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You might expect a psychic medium to be the first person to talk about past lives. Matt Fraser, the Rhode Island medium known for his reality series and his sold-out live readings, has spent most of his career saying the opposite. Across thousands of sessions, he says, not one spirit ever told him it had lived before.
In a recent video he explains why that position has now shifted. It started with one reading, a woman he believes once spent an entire life unable to walk, and it ended with Fraser openly considering that a soul’s journey may run across more than a single lifetime. What follows is the story he tells, the five signs he believes can point to a past life, and what researchers and memory scientists have to say about each of them.
Why a Medium Stayed Silent About Reincarnation
Fraser’s explanation is simple. Spirits, in his experience, present themselves in the form their families will recognise. A grandmother comes through with her kitchen and her favourite dishes. A father arrives with the hobby that filled his weekends. The whole point of a reading is recognition, so the spirit shows the one life it shared with the person sitting across the table.
That meant he only ever saw one life per soul. When clients came to him convinced they had once been a soldier, a priestess or a figure from some ancient court, he neither confirmed nor dismissed them. His working rule, he says, has always been to speak only about what spirit shows him directly, and on this subject spirit had shown him nothing at all.
It is a striking admission, because belief in rebirth sits at the centre of many spiritual systems, from Hindu and Buddhist teaching to several Western esoteric schools. A medium who openly said “I have never seen it” was being unusually candid. Which is why it matters that he now says keeping quiet about one particular reading would be dishonest.
The Reading That Changed His Mind
The session began like any other. A woman had come hoping to hear from a relative, and the usual family messages came through. Then Fraser says he was shown something he could not place: the same woman, but sitting motionless in an old-fashioned chair, not a modern wheelchair, dressed in clothes from another century and surrounded by a room that clearly belonged to a different time.
With the image came a feeling he struggles to forget. It was the sense of long, unbroken stillness, of someone fully alert to the life going on around them, able to watch everything, yet never able to stand up and join in.
Assuming it belonged to an ailing aunt or grandmother, he described it cautiously and asked who it might be. The woman told him no one in her family matched that picture. Then she shared three details that, for Fraser, settled the question:
- Since she was a small child she has had the same recurring dream. In it she lies awake and aware, but her legs will not move.
- She has always carried a fear that nobody, including herself, could explain. It is not a fear of dying. It is a fear of being held still, confined, or stuck in a bed she cannot get out of.
- She is restless by nature. She hikes, she dances, she can barely sit down, and her family teases her about it endlessly. She told him she has always felt as though she were catching up on years she never got to live.
Fraser’s reading of this is that her soul once lived a life without the use of its body and chose to come back in order to experience life whole and moving. He admits the moment gave him chills, and that it pushed him to revise a view he had held for his entire working life.
Where Fraser Stands Now
Fraser is careful to say that his core message has not changed. He still holds that the people we love meet us when we cross over, and that those bonds continue on the other side. Your mother, in his words, is still your mother.
What has changed is the timescale. He now suspects a soul may return more than once, whether to learn, to love more fully, or to finish something left incomplete. He also offers it as a possible reason so many people carry longings, fears and attachments that have no obvious root in the life they are living now.
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He shared the story while promoting his latest book, Don’t Wait Till You’re Dead, which centres on spirit guides and messages from the other side. He also frames the subject gently, acknowledging that some faiths teach rebirth and others reject it, and inviting viewers to keep what resonates and leave the rest. That is a sensible way to approach a question no reading can fully settle.
Sign Five: A Pull Toward a Particular Place or Era
Fraser counts his signs down from five to one, saving the most common for last. The first is a yearning for somewhere or somewhen you have no personal connection to. Perhaps you have never set foot in Ireland or Iceland yet feel homesick for them. Perhaps you feel oddly settled in Victorian rooms, or you have always been drawn to the 1920s, the Old West or ancient Egypt without knowing why. Some people read that attraction as a faint memory rather than a passing taste.
Sign Four: Fears With No Traceable Cause
The second sign is a fear with no source in your own history. A dread of deep water when you have never had a scare in it. Panic in small spaces. A deep unease around fire. When nothing in this life explains the reaction, Fraser suggests the root may lie in another one. The woman in his reading, with her lifelong terror of being held still, fits this pattern closely, as do the recurring dreams that he lists alongside these signs.
Sign Three: Being Called an Old Soul as a Child
Some children seem to arrive already grown up. They speak like adults, show patience or insight well beyond their years, and leave the grown-ups around them slightly unsettled. If the adults in your early life regularly called you an old soul, Fraser suggests they may have been more right than they knew.
Sign Two: Instant Recognition of a Stranger
You meet someone for the first time and there is no awkward stage at all. It feels like picking up a conversation rather than starting one. Sometimes it is a friend, sometimes a partner, sometimes your own child. Many spiritual traditions hold that souls travel in groups from life to life, and that this sense of recognition is the soul remembering before the mind catches up.
Sign One: Déjà Vu That Feels Like Memory
Fraser’s top sign is the one almost everyone has felt and brushed aside. You walk into a house you have never visited and somehow know where the kitchen is. Halfway through a conversation, you are certain you have lived this exact moment already. It lasts a few seconds, it raises the hair on your arms, and then it is gone. Fraser accepts that science has explanations for it, but he asks viewers not to wave it away too quickly when it is intense and tied to a specific, unfamiliar place.
The Children Who Say They Remember
Fraser closes his list with advice for parents: listen closely when a toddler starts talking about the time they were big. This is the one area where his claims connect to formal research. The Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia has collected accounts from young children, usually between two and five years old, who describe memories of a previous life. The work began with psychiatrist Ian Stevenson in the 1960s and was carried forward for decades by Jim Tucker, whose team has catalogued more than 2,500 cases from around the world. In some of them, details the child gave were checked against records of a real person who had died.
The research is still active. In January 2025 the division announced a new research programme on children’s past-life memories, using neuroimaging and modern methods to investigate why some children report these experiences. Fraser’s practical suggestion is a good one regardless of what you believe: when a child says something unusual, write it down with the date before anyone starts asking leading questions.
What Memory Science Says
An honest look at these signs has to include the other side. Déjà vu in particular has been studied closely. Cognitive psychologist Anne Cleary at Colorado State University has induced déjà vu in the lab by having volunteers explore virtual rooms that shared a layout with rooms they had seen earlier but could not consciously recall. The more the spatial arrangement matched, the stronger the feeling of having been there before. Her view is that déjà vu is a form of familiarity without a source: the brain recognises a pattern but cannot retrieve the memory behind it.
Her team has also tested the sense of knowing what comes next. Around half of participants who felt déjà vu also reported a premonition, but their guesses were no more accurate than chance. Later work found a related “I knew that would happen” bias, where the strong familiarity convinces people after the fact that they predicted the outcome.
The children’s cases draw scrutiny too, and the researchers themselves have tested the obvious objection that these reports come from troubled minds. A small psychological evaluation by Tucker and a colleague of 15 American children found above-average intelligence and no pattern of psychopathology, although two of the children did show notable dissociative traits. The authors acknowledge that ordinary imagination could still produce such stories. Critics add overheard conversations and family expectations to that list, while supporters point to cases where a child’s details were written down before anyone identified the earlier person.
None of this proves or disproves rebirth. Science can describe how a feeling arises in the brain without being able to say what, if anything, it ultimately points to. The healthiest position is probably to hold both views at once: stay curious about these experiences, and stay honest about what they can and cannot show.
Why the Question Is Worth Asking
Fraser’s closing argument is less about proof and more about perspective. If a soul returns to keep growing, three things look different.
Your struggles stop looking random. The hardest parts of a life may be exactly the lessons a soul came back to work through, which turns suffering from a punishment into a curriculum. That idea echoes a long line of teachers who see consciousness as something that evolves through experience rather than something that simply switches on at birth and off at death.
Your relationships take on more weight. The people you clicked with instantly may not be strangers at all, but companions you are recognising rather than meeting.
And death loses some of its finality. If the journey is longer than one lifetime, then no effort here is wasted and no one we love is entirely lost. The love, as Fraser puts it, travels with us.
Whether or not you accept reincarnation, the signs in his list are worth paying attention to as part of knowing yourself. A fear with no origin, a dream that keeps returning, a place that tugs at you: these are invitations to look inward, journal, and notice patterns. You may never know where they come from. But the question of whether you have been here before is one of the oldest humans ask, and it can still teach you something about who you are this time around.
