Imagine the scare you’d get if one day your 3-year-old son told you out of the blue, in utter seriousness, “I am not your child. I was called Chen Mingdao in my previous life. My father’s name was Sandie”–especially when everything he says eventually checks out.

That was the unsettling incident a young couple in Bumo village, western Hainan province, supposedly faced in 1979. In the widely circulated version of the story, Tang Jiangshan, their toddler son, pronounced these very words one day, and went on to explain that his previous home was called Huangyu, a village in Danzhou city about 150 kilometers northeast of Bumo.

Nearly 10 years before Tang was born, in September 1967, 20-year-old Chen Mingdao and seven other local young men set out from Huangyu to buy diesel for the village’s milling machine. On the way, they were violently attacked by members of a neighboring village who had a feud with their own. This resulted in six deaths, among them Chen, who was shot and stabbed multiple times.

Tang has a scar on the left side of his body allegedly corresponding with one of these wounds. While recounting the tale in media interviews as an adult, he claimed to have been born with it. In these interviews, which form the bulk of what is known of Tang’s story today, he would claim this was proof that he was indeed Chen’s reincarnation.

The Tang family initially dismissed his story as childish make-believe, but under Tang’s relentless pestering, they gave in three years later and took the boy to visit his “past family” in Huangyu. Villagers’ jaws dropped when they heard him greet them one by one, correctly identifying them by their names or titles as relatives and friends from his past life. He allegedly spoke to them in the Danzhou dialect, which was mutually incomprehensible with Bumo’s local tongue.

In that first “homecoming” trip, the young boy walked up to a 30-year-old woman named Xie Shuxiang and held her hand. She was startled when Tang called her name. “I said, ‘You’re Xie Shuxiang. We were good friends. Don’t be afraid of me. I miss you,’” Tang recalled in an interview with Haikou magazine Oriental Female in 2002, adding that he was then able to prove his identity to Xie, his “past lover,” by detailing the places they used to take walks and hang out.

Oriental Female published two articles in 2002, claiming to have investigated this fantastical tale for months. They interviewed Chen Mingdao’s cousin Chen Junzhu, other villagers, and Xie Shuxiang herself, all of whom corroborated the basic facts from Tang’s account.

In 2014, Hainan News TV revisited the story. In the resulting short documentary, villagers from both Bumo and Huangyu expressed their unqualified belief that Tang is indeed a reincarnation of Chen Mingdao. A reporter from Danzhou spoke to Tang in the Danzhou dialect and concluded that though his speaking was rusty, he could understand the dialect with no problem.