January 10, 2007
The Boy Who Lived Before
By YVONNE BOLOURI, September 08, 2006, The Sun
LITTLE Cameron Macaulay was a typical six-year-old, always talking about his mum and family.
He liked to draw pictures of his home too — a long single-storey, white house standing in a bay.
But it sent shivers down his mum’s spine — because Cameron said it was somewhere they had never been, 160 miles away from where they lived.
And he said the mother he was talking about was his “old mum.”
Convinced he had lived a previous life Cameron worried his former family would be missing him.
The Glasgow lad said they were on the Isle Of Barra.
Mum Norma, 42, said: “Ever since Cameron could speak he’s come up with tales of a childhood on Barra.
“He spoke about his former parents, how his dad died, and his brothers and sisters.
“Eventually we just had to take him there to see what we could find.
“It was an astonishing experience.”
Cameron’s journey to find his previous life is now the subject of a spooky TV documentary.
Norma said: “His dad and I are no longer together but neither of our families have ever been to the island.
“At first we just put his stories down to a vivid imagination.” Then life took a more sinister turn as Cameron started to become distressed at being away from his Barra family.
Norma said: “It was awful and went on for years.
“When he started nursery his teacher asked to see me and told me all the things Cameron was saying about Barra. He missed his mummy and his brothers and sisters there.
“He missed playing in rockpools on the beach beside his house.
“And he complained that in our house there was only one toilet, whereas in Barra, they had three.
“He used to cry for his mummy. He said she’d be missing him and he wanted to let his family in Barra know he was all right.
“It was very distressing. He was inconsolable.”
“He wouldn’t stop talking about Barra, where they went, what they did and how he watched the planes landing on the beach from his bedroom window.
“He even said his dad was called Shane Robertson, who had died because ‘he didn’t look both ways.’
“I assume he means knocked over by a car but he never says that.
“One day his nursery teacher told me a film company were looking for people who believed they had lived before.
“She suggested I contact them about Cameron. My family were horrified. There was a lot of opposition to it. I’m a single parent so it was me and Cameron’s brother Martin, who is only a year older than him, who were being badly affected by this.