Wisconsin boy thought he died on the Titanic before family figured out who he 'really was'
Jamey was just five years old when he started listing off construction errors on the Titanic, a ship that sank almost a century before he was born.
He told his mother that builders had used iron instead of steel, and knew the vessel's internal layout well enough to sketch it from memory, deck by deck.
According to his family, he hadn't even seen James Cameron's iconic film when he started coming out with these details.
The claim, laid out in LMN documentary series The Ghost Inside My Child, is that Jamey is the reincarnation of Thomas Andrews, the shipbuilder who designed the Titanic and chose to go down with it in 1912.
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His parents say the fixation started as a toddler phobia, escalated into night terrors, and ended with a single scream that left his mother in tears.
But long before the Titanic connection surfaced, Jamey's family noticed he had a huge fear of water.
His mother, who is not named in the documentary, described him as an 'easygoing' child who enjoyed a lot of hobbies, mainly learning, but the only thing he really disliked was swimming.
The family had a pool, and swimming was something 'everybody' in the household loved. But Jamey didn't.
His mother said he 'would never go down past the stairs of the pool,' and that trying to carry him into deeper water caused him to panic.
"He would completely panic, practically choke you, begging you to take him back into the shallow part of the pool," she said. "He was terrified of the deep end of the pool."
Around the same age, Jamey's sister, Teal - who is a forensic psychologist - was teaching him to ride a bike when he brought up a memory that unsettled her.
He described watching her mother ride a small blue bicycle down their street as a child, long before Teal or Jamey were born.
When Teal asked whether he'd seen a photograph, he said no. He told her he'd looked down through a window and watched her. Jamey's mother later confirmed she did own a blue three-wheeler around the age of five, something she said she'd never mentioned to him and didn't have pictures of.
When she pressed him on how he could have seen her, she said he became 'kind of indignant' and replied: 'There's windows in heaven, Mama.'
The night terrors began not long after, according to his mother, who said he would wake mid-sleep looking panicked, 'like he was looking for a way to get out' without registering his surroundings.
The turning point, by his parents' account, came after a babysitter let Jamey watch the second half of Titanic, something his mother said she 'was not happy about.'
The following day, he began drawing the ship obsessively. Within two weeks, he'd produced around 50 pictures, including one sketch with over 100 windows and another showing every internal deck of the vessel cut away in cross-section.
His mother said the detail went beyond what the film could have taught him.
"He knew the ship, he knew it by heart," she said. "But you can't learn that by watching the movie. The movie was actually mainly about the love story."
What struck the family wasn't just these incredibly in-depth drawings, but Jamey's emotional reaction to specific, obscure details of the sinking - particularly the deaths of the men working in the Titanic's boiler rooms.
His mother said he became 'completely distraught over the fact that the people in the boiler room died first, like it was his fault that they were trapped,' and would cry while describing construction shortcuts he said had been made, including the choice to use iron rather than steel.
As his knowledge grew, so did his parents' search for an explanation. Studying the ship's history, they landed on Thomas Andrews, the naval architect who designed the Titanic for the White Star Line and made a habit of sailing on the maiden voyages of ships he'd built.
On the night the Titanic went down, Andrews reportedly refused a seat on a lifeboat.
His mother said Andrews was concerned over safety compromises made to hit the ship's launch date, including an insufficient number of lifeboats and the use of iron over steel, the same detail Jamey, then five, had already identified.
"When you read about Thomas Andrews, it fits with what Jamey said," she said, adding that she had grown up believing in reincarnation. Jamey's father has said separately that he believed his son's fixation pointed to 'some other deeper connection.'
Hoping exposure might ease the obsession rather than deepen it, the family took Jamey to a touring Titanic exhibition in Chicago.
Teal said the thinking was that 'if he is exposed to things that were actually there, maybe something will click in him'.
It didn't work out that way. Not long after the visit, Jamey's mother described being alone with him one night when she heard a rhythmic banging from his bedroom wall. She ran to find him on all fours on his bed, shaking and staring at the floor. Before she could react, she said, "he let out a scream in a voice that didn't sound like a little boy, 'She's going down'."
"I cannot tell you the terror in his voice," she said.
According to his mother, Jamey talked about the Titanic less and less in the weeks that followed, until the subject dropped away entirely.
She has described the episode as the moment the memory of the sinking itself finally surfaced and resolved.
Jamey, who was 19 and studying in Wisconsin at the time of the documentary, has said he has 'made peace' with the past-life claim, and believes the personality match makes sense to him.
"I would like to think that I was probably Thomas Andrews just because of the personality traits, and what he did is what I would have done," he said.
"He gave himself up to let others get off the ship."
He added: "It was a horrible tragedy in history, and I'm just very at peace with it, knowing that I died on the Titanic."
Thomas Bamford