper with a lot of fake pictures,” Ruehlman said. “Luke goes, ‘Well I don’t recognize anybody, but I remember when this one was taken’ and he pointed to the correct one.”
WJW also reports that when Ruehlman contacted Robinson’s family, they were shocked to learn similarities between Luke and Pam, namely that they both like Stevie Wonder and “Luke played a toy keyboard, similar to the real instrument Pam played when she was alive.”
But apparently, Pam’s spirit could only stick around long enough for a local news story. “It was like he got it out,” Erika Ruehlman said. “He was finished and had nothing more to say about it.”
But Luke’s experience with the otherworldly will be told in full soon: He’ll be featured on a future episode of Lifetime Movie Network’s Ghost Inside My Child.
Luke’s mother says she wasn’t paid for her son’s story—she just believes “it was a story that needed to be told,” because “it’s a positive one. It is one of unification it is one of love.”
[H/T NY Daily News // via WJW]
'When I woke up, I was a baby and you named me Luke': Mom claims her five-year- old son remembers his past life as a Chicago woman who died in a house fire