Fragments | Ryan Hammons: The Boy Who Remembered a Past Life in Hollywood — Ep. 08

A Question About What Comes Next

I'm Robert Barber. Welcome to Fragments. It's just me, a microphone, and an interesting story that I couldn't stop thinking about. Some of these are forgotten newspaper accounts, some are old legends, some are bits of folklore that have survived for generations. They're not full documentaries, they're just stories that deserve another telling. For as long as human beings have understood that life ends, we've been asking the same question. What comes after this? Is there anything beyond this life, beyond this place? That question and all the possible answers to it fascinates me. If some part of us continues, where does it go? And could any part of who we are somehow come back? That's

Ryan Says He Wants Hollywood

why stories about children who claim to remember past lives interest me so much. Most are impossible to test. A child says something strange, the adults remember it years later, and there's no way to know where it came from. But the story of Ryan Hammonds is different. Ryan was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma in 2004. When he was four, sometime around 2008, he started asking his mother to take him home. Which was confusing because they were home. Ryan lived there with his parents, Cindy and Kevin. But Ryan didn't mean Oklahoma, he meant Hollywood. Ryan had been late to start talking because of enlarged adenoids. After surgery, he began speaking in complete sentences. And that's when these stories about another life started coming out. At first, some of it probably sounded like normal childhood make-believe. Ryan loved movies. He would gather other children together and pretend he was directing them. He liked wearing suits and ties, which he called his agent clothes. He

A Journal Of Strange Details

even popped the lenses out of a pair of 3D glasses because he thought the frames made him look like an agent. But Ryan didn't talk about Hollywood like a child imagining he might live there someday. He talked about missing it. He told Cindy that he thought he used to be somebody else. He said he had another family in Hollywood and he wanted to go back to see them. Then he started giving her details. He remembered a large house with a swimming pool on a street with a name that sounded like rock or mount. He had owned a green car and nobody else was allowed to drive it. He had worked at an agency where people changed their names. He talked about dancing on a stage in New York, traveling on large ships, visiting Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower. He remembered several wives, a daughter, and three boys. The boys weren't really his, he said, but he had given them his name. He also kept mentioning someone he called Senator V. And this wasn't something Ryan talked about once and then forgot. He was homesick. He worried about the people he thought he had left behind, especially the children. Sometimes he woke from nightmares. He wanted to know what had happened to his old family and why he couldn't remember their names. Cindy and Kevin were Christians. Reincarnation wasn't something they'd taught Ryan to believe in, and Cindy didn't know what to make of any of this. Kevin suggested that she start writing it down. So in 2009, when Ryan was five, she began keeping a journal. She recorded the names, places, and fragments that came out, often while Ryan was taking a bath or getting ready for bed. At that point, none of them knew whether the person Ryan described had ever existed. Cindy started borrowing books about old Hollywood from the library, thinking the photographs might help him explain what he was trying to remember. Ryan recognized some famous people, including Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Say, that's just crazy to me. I know I would recognize Marilyn Monroe, but that's after many years, obviously, of her image in Hollywood and pop culture. Even at my current older than five years old age, I don't think I could pick out Rita Hayworth. How is this little kid doing it?

The Unnamed Man In The Photo

Then Cindy brought home a book containing a photograph from a 1932 movie called Night After Night. It showed several men together, and Ryan pointed to one of them and said, That's me. And honestly, this is where the story really grabbed me. Before that photograph, you could reasonably say that Ryan was an imaginative child building his own version of a glamorous Hollywood life. But he didn't point to Clark Gable or another famous actor whose face he could have seen anywhere. He pointed to a man standing off to the side of an old photograph, a man his mother couldn't identify and whose name wasn't given in the book. Even the film's credits didn't make it clear who he was. In February 2010, Cindy wrote to Dr. Jim Tucker, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, who studies children who report memories of previous lives. She sent him some of Ryan's statements and a copy of the photograph. Two months later, Tucker traveled to Oklahoma and recorded his first interview with Ryan. So before anyone knew who the man was, Cindy had already documented Ryan's memories and Tucker had already interviewed him. Soon afterward, producers from The Unexplained, a biography channel series exploring unexplained cases, began following Ryan's story for an episode called A Life in the Movies. The productions researchers believed they had identified the man in the photograph, and the family was flown to California to investigate. But the man's biography didn't fit Ryan's memories. Ryan also failed to recognize the homes connected with him. They had the wrong person. I think that matters. The family didn't accept the first name they were given and start bending Ryan's statements to make everything fit. The first answer simply didn't work. The production hired a film archivist to examine the photograph again.

Marty Martin Finally Identified

This time, the man was identified. His name was Marty Martin. Martin wasn't a famous actor. He was an obscure extra, and his appearance in night after night had only been a tiny part of his life. He was born Morris Kolinsky in Philadelphia in 1903. During the 1920s, he moved to New York with his sister and danced on Broadway. Later, he went to Hollywood and tried to build a career in the movies. When that didn't work out, he became a talent agent and opened the Marty Martin Agency. Ryan had talked about working at an agency where people changed their names. Then more details started lining up. Martin became wealthy and lived in a large Beverly Hills home with a swimming pool and a brick wall. The address was 825 North Roxbury Drive. So Ryan's street with rock in its name didn't seem quite so random anymore. Martin had traveled to Europe aboard the Queen Mary and visited his sister in Paris. He enjoyed the beach and collected sunglasses. Ryan had also talked about several wives. Martin had been married four times. And then there were the children. Martin had one biological daughter. When he married his final wife, he became stepfather to her children, including three boys. He adopted those boys and gave them his last name. Ryan had said there were three boys. They weren't really his, but he had given them his name. That's the detail I keep coming back to. A large house and a swimming pool could have come from a child's idea of how people in Hollywood lived. But three boys who weren't his by birth, who were adopted and given his name? That's strangely specific. Even the Senator Five seemed to lead somewhere. Marty Martin had known Irving Ives, a United States senator from New York.

Matches That Hold And Break

Now, not everything Ryan said matched. He believed Martin had been cremated, but the death certificate said he was buried. Ryan described a heart-related death while Martin died from a cerebral hemorrhage while suffering from leukemia. Other statements couldn't be verified. And I'm glad we know that. If every statement had been presented as a perfect match, I'd wonder what had been left out. Cindy's journal eventually contained hundreds of statements. Some matched, some didn't, and many couldn't be checked. But the published account says 47 of the matching statements had been recorded before anyone knew Marty Martin's name. In later photograph tests, Ryan selected Martin's fourth wife, Senator Ives, and a younger Martin, then missed two others. Tucker knew the intended targets, so the test wasn't perfect, but Ryan's parents didn't know the answers or even Martin's name.

Meeting The Daughter From Before

When Ryan was six, he returned to California and met Martin's daughter. She had been eight when her father died. By the time she met Ryan, she was fifty-seven. She confirmed several smaller details. Martin's green car, which he wouldn't let anyone else drive, his sunglasses, his dislike of cats, and a dog that he'd bought for her that she didn't want. For Ryan, though, the meeting was difficult. He said her face seemed familiar, but she wasn't the little girl he remembered. At one point he complained that she hadn't waited for. Ryan had spent years asking to return to his old home and his other family. But if these really were memories, nearly half a century had passed without him. The house now belonged to someone else. The children had grown old. The Hollywood he remembered was gone. I don't know if Ryan remembered a past life, and this case doesn't prove reincarnation is real. Compelling, though. But I also don't think saying children imagine things comfortably explains the photograph, the timing of the journal, and some of those very specific details.

Letting Go Of Another Life

A Life in the Movies premiered on April 30th, 2011. Over the following months, he spoke less and less about Marty. The memories that had once caused him so much distress started to fade. Now, people often say children are more open to the supernatural because they haven't yet learned that those things aren't supposed to be real. They say children can see ghosts, remember other lives, or experience things that adults have learned to dismiss. Now, I have no idea whether that's true, but as Ryan grew older, whatever connection he had to Marty's life seemed to weaken. About six months later, after the program aired, sometime in the fall of 2011, Cindy walked into Ryan's bedroom and found that he had removed the things that connected to his old life. The Hollywood pictures, the images of New York, and even the small Eiffel Tower. Ryan told her it was time now just to be a regular kid. And I have to admit, that makes me sad. Because I wonder if the memories didn't simply fade. Maybe meeting Martin's daughter, seeing that the little girl he remembered was now a 57-year-old woman helped him understand that the life he kept asking to return to was gone. Time had continued moving without him, but maybe that meeting also gave him something he needed closure. He'd spent years asking to go home, and he finally got as close as he could. Maybe putting away the photographs wasn't Ryan deciding that none of it had been real. Maybe it was his way of accepting that whatever had happened, he couldn't go back. It was time to live the life that was still in front of him. Either way, Ryan's story is difficult to forget. Whether those memories came from another life or just from somewhere inside his own imagination, they were real enough for him to miss and eventually to let go.

The Questions That Stay Open

So what do you think happened? Did Ryan simply outgrow an elaborate childhood story? Or are children somehow connected to something that the rest of us learn to shut out?