One afternoon in the spring of 1990, a young mother was tidying up her family’s living room in Pingyang Township, a small rural community in southern China. She was nearly finished when she suddenly heard her three-year-old twin daughters crying. This took her by surprise because, despite their age, her daughters—Shai and Shiung Wu—almost never cried. They had been unusually quiet babies who primarily slept, and even at three years old, they had yet to speak their first words.
Alarmed and curious, the mother rushed down the hallway to check on them. Bursting into the nursery, she found her daughters in their crib, sobbing hysterically. She immediately scooped them up, comforting them while searching for any signs of injury or illness. However, there was nothing visibly wrong. The girls eventually calmed down, and she placed them back in their crib, where they quickly fell asleep. That seemed to be the end of it.
A few days later, life returned to normal. The twins resumed their usual routine—being eerily silent and sleeping for most of the day. As their mother went about her housework, she happened to walk past their nursery. The door was closed, and she hadn’t heard a peep from them all day. But just as she passed, she came to an abrupt stop. For the first time ever, she distinctly heard her daughters making noise—not crying, but talking.
At first, the mother wanted to rush in and witness this landmark moment. However, she hesitated, fearing that if they saw her, they might stop. Instead, she pressed her ear to the door and listened. To her amazement, the twins were not just babbling random words—they were engaged in a full-blown conversation, speaking in complete, adult-level sentences.
The more she listened, the more unsettled she became. It wasn’t just that they were speaking fluently for the first time—it was what they were saying. The girls were discussing people and events from a different village, a place they had never been to or even heard of. They spoke in vivid detail about individuals they couldn’t possibly know.
In most parts of the world, such an occurrence would prompt a mother to call a doctor. But in Pingyang Township, things were different. The village harbored a well-known secret: out of its 7,000 residents, over 100 claimed to be reincarnated spirits of people who had died traumatic deaths. This belief was not just held by those claiming reincarnation, but by the entire community. It was an accepted part of life.
The reincarnated individuals in Pingyang often approached others with claims from their past lives. Some demanded debts be repaid from previous incarnations, while others sought vengeance for past wrongs. Occasionally, conflicts even escalated into physical altercations. To avoid such tensions, the town had adapted. In one case, a butcher closed his shop entirely after a young boy claimed to be the reincarnated spirit of a pig the man had slaughtered.
Understanding this local belief, the mother immediately realized what was happening—her daughters were reincarnated spirits. Rather than seeking medical help, she spread the news throughout the village and beyond, hoping to find relatives from the past lives her daughters spoke of.
Less than a week later, a man and woman arrived at her home, claiming to recognize the details the twins had spoken about. As soon as they entered, one of the girls identified them as her parents from her previous life. The twins then told an astonishingly detailed and accurate story about their past lives. According to them, they had not been sisters but best friends. Tragically, they had taken their own lives just a month before being reborn as the twins.
Throughout the conversation, the twins revealed intimate details about their past village, events leading to their deaths, and even the exact locations where their bodies had been found—details that should have been impossible for them to know. When their biological mother asked the visitors if the girls’ claims were true, they confirmed every detail as accurate.
Eventually, the twins turned to their current mother and explained why they had been silent for so long. They said they had been trying to keep their reincarnation a secret. Moreover, their constant sleep was due to dreams of their past lives, which they still missed dearly.
To this day, no one has been able to provide a rational explanation for how these three-year-old twins possessed such specific knowledge. The only explanation that seems to fit is the one the village has always believed—that they were indeed the reincarnated spirits of the two lost girls.
Pingyang Township remains a known hotspot for alleged reincarnations, and to this day, no one knows why.