Molly Curnutte says she is “heartbroken” over the backlash her young son has faced since his claims about a past life began drawing attention.
Cade Wilson, now identified as the boy at the center of the story, was just three years old when he started waking in the middle of the night with terrifying dreams he could barely explain. His mother, Curnutte, recounted on LMN’s The Ghost Inside My Child that he described working in a tall building with a view of the Statue of Liberty from his office, then falling as the structure collapsed around him.
“I noted it, but I never thought anything of it. I noted it as an oddism. I just thought he had a vivid imagination,” Curnutte said of her initial reaction.
His father, Rick, emphasized that the family had no apparent connection to New York or the World Trade Center. Cade had never visited the city, and no relatives worked there. Yet the nightmares persisted, and soon a broader pattern of fear emerged.
Cade developed what his mother characterized as an obsessive terror of aircraft—not of flying, but of where planes appeared to be heading. His grandmother, Fae, described him as “totally petrified,” saying he reacted to them “like they were monsters.”
Driving through downtown areas became nearly impossible. Rick said Cade grew frantic around tall buildings, bursting into panic when the family could not avoid them.
The situation shifted when Cade moved beyond vague fears and supplied concrete details. Curnutte said he “flat out said that he was in a building that was hit by something, that it exploded, and that he had fallen.”
He also began insisting his name was not actually Cade.
Desperate for understanding, Curnutte turned to an online forum and posted her son’s story. Another mother responded with a link that would change everything.
“It was actually another mother who sent me the link,” Curnutte explained. “And she said there was a man that worked in the World Trade Center. And he died on 9/11. His life mimics what Cade describes his life and his death was.”
Curnutte pulled up the man’s obituary and photographs. She said the parallels between his life and Cade’s descriptions struck her immediately. She has never contacted the man’s surviving family, she noted, wary of interrupting anyone’s grieving process.
The fallout within their own community has been severe. Curnutte said other children have called Cade a liar, some neighborhood parents do not want their children playing with him, and teachers have grown frustrated with classroom disruptions tied to his fears.
“I’m heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken,” she said. “You just want everybody to like your kid.”
Despite the strain, both parents say their priority is preserving as much normalcy as possible for their son.
“I need him to learn to be Cade, to learn to be a kid again, to learn to laugh,” his mother said. “And I think we’re gonna get there. I do.”
The story echoes long-documented patterns in cases of young children reporting detailed memories of lives they could not have known about through ordinary means. Families who come forward with such accounts often face skepticism and social isolation, even when they seek no publicity. Curnutte’s decision to share the story on a television program about children’s past-life memories placed her family in a familiar position—defending a child’s claims against widespread doubt while privately wrestling with their own.
The family has continued to focus on Cade’s wellbeing without pursuing further public revelation of the man’s identity whose obituary matched their son’s descriptions.