Young boy says he died in a fire 17 years before he was born

A young boy has sent shivers down his mom's spine by claiming to know how he died in his past life.

According to his mom, five-year-old Luke Ruehlman has been saying he is the reincarnation of an African-American woman named Pam Robinson for almost as long as he could talk.

The young boy from Cincinnati, Ohio, apparently insists that he lived a past life as Robinson and that he remembers how she died in a 1993 fire at Chicago's Paxton Hotel.

In an interview with Fox8, mom Erika explained that her son first spooked her out when he was just two years old and started talking about a woman named "Pam".

When she asked him who Pam was, Erika received a chilling response from her toddler: "He turned to me and said, 'Well, I was."

"[He said] 'Well, I used to be, but I died and I went up to heaven.  I saw God and then eventually, God pushed me back down and I was a baby and you named me Luke'," Erika recalled to Fox8.

The mom was stunned - her family didn't know anyone named Pam, and she had no idea how Luke had come up with the story. More shocking still were her son's memories of jumping from a burning building before he was 'reincarnated'.

In the end, Erika did some research and discovered to her amazement that a woman named Pam Robinson was one of 19 people killed in a hotel fire almost 30 years ago.

Credit: Tom Croke / Alamy

Eerier still, Erika's discovery that Pam Robinson was an African American woman tallied perfectly with her son's claims that he had dark hair in his past life.

"He 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,'" Erika claimed.

Things only got more spooky when the concerned mom reached out to Pam's family and discovered that she bore striking similarities to Luke. As Pam did, Luke loves Stevie Wonder; also like Pam, the young boy loves playing the keyboard.

The creepy similarities were enough to pique the interest of the paranormal investigation show 'The Ghost Inside My Child'. When the show looked into Luke's case, they put his claims to the test by asking him to pick out the correct photo of Pam Robinson from a lineup. According to the show, Luke got it right the first time.

So while there's no rock-solid evidence that Pam was reincarnated as Luke, it certainly looks like there's something spooky going on...

Featured Image Credit: Kristian Kirk Mailand / Alamy