The joke about reincarnation has always been that too many people claim to have been famous in past lives. They were Cleopatra or Abraham Lincoln or someone of such historical notoriety. Now a little boy from Oklahoma says he was a Hollywood actor in the 1930s.
But he wasn't Clark Gable or Greta Garbo or Cary Grant or Mae West. (The he says he was an extra with no lines in West's movie debut, however.) The name of the guy he pointed out as himself in an image from 1932's Night After Night: Marty Martyn.
The kid, Ryan Hammons, recently appeared with his mother on Today to tell the unbelievable story. When he was four years old, he began having nightmares related to his reincarnation, and a year later he told his mother he believed he was a Broadway dancer who went to Hollywood and, following his appearance in the one movie, became a big-time agent.
He also had been married a handful of times and had a love for Tru-Ade orange drink that only existed from the 1940s to the 1970s (though there is a new version out now).
As investigated by University of Virginia professor Jim Tucker, an expert on reincarnation claims of children, the now-10-year-old Ryan listed 55 details about his former life and his death at age 61 in 1964, and all of them have been confirmed as true of Martyn.
A lot of the details can be found in the actor turned agent's IMDb biography, but that information may not have been so easily available five years ago. Whether the amazing story is true or not, though, it'd make a great movie of its own, something like Birth meets Heaven Is for Real.
Watch the Today segment below and judge for yourself if you believe Ryan was once a little-remembered guy who played a gangster in a movie 83 years ago.
