Reading Time: 5 minutesCade became ‘obsessed’ with planes and was terrified of tall buildings – when he was three, he told his family he died in the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terror attacks
There was always something extraordinary about Cade from the moment he was born.
His parents, Molly and Rick had been told they could never have children and felt blessed to have a miracle son. But by two-and-a-half months old, he was trying to walk and reached all of his infant milestones extremely early.
Even his own grandmother admitted he was different. “He was like an old man. He wasn’t like the bouncy baby. He just looked at you like: ‘who are you? what are you?'” she said. By the time he was two, he was using “very intricate, intelligent words” and could “hold conversations with adults,” according to his mother.
It was around the age of three when the youngster started saying he remembers dying.
Speaking to LMN for a programme called The Ghost Inside My Child in 2011, Molly recalled: “I would be in bed and Cade would just start crying in the middle of the night and he would wake up screaming about working in a tall building and he could see the Statue of Liberty from his office.
“He told me he dreamt that he was falling with the building like the way he died.
“It’s surreal to have a three-year-old talking about New York and talking about death.
“Honestly, I started to think…could he have been in the World Trade Center? But there was a huge part of me that said wait a minute, that can’t be.”
Cade’s dad, Rick added: “We didn’t show him anything , there’s no way he could’ve known about it. It was before school. It was before pre-school.”
The family didn’t know anyone involved in the terror attacks at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and Cade, who was born in 2004 had never been to New York
“I noted it as an oddism but I never thought anything of it. I just thought he had a vivid imagination,” Molly told the programme.
But as Cade got older, he became “obsessed with planes” and was “frantic” around tall buildings.
His gran, Fae said: “Cade was totally petrified by the airplanes, like they were monsters. He wasn’t scared of them being in the air. It’s more like he was scared of where they were going.”
Video footage shows a seven-year-old Cade in the car while driving around a busy city with tall buildings. He states: “That feels creepy.
“I just don’t like to look up. I would not like to go in that tall building….that big shiny one looked just like the Twin Tower. It brings back a lot of memories but I’m not going in it ok?”
Molly admitted that she would make excuses for her son’s behaviour for a while but it got to a point where she “couldn’t deny it anymore.”
She said: “He just flat out said that he was in a building that was hit by something, that it exploded and that he had fallen.
“The pieces suddenly came together like a puzzle, the planes, the tall buildings. This person was at the World Trade Center.”
Cade tells programme-makers: “The plane hit the World Trade Center then it got stuck in the building.
“When I was falling, I was still alive and then all the rubble hit me. I didn’t feel anything because I died.”
Molly was left feeling helpless, unable to know what to do to help her son get past the memories admitting she feels “very sad for him.”
He even started asking her to change his name insisting that he wasn’t called Cade. He told her what his name was and she set to work investigating.
She shared her son’s story on a web board hoping to find answers and discovered there had been a man who worked and died at the Twin Towers whose “life mimics what Cade describes his life and death was.”
“I was absolutely shocked. I pulled up the obituary, the pictures, but I’d never thought about contacting the victim’s family,” she said.
“Continuing to follow through with anything to do with 9/11 may interrupt their mourning process. But also, what would you say? Your son didn’t die, he is just someone different now.
“I would imagine if someone called me with that, I would hang up the phone.”
Molly said she now knows the truth about who the man was but added: “As a mother, I’m feeling very helpless. I can’t make this memory go away. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to fix this.”
She described her and her husband’s heartbreak at being “lost for years” over their situation and said Cade struggled to make friends because other children would call him a liar and laugh at him.
Teachers also took a dislike to him.
Molly and Rick said their priority was to help their son “be comfortable in his Cade body” admitting they “wouldn’t trade him in for anything in the world.”
“I need him learn to be Cade, to learn to be a kid again, learn to laugh and I think we’re going to get there, I do,” Molly added.
The programme ended with news that Cade had started playing in a football league and was improving in school but was still having nightmares.
No further information about Cade has been publicised since. He would now be aged 20.
After the interview recently resurfaced on YouTube, many wondered how he’s getting on as some recalled similar situations with their children who went on to “outgrow” their “past-life memories.”
One viewer said: “My oldest son used to tell us stories about things he used to do and things he had and places he went when ‘he was an old boy’…eventually he stopped telling us the stories and now doesn’t remember anything about it. But he had a ridiculous amount of detail about things a 2-4 year old had no business knowing.”
While one commented: “This is so incredibly sad under any circumstance. Real or not, no kid should ever have this type of anxiety. I hope things get better for him and his family.”
One added: “It’s like being born with PTSD.. I feel bad for him. I hope his family finds him real help. He is blessed to have a caring family and to have another chance at human life.”