they broke out on her face in such profusion that she looked as if tattooed

Dr. Carl Wickland, MD, Thirty Years Among The Dead, writes:

"Mr. Price ... reports his observations of a young girl possessed of a [spirit], a poltergeist that inflicted bites and scratches on the girl which produced marks and brought forth howls of pain...

"As to the stigmata, they frequently appeared while I and other trained observers did not take our eyes from [the patient] for a second. At one time they broke out on her face in such profusion that she looked as if tattooed."

In a chapter entitled “Psychic Invalidism,” Dr. Wickland explains how discarnates suffer mind-induced ailment, and then pass this on to those whose bodies are occupied:

“Spirits who are ignorant of having lost their physical bodies often hold firmly in mind the thought of their former physical condition and continue to suffer pain. This error of the mortal mind persists until an understanding of transition and spiritual laws is reached, when freedom from ideas of physical limitations is attained.

“When spirits, who are under this delusion of suffering and disease, come into the auras of mortals their condition is conveyed to the sensitives, and chronic lassitude, pseudo-illness and psychic invalidism result.”

The vast majority of cases – hundreds of them – reviewed by the Wicklands exhibited these tendencies of deluded spirits to cause mental and physical disease in their host-bodies. This phenomenon can well explain the occurrence of marks on the mortal bodies of those taken over by the possessing spirit.

Other examples from the Wicklands:

"When the father later died of cancer of the stomach, he was attracted to Mr. Z. ... becoming enclosed in his aura, he was unable to free himself and had remained with him for twenty-five years, conveying to his mortal friend the symptoms of the disease from which he had suffered while in earth life." - note: 25 years of stomach nausea due to an attached spirit! a spirit who, in fact, no longer had a physical ailment but merely imagined himself to suffer in this way!

"An unusual type of psychic invalidism, due to spirit influence, was the case of Mrs. G., who had for many years suffered intensely from a peculiar spinal affliction, which baffled all skill of physicians. After Mrs. G. had been under our care for some time, a spirit who had died of a broken back and neck was removed and controlled Mrs. Wickland.
The guiding intelligences explained that he had drifted into the aura of the patient when she was a child and had become enmeshed in her nervous system, thus transferring to his victim the physical condition under which he had died, and which he still believed himself to be suffering from. With the removal of the spirit the patient was promptly relieved and suffered no more pain in the back."

Let’s get down to nuts and bolts. Let us decide, once and for all, whether symptoms that belong to the deceased and are passed on to the living are due to reincarnation or due to overshadowing. It must be one or the other. To zero in on this question, we might tackle the business of mysterious bruises and birthmarks. These, argues the reincarnationist with supreme confidence, are the soul’s own wounds carried over from one life to another. In fact, these marks or wounds are actually trotted out as proof of reincarnation.

Take Miss Mills, for example: When a line of blisters appeared on her back, she said this was where she’d been struck with a burning torch as she was led to the stake -- in her life as a thirteenth-century Cathar heretic! Mills, it should be noted, was not the only returned victim of the Inquisition. As mentioned earlier, she and a few other women were actually persuaded of the fact by their psychiatrist who, “obsessed by it . . . [declared] that dozens of the Cathars . . . reincarnated in the twentieth century . . . to prove the reality of reincarnation.”

Nevertheless, the late Colin Wilson, who had the opportunity of personally interviewing the doctor, came away with the impression that “all that has happened is that a patient has become fixated on her doctor, and looks around for ways to gain his interest . . . Miss Mills is also, significantly, an unmarried lady. She gets drawn into the fantasy . . . until a whole group of her friends are convinced that they were thirteenth-century Cathars. An interesting case of group hysteria” (Wilson 1973, 128, 135).

Stevenson’s questionable and sub-standard research practices

That was in England. It was, however, here in America that the birthmark theory gained traction, thanks to the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia. On the surface, his research appears to be scrupulously scientific and objective. Yet Stevenson’s [own] claim -- that he eliminated all other possible explanations of these bruises and birthmarks -- is disingenuous and deceptive. It is, in my view, a falsification of the record, and indeed, a breach of faith with the  very discipline in which he made his name: parapsychology.

Editor's note: It's a "breach of faith," in that, if you hold yourself out to the public as a vaunted "expert," as one employing the prestigious scientific method as means of determining the truth, then you are not allowed to summarily and dismissively close off and disregard, without investigation or consideration, other possible explanations. If you do, you're just a quack and a fraud, a dogmatist, selling your own private religion. You can't begin your search with a conclusion in mind -- this is shooting an arrow and drawing a bulls-eye and target around it.

"it's the body-snatching, stupid"

Stevenson’s many anecdotes, rather than proving reincarnation, actually document the typical stunts of [spirit] entities lingering on the earth plane. Indeed, Stevenson’s cases “suggestive of reincarnation” fall apart completely when taken simply as cases of body snatching.

A Hindu man, for example, is poisoned to death; instead of waiting the theoretical ten or twenty or fifty years, he “reincarnates” immediately. Not only does the time lapse fail to fit the theory, but the fresh body is not that of a newborn, as theory stipulates; for the spirit of the poisoned man has overtaken a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who has apparently died of smallpox, leaving his body vacant. And sure enough, upon reviving, the little boy identifies entirely with the life and habits of the poison victim; the boy is no longer quite “himself,” and instantly recognizes all “his” former family members when taken to them (Langley 1967, 231).

The scenario, though, is seriously akin to ghostly intrusion, the mortal victim (or host) serving merely as a target of opportunity for the homeless spirit. None of this can be understood or appreciated without a grasp of [spirit] overshadowing, the subtle ways in which the unquiet dead can impinge on the living.

Steve Blake, the English mathematician who took the time to write a 450-page book refuting reincarnation, states that we should not go about the debate by quibbling over beliefs or terms, “but by establishing the true nature of human spirituality” (2014, xv). How true this is! Blake’s brilliant rebuttal (in chapters 2 and 8 of Reincarnation Refuted) of Stevenson’s work covers a lot of ground, including the question of bruises and birthmarks as well as Stevenson’s errors in logic and even fieldwork methodology.

In Stevenson’s work, says Blake, “spirit intrusion is arbitrarily called reincarnation.” In the field, “he draws on local superstitions to buttress his argument. . . . When interviewing subjects, his questions are couched in the language of reincarnation. This means that he gets the results he wants. . . . The exercise becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy” (Blake 2014, 296).

Stevenson’s followers often tout his evidence as overwhelming. But, as another critic, Gus Cahill (1965, 127) put it, “By the researcher ignorant of the spiritual universe, unquestionable ‘evidence’ of reincarnation is gravely recorded and published, to the conviction of a marveling public.”

... let us consider the bruises and scratches that may directly result from an OBE:

“If,” cautions Dion Fortune, “an occultist, functioning out of the body, meets with unpleasantness on the astral plane, if his subtle body is struck or shot at, the physical body will show marks. I myself have many times found curiously patterned bruises on my body after an astral skirmish” (Fortune 1981, 52).

Apparitions and hauntings, of course, are also a big part of today’s parapsychological curiosities, and we do wonder how Dr. Stevenson could have overlooked the numerous cases that directly link phantoms with wounds. A few illustrations should suffice:

A séance circle in San Francisco gets out of hand: the medium is struck and bloodied on her cheeks and hand. The house, it turns out, is haunted by the medium’s own deceased mother who is “reproachful of her daughter’s . . . scandalous life" (Fodor 1966, 388).

An old jailhouse in New Orleans, where not a few had died on the gallows, is “said to be haunted by angry, vicious ghosts.” One of them nearly strangles a desk sergeant, “flinging him to the floor and leaving ugly bruises on his throat” (Hurwood 1971, 5).

In the 1960s, the Toronto Telegram reported weird phenomena at the Mackenzie House (belonging to the prime minister). There were unaccountable footfalls, the piano playing by itself, an “oppressive presence,” and other strange apparitions—one of  which attacked the caretaker’s wife, leaving three red welts on the left side of her face, like finger marks (S. Smith 1970a, 40–43).

Prime Time Live and CNN covered the case of eight-year-old Michael J.,  a Connecticut boy who saw the apparition of his grand-father with blood-stained teeth. Scratch and bite marks began to appear on Michael’s body after a year’s worth of phenomena besieged the household -- orbs, ghost sightings, flying silverware, and even furniture moving of its own. The poltergeistery in Michael’s case suggests that paranormal marks and bruises may devolve on the ghostly presence, not past lives. As some see it, the “biting poltergeist” has a purpose: to force humans to vacate homes that they feel belong to them.

They might also cut and slash; or leave scratches and welts, as in a Rumanian case (Rogo 1979, 177–79); or assault with gashes, as in the South African case witnessed by police-men and doctors (Archer 1967, 181); or puncture, choke, and sting, as in the meticulously documented Indiana case (Roll 2004, 51–55).

As  William Roll indicates, the ability of psyche to suffer a wound from “an invisible force” actually has a name, “repercussion,” and it is known to occur in religious mania, conversion hysteria, possession, poltergeistery, multiple personality disorder, hauntings, satanic rites, autism, medium-ship, and criminal psychopathology.

Scratches are among the most common forms of psychic marks in cases of possession. Our skin, our envelope, is the first to bear the brunt of a close encounter with the powers of the Darkening Land. Paranormal eruptions of the skin are not all that rare. In fact, skin diseases such as psoriasis and herpes were, in former times, thought to betray spirit  possession. Even modern analysts like Titus Bull thought some of his patients had been “overshadowed by entities who pressed too close . . . casting on [them] a reflection of their own memories and ills” (Fodor 1966, 40).

Concerning these bodily ills, another modern psychiatrist has written, “In my experience, when a person dies with an illness, the soul will carry the energy pattern of that pathogen. If the soul attaches to a living human, that human may then manifest the illness carried by the departed soul. I have seen a number of illnesses remit after the attaching spirit leaves the body” (Dr. M. E. Gibson, in Tymn 2008, 8).

Among experienced mediums, repercussion is painfully familiar. H.F.P. Battersby (1979, 29), for one, has felt his own psyche “strike obstacles in space which block its free movement and cause a repercussion to my nervous system and a shock to my physical body.”

In the early days of Light magazine, many such experiences were reported by mediums and occultists, most of whom believed that these fresh injuries came from spirits of a low order. Some saw it as the unintentional effect of the recent dead, reproducing the symptoms of their last bodily illness in the body of the medium, causing her great discomfort.

This is what happened to the well-known medium Stainton Moses after a friend of his committed suicide: Moses woke up in the middle of the night and saw his friend’s spirit trying to reach him. Moses was repulsed and horrified by the vision. In the morning, he found on his forehead an oblong red mark in the exact spot where his friend had wounded him-self.

This is the same approach taken by Vivian Garrison who looked for the espiritus obsesores oppressing a person afflicted with “the symptoms of the disease of which they [the spirits] died” (Crapanzano and Garrison 1977, 426).

In the early days of modern spiritualism, mishaps of this sort were a common occupational hazard among mediums. W. E. Butler (1978, 186–87) explained that weakness in “the auric skin . . . well known to those who studied these matters . . . were called ‘orbicular wounds.’ Certain practices in connection with mediumship can cause orbicular  wounds; and for this reason the older occultists were not altogether in favor of the indiscriminate development of mediumship.”

“All the symptoms I felt were his,” one victim spoke of his attached entity, in a Japanese case (Crapanzano and Garrison 1977, 349). Even “friendly” spirit familiars, as Eugene Maurey pointed out (1988, 131), can be dangerous, especially when they have died of an illness and can bring “that particular illness to you.”

If the reincarnationists paid the least attention to the ways of overshadowing, their sham of a theory—and its bogus “evidence”— would melt away…

Men of the cloth were not unfamiliar with the religious phenomenon known as stigmata, as it affected persons obsessed with the crucifixion -- blood and wounds appearing in their palms. Certainly the stigmata of religious ecstatics are in the same general family as the welts and bruises erupting on all the hosts described in these pages.

Having suffered them herself in her occult excursions, England’s Dion Fortune came to believe that “such marks must be of the same nature as the stigmata of saints and the curious physical marks and swellings sometimes seen in hysterics” (Fortune 1981, 52).

Editor's last word:

Consider again the words of Rupert Sheldrake: 

I think that brains are more like tuning devices, more like TV receivers than like video recorders.

I'm betting that, when all the data is in, we'll find that attaching spirits manipulate the brain-as-receiver and, in certain cases, might induce the physical manifestation of scars, torture wounds, birth marks, tattoos, bullet holes, and the like.

Dean Radin adds this closely related "mind over matter" material: (1) If people "think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they are drinking a placebo"; and (2) "Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients indicate that [they] may speed death in a patient simply by diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know."

A final note, one of tangential importance: Notice the above provocative term, "mind-induced stigmata"! - of course, the emotive term "stigmata" is brandished by Big Religion as suggestive evidence of its authority, just as reincarnationists employ scars and birth marks to the same end.