A fascinating little thread in one of the community forums on how past lives, and reincarnation memories may intersect with Ghost or haunting experiences. What do you believe?
Hauntings with visual apparitions doing repetitive things and bad feelings (like the sense of oppression when one walks into a room) may not involve deceased spirits hanging around – these may represent only psychic impressions left on a space. But hauntings with poltergeist activity (moving things around, making noises) are more likely to involve “earth-bound spirits,” I think. With these types of hauntings, it has sometimes been possible to contact the spirit (through a medium, or in one case I’ve heard of, through typing on a computer), convince them they are dead (this appears to happen because they do not realize they are dead), and then they move on. I don’t think this happens often, but evidently it can happen, especially when deaths are sudden and unexpected.
After these spirits realize that they are dead, they stop haunting places, and presumably they will go on to reincarnate. There are no reported cases yet of remembering something like this, but some people who remember previous lives also remember having been seen as apparitions or done things that are perceived as poltergeist activity between their death and rebirth.
As to the life review, that is a feature of near-death experiences but not so much of past-life memories, at least those that come spontaneously (without hypnosis). I know that many people assume that there is always a life review, but from the research, there does not seem to be. Most people simply have experiences of different sorts for a while and then move on to reincarnation. From what I can see in the research, it is rather uncommon for spirits to be stuck in an earth-bound state after death, although this may happen.
From the research, it appears that we humans will always be reborn on Earth as humans, and it seems to me most likely this is a natural process over which we have only limited control.