A Wisconsin family's account of their young son's fixation with the Titanic has drawn attention after being featured on LMN's documentary series The Ghost Inside My Child, with the family suggesting he may be the reincarnation of the ship's own designer. It's worth being upfront: these are unverified personal claims from a family and a paranormal-themed TV series, not something independently confirmed, and stories like this are best read with that in mind.
How it started
According to his mother, Jamey showed an unusually strong fear of water as a toddler, long before any connection to the Titanic emerged. Despite the family owning a pool that the rest of the household enjoyed, she said Jamey would panic if carried past the shallow steps, becoming distressed and begging to be taken back.
Around the same age, his older sister Teal, now a forensic psychologist, said he described a specific memory of watching their mother ride a small blue bicycle down their childhood street, an event that took place before either of them was born. Their mother has said she did own a blue tricycle around that age, something she says she'd never told him or shown him photos of. When pressed on how he knew, she said he responded: "There's windows in heaven, Mama."
The Titanic obsession
The family says the turning point came after Jamey watched part of the film Titanic while being babysat. Afterwards, he reportedly began drawing the ship obsessively, producing around 50 sketches within two weeks, including one depicting the vessel's internal decks in cross-section and another featuring over 100 windows. His mother said the level of technical detail went beyond anything the film itself explained, since the film's narrative centres on a fictional love story rather than the ship's engineering.
She also described Jamey becoming distressed specifically over the deaths of workers in the ship's boiler rooms, and recalled him identifying construction shortcuts, including the use of iron rather than steel in parts of the ship's structure, a detail that is historically accurate to accounts of the Titanic's construction.
The Thomas Andrews connection
Searching for an explanation, the family landed on Thomas Andrews, the real naval architect who designed the Titanic for the White Star Line and died in the sinking after reportedly declining a seat on a lifeboat. Historical accounts describe Andrews as having raised concerns about safety compromises made to meet the ship's launch schedule, including an insufficient number of lifeboats and structural choices similar to those Jamey had described. His mother, who has said she grew up believing in reincarnation, said the details lined up with what her son had described, while his father has said he believes the fixation points to some deeper connection.
A visit to a Titanic exhibition
Hoping direct exposure might resolve the fixation rather than intensify it, the family took Jamey to a touring Titanic exhibition in Chicago. According to his mother, the opposite happened. Not long afterward, she described hearing a rhythmic banging from his bedroom one night, finding him shaking on his bed before he reportedly screamed, in what she described as a voice that didn't sound like his own: "She's going down."
She said his interest in the Titanic faded steadily in the weeks that followed, eventually disappearing entirely, something she's interpreted as the memory finally resolving itself.
Where he is now
Jamey, now 19 and studying in Wisconsin at the time the documentary aired, has said he's made peace with the claim, telling producers he believes the personality parallels with Andrews make sense to him, particularly Andrews' choice to give up his own place on a lifeboat for others. He described feeling at peace with the idea that he died in the sinking.
