On a winter night in 1961, in a stone bunker on a hilltop outside Turin, two young Italian brothers sat in front of a wall of homemade radio equipment and heard something they would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain. The slow, wet sound of a man breathing his last breaths from somewhere above the Earth. Over the following years, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia would record eight more transmissions just like it. Morse code SOS signals from spacecraft in trouble. A capsule drifting into deep space. A female voice, calm at first and then terrified, counting down numbers in Russian as her capsule appeared to burn up around her. They were the dying breaths of Soviet cosmonauts on missions that, officially, never happened. Or they were one of the most extraordinary fabrications of the Cold War. Sixty years on, no one has been able to decide which.

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A young father in Vermont was changing his eighteen-month-old son's nappy when the little boy looked up at him and said something that no toddler should be able to say. Daddy, when I was your age, I used to change your nappies. His father searched his face for a smile. There was none. The little boy looked back at him with the calm certainty of a child stating a fact. And the strange thing was, his paternal grandfather had died eighteen months before the boy was born. The exact length of time it would take for a soul to return. In the months and years that followed, the little boy named Sam began saying things he could not possibly have known. About kitchen appliances. About cars. About a great aunt who had been murdered sixty years before. This is the story of one of the most studied cases of childhood past-life memory in modern science. Investigated, documented, and to this day, never explained.

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High on a hillside above the River Esk in Cumbria stands one of the oldest occupied houses in England. Muncaster Castle has been home to the Pennington family for over 800 years. A king once sheltered here after losing his throne. A cruel jester named Tom Fool once stalked its grounds. A young carpenter was beheaded in its stables. A housemaid was murdered on the road outside its main gate. And in a quiet room at the end of a first floor corridor, where dark tapestries hang from the walls and iron fire dogs shaped like devils' heads guard the fireplace, an academic named James Cartland heard something in 1988 that he would never be able to explain. The sound of a child crying. The soft voice of a woman singing. And the slow realisation that the room he was sleeping in had once been a nursery, where a little girl had died over a century before.

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