Natalia Beketova, a young woman from Anapa on Russia’s Black Sea coast, fainted during a school maths lesson and woke up speaking languages she had never studied. She went on to describe more than a hundred and twenty past lives, one for each language. In 2003 her story ran in the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda; she appeared on television and was examined by orientalists and teachers of Eastern languages. Later she took the Finnish name Tatti Valo — in her words, to honour her Finnish roots on her mother’s side. This article brings together what she said herself and what specialists who met her in person said about her. It belongs to our series on xenoglossy — speaking unlearned languages.
Who is Natalia Beketova?
Natalia Olegovna Beketova was born on 29 August 1979 in Poland, into a military family: her father was an army officer, her mother a geography teacher. The family lived in Poland, then five years in Uzbekistan, and moved to Anapa when she was about fourteen. After school she trained as a nurse, worked in a hospital, studied for a year at the Yaroslavl medical institute and lived for a time in Moscow. In 2003, when the newspapers wrote about her, she was 23 and worked in a shop in Anapa.
She said she remembered herself from a very early age: “I remember myself very clearly from the age of two… from two I could already reproduce these languages freely and think in them.”
What happened during the maths test?
Before the test, she said, she had a feeling she should not go, but her mother insisted. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, this happened in 1993. In class she lost consciousness — and, as she describes it, watched everything from above: “I felt that I had left my body; I was watching what was happening in the classroom.” The school nurse, Lidia Dmitrieva, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that she revived the girl with smelling salts and that the girl began speaking an unknown language, which the English teacher recognised as an old form of English.
In Natalia’s own words: “The first thing I answered them was speech in Old English… I understood Russian, but I could not answer in Russian.” She relearned Russian with her mother, starting from the alphabet: “After two or three days I could speak more or less calmly, although I had an accent — an English accent. And this although at school I studied German, and at home we spoke only Russian.”
How many languages did she speak?
The papers said 120; on television she said herself: “All the languages I have counted come to 121.” According to her and to press accounts they included Old English and the English of Shakespeare’s time, Old Japanese, classical Chinese, Mongolian, Arabic, Persian, Old Ottoman Turkish, Latin and Old Church Slavonic. The key to her explanation: “I know the language of exactly that time, that country and that place where I lived, with its dialects.” In other words, these were not modern languages but their old forms — each from a past life.
What did the specialists who met her say?
She was open about why she agreed to appear on television: “I wanted to find specialists who would help me understand what this is.” According to the writer Mikhail Rechkin, who observed her in person over a long period, before that she had kept her abilities secret, afraid of harming the people close to her.
- Mahir Rauf al-Saffar, teacher of Arabic in the oriental studies department of the Institute of Economics, Law and Natural Sciences in Krasnodar: “She could write in Arabic letters — one hundred per cent… and above all she wrote correctly and joined the letters correctly.” Her spoken “Eastern” language, according to Rechkin’s account, he could not identify: “Perhaps it is one of the Central Asian languages.” His conclusion: the phenomenon “needs to be studied from every side, by psychologists and by linguists”. In the television studio, when she spoke slowly, he recognised individual words that survive in Classical Arabic: adam — man, hayat — life, faris — horseman, mahabba — love. Her letters looked to him closer to the Phoenician script from which the Arabic alphabet descends, and he dated the language to roughly 1000–1500 BC (she herself placed that life in the 6th–7th centuries AD). His conclusion: “science can neither confirm nor deny it… this phenomenon needs to be studied” (TV series, 2:25:42–2:36:31).
- Miyuki Takagi, teacher of Japanese at the same institute: “When I saw how Natasha wrote, I understood at once that it was old Japanese,” and her spoken Japanese had no accent at all — “although her grammar and her words are simple”. According to Rechkin, some of the characters she wrote were unfamiliar to Takagi, who had herself studied old Japanese for only a year as a child. In the studio she admitted that at first the old speech was hard for her to follow and asked Natasha to speak more slowly. The poem Natasha recited was Bashō’s famous haiku “The old pond” (17th century). Takagi’s conclusion: “no teacher, no present-day Japanese, could have taught her such a language” (TV series, 2:15:09–2:23:28).
- Tahmasib Guliev, teacher of Turkish: her writing, Rechkin reports, reminded him of a variant of Old Ottoman.
- Igor Valentinovich Olenev, a psychoanalyst and editor-in-chief of the psychological review Grani Cheloveka (“Facets of the Human Being”), talked with her in the studio: “I can see that Tatti, dear viewers, is a completely normal person. I want to say with full responsibility that I see no signs of psychosis. I see no signs of splitting. I see in front of me a completely normal person… in some ways even more mature” than her peers (TV series, 1:42:49–1:43:36).
- Tatyana Grigorieva, Doctor of Philology at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Komsomolskaya Pravda, 2003): “It was hard for me to believe until I was convinced — Natasha has phenomenal knowledge. Most likely the fainting fit in her teens awakened her so-called deep memory.”
- A sinologist in the film Outlines of a Phenomenon listened to her reading and said plainly: “What was read is, of course, not Chinese. It is a very talented, very subtle imitation.” And he immediately suggested a way forward: “You really need to study these languages… ancient languages, rare languages… This will let you truly understand the kind of feeling and the kind of knowing of the world that you undoubtedly have.”
How the Komsomolskaya Pravda test ended
Komsomolskaya Pravda is one of Russia’s largest newspapers, published since 1925. In spring 2003 it arranged meetings between Natasha and language teachers from universities in Krasnodar. Its summary on 15 May: the scholars’ opinions “differed: only the teacher of Japanese confirmed, beyond doubt, a brilliant command of the language”. The detailed results of the checks in England and France were promised “in the next issues”, but they do not appear in any issue available to us — it is not known what exactly was checked or how. The rest is known from a short 2014 note by the journalist Anna Gerasimenko summing up the story — a journalist’s retelling, not an expert report:
- the Japanese teacher “assured us that she speaks colloquial Japanese, but writes in old characters”;
- Professor Alexei Maslov of the Peoples’ Friendship University “tried to talk with Natalia in the ancient languages she supposedly knows. But the girl understood nothing — not even the simplest questions. Nor could she read the texts she was given”;
- “a professor from Korea did not recognise Korean in her speech. Likewise a Turk did not recognise Turkish, a Tajik — Tajik. Although each caught one or two familiar words and allowed that they might have heard dialects unknown to them”;
- her accounts of former lives in Britain and France, according to the note, “were not confirmed at all” (how they were checked is not reported).
The note’s conclusion: “Perhaps, the specialists decided, Natalia is a talented imitator. But the nature of such abilities is also a mystery.” The sinologist in the film Outlines of a Phenomenon is not named in the recording, so we do not claim he was Maslov.
The opinions differ, and that is an honest picture: the specialists who saw her themselves spoke both about what surprised them and about what did not match.
“Knowing a language and hearing it are not the same thing. I am Russian, yet when I hear temporary migrant workers from Armenia, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, I understand only part of it, even though they are speaking Russian. I lived in Latvia, and Latvians themselves barely understand Latgalian.”
— Maris Dreshmanis, founder of Reincarnatiopedia (conversation with the editors, 3 October 2026)
Professor Tatyana Grigorieva, a Japanologist at the Institute of Oriental Studies, had Natasha live at her dacha near Moscow for two years from 2001 and observed her at close range.
Specialists who work in English from the Reincarnatiopedia directory, today
Can speech in an ancient language be tested?
Hardly — and this is the central difficulty of her case. How Old English, Old Japanese or Chinese a thousand years ago actually sounded is reconstructed by scholars from indirect evidence: rhymes, loanwords, foreigners’ transcriptions. None of these languages has a living native speaker.
Knowing a language from texts and recognising it by ear are different skills. Even a native speaker understands his own language only partly when it is spoken with a strong accent. A specialist in ancient China works with written texts; how Chinese sounded a thousand years ago has been reconstructed only approximately, and no one can recognise it by ear. So the verdict “this is not Chinese” about live speech is an honest opinion, but not proof either way.
What can be tested is something else: written texts, and details of past lives that leave traces in records. Cases in which a child or adult speaks a language they never learned are called xenoglossy; see Cases of Xenoglossy.
Which past lives did she describe — and what can be checked?
England, 17th century. This is the life she described in most detail, and Komsomolskaya Pravda chose it for checking as the most accessible. In her account: Anie Mary Kat, family name McDowell, born on 4 April 1679 north-west of London, in a place she calls Baxfield. She spent her childhood on the family estate of Bewhauld — her grandfather, Henry McDowell, called it “Green Valley”; an avenue of twelve oaks led to the house. Her father was James Whistler, her mother Mary Magdala, her brothers Bruder and Richard, her sister Suelin. Her parents died in the Atlantic when she was four; she was taken to India, where she lived for many years, and was buried near the family estate.
This also explains the different names in press accounts: “Ann McDowell” in the school nurse’s story and “Anie Mary Kat” in Rechkin’s record are the same person — one gives the family name, the other the full given name.
According to Rechkin, Larisa Melenchuk in London “found the small town” where Miss McDowell was born and died. Her own letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda of 15 May 2003 shows something different: Larisa Melnichuk only suggested that “Baxfield” might be the town of Beaconsfield and that “Magdala” might be a garbled form of the surname McDowell. She found no documents. The English historian the paper approached (named in KP as “Oxford University professor, historian James Norwich”) found it hard to make out old English place names that Natasha had written in Russian letters. What can be checked: English parish registers of baptisms for April 1679 and of burials in the early 18th century; the surnames McDowell and Whistler in the counties north-west of London and towards the Welsh border; records of Atlantic shipwrecks in the 1680s; and East India Company records of orphaned children taken to India.
France, the Napoleonic wars. Her own words on television: “I was born on 16 July 1793 in a place called Saint-Julien… between Toulouse and Bordeaux. My parents were impoverished nobles… I was bayoneted at the age of nineteen” — at the beginning of the war with Russia, on the territory of today’s Kaliningrad region. On 15 May 2003 Komsomolskaya Pravda printed her detailed account: Jean Salier D’Ever, whose father built boats and whose mother was Marie-Annie Pietri, baptised by a Catholic priest, Father Maurice; in 1811, at eighteen, he joined Napoleon’s guard in a unit commanded by Michel Astri and was killed in his first battle near today’s Kaliningrad by a bayonet thrust to the right side. The paper’s correspondent Valentina Lvova travelled to south-western France to check it; according to the paper’s short 2014 note, the French life was not confirmed; Lvova’s own report does not appear in any issue available to us. This can be checked in French parish and civil registers for 1793 and in the muster rolls of Napoleon’s regiments held by the French defence ministry’s historical archive. Rechkin writes that she has a birthmark on her right side — exactly where the bayonet struck. Links between fatal wounds and birthmarks were studied in detail by Ian Stevenson; see Birth Defects Linked to Past-Life Wounds.
Germany, 20th century. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, in her most recent life she died of typhus at thirteen in 1920.
The English life in more detail, from the TV series. In the studio she told it in full: at ten, on 10 April 1689, she ran ahead of her maid to a town festival, came out onto a square where a hanging was taking place, and was abducted there by a man who turned out to be a pirate; about six months in a ship’s hold, and then India, where she was sold into slavery. About four years later her master sent her to an ashram of Shiva in north-western India; there she lived out her life as a priestess, studied Vedic knowledge and wrote a book about her fate. In her 89th year she travelled back to England through Iran and Arabia, found the estate in ruins, handed the book to a cousin and died soon after (TV series, 2:46:51–2:52:25). In Rechkin’s account she was taken to India by relatives — another difference between the retellings.
Other lives she described in the studio: Turkey — a woman named Saliha, 28, with four children, walking through the market to borrow money from a family friend, Mustafa, because her father was gravely ill (2:38:03); Sicily, 14th century — a man who at 32 led a band of rebels against the local authorities and the Church (3:01:04); Japan — a concubine at the shogun’s palace who sang, played and wrote poetry (3:02:33); northern China — a man, a landowner’s son, who drowned when a neighbour pushed him off a bamboo ferry in a quarrel (3:04:00). Her longest life, she said, was in China — 140 years; in England, 89 (1:44:21).
What she remembers and what she does not. She described her past lives “as waking reality”, not as dreams — from birth to death, the strongest moments most vividly; remembering, she said, is hard: “I lose a great deal of energy… my body temperature drops sharply” (0:42:09; 1:21:25; 1:35:16). The time between lives, however, she does not remember: “the heavenly part is a mystery… it is closed” (1:36:04). At the time of her fainting fit she did not know Raymond Moody’s Life After Life; she read it later, and she felt no fear when she left her body (0:41:20).
She herself asked for checks. “The moments of my past lives that I wrote down and gave to the journalists — these things should be checked now… which county, which place I lived in, who the priest was, when the baptism was… through those archives, with the help of scholars” (1:48:03). Her lives, she added, were not those of kings or textbook events but of ordinary people “somewhere on the outskirts”, so they can be checked “only in archives” (1:49:08; 1:50:26).
According to the 2014 note, the paper found no confirmation of the English and French lives, but how and in which records it searched was never published. We have found no publication showing that anyone has searched the parish registers and muster rolls listed above. It remains an open task for researchers.
The Phaistos Disc: Grinevich’s decipherment and Natalia Beketova’s reading
In 2001, for a short film by the director Alexander Kipkalo, she was asked to read the Phaistos Disc — a clay disc from Crete, from the second millennium BC, stamped with a spiral of unknown signs. She and Yuri Yankin, a translator of ancient texts and a student of Gennady Grinevich, translated it independently and then compared their versions. Yankin’s assessment: “Side A matches more closely, side B less… I regard it simply as another variant of translation.” It is important to know that Grinevich’s reading is not accepted by the scholarly community, and the Phaistos Disc has still not been officially deciphered. There is also a discrepancy: in the TV series she herself named side B as the one closer to Grinevich (0:40:25), whereas the protocol and Yankin name side A. She read the disc from the rim towards the centre.
According to Rechkin, at his urging she took up the disc in earnest and filled more than 200 pages on it; in her reading, one side of the disc speaks of a pyramid and the other of a crystal. He also asked her to write one and the same phrase in seventy languages. The cameraman Yuri Sivirin keeps the recordings of these experiments.
The 2001 test protocol
In 2003 Komsomolskaya Pravda published from its archive a test protocol signed by Yu. G. Yankin, a candidate of technical sciences and translator, and the film director A. V. Kibkalo. Beketova was given five inscriptions:
| Inscription | Result according to the protocol |
|---|---|
| Phaistos Disc (18th century BC) | Side A — “a clear match in overall content” with Grinevich’s translation; side B — “different content”, accepted as “two different variants of reading” |
| Etruscan ritual dagger (5th century BC) | Yankin’s and Beketova’s translations “differ strongly” |
| 14 inscriptions on seals and bronze plates from the Indus Valley | Match “in terms of worldview” |
| Alekanovo inscription (excavated by A. A. Gorodtsov near Ryazan) | Did not match Grinevich’s reading |
| Inscription on the Krivyanskaya flask (Smolensk province) | Did not match Grinevich’s reading |
The protocol’s conclusion: “The tests confirm Beketova’s ability to read and understand Proto-Slavic texts of various dialects (Etruscan, Cretan-Mycenaean, Indus). The expert considers that the subject possesses genetic memory, that is, the memory of her distant ancestors who could write in various languages.”
The readings in the protocol were made within Gennady Grinevich’s Proto-Slavic theory, which academic linguistics does not accept, and the protocol was signed by supporters of that theory.
Why did she become Tatti Valo?
The television host asked whether her new name was connected with a past life. She answered: “No, certainly it is not a tribute to a past life. It is connected with my Finnish roots on my mother’s side… I changed my name to Tatti Valo because I feel comfortable with it… this name protects me.” She did not seek attention as a celebrity — she sought people who could help her understand what was happening to her. But attention came anyway, and it weighed on her. In 2003 she told journalists: “I sell kitchenware now, and sometimes people come into the shop not to buy anything but to stare at me,” and: “I dream that this ‘film’ will end and I will be an ordinary person again.” About the new name she said at the time: “I am tired of Russia, really… That is why I chose a Finnish first name and surname.”
To a Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent she also put it this way: “Natasha Beketova had many problems in her life — so I decided to get rid of them.” One of those problems, according to Rechkin, who observed her over several years, was television: after she appeared on Yulia Menshova’s talk show Prodolzhenie sleduet… (“To Be Continued…”), where she demonstrated 19th-century French, “the badly organised show only compromised the girl. She went back to Anapa… very upset.”
In 2003, barely a decade after the end of the Soviet Union, Komsomolskaya Pravda was still one of the most widely read newspapers in the country, and a series of articles in it meant fame across all of Russia — hence the phone calls, the TV invitations and the people who came into the shop “to stare”. On 15 May 2003 Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote that after the articles “the phone in Natasha’s flat never stops ringing. But to every invitation to film or to appear on talk shows on Russian and local television Beketova so far answers no: she is tired of all the attention.” A Canadian film director and Moscow psychics tried to reach her without success — “she does not want the fuss”. What she wanted then was to study oriental languages and Japanese culture — “my Japanese is the strongest” — but the course was fee-paying and she had no money.
After the wave of publications she stepped away from public life, and we do not write about her present life.
Similar cases
The best-known scientifically documented case of speech in an unlearned language is that of Uttara Huddar from Nagpur: a Marathi-speaking woman who at times became “Sharada” and spoke Bengali. Ian Stevenson and Satwant Pasricha published it in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1979; see The Uttara Huddar Case. In 2025 researchers at the University of Virginia compared 40 cases with xenoglossy and 872 without it: speech in a foreign language was more common where the previous life had ended in a violent death and where the memories were especially emotional. More on the evidence: What Is Reincarnation? Evidence and Scientific Research and Reincarnation Beliefs Across World Religions and Cultures.
In 2014 Komsomolskaya Pravda, citing Britain’s Daily Mail, described a similar case: the Australian Ben McMahon spent a week in a coma after a car crash and woke up speaking Chinese; he reportedly regained his native English three days later. In the same article the neurosurgeon Igor Borshchenko, PhD in medicine, offered his explanation: after a coma the brain may “recall” a language that a person once studied or simply heard — “it is all about the activation of memory”.
Frequently asked questions
Did Natalia Beketova really speak 120 languages?
That is what she said (by her own count, 121) and what the papers reported. Teachers who heard her confirmed correct Arabic script and accent-free Japanese; a sinologist called her Chinese reading “a very subtle imitation”; Korean, Turkish and Tajik speakers did not recognise their languages in her speech. No full linguistic study of all the languages has been published.
How long did it take her to relearn Russian?
Two or three days, in her words: she relearned it with her mother, starting from the alphabet, and for a while spoke with an English accent.
Where is Natalia Beketova now?
She changed her name to Tatti Valo and stepped away from public life. We respect that decision and do not publish details of her private life.
What is xenoglossy?
Speaking or writing a language that a person never learned. The best-known documented cases were collected by Ian Stevenson and his colleagues at the University of Virginia.
Sources
- “After fainting, Natasha Beketova began speaking 120 languages” [in Russian]. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 17 April 2003. https://www.kp.ru/daily/23016/3174/
- Kuzina S., Gerasimenko A. “Komsomolka will test the Natasha Beketova phenomenon” [in Russian]. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 18 April 2003. https://www.kp.ru/daily/23017/3183/
- Moiseenko A. “Natasha Beketova speaks 120 languages” [in Russian], with M. N. Rechkin’s testimony and the 2001 test record. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 24 April 2003. https://www.kp.ru/daily/23021/3332/
- “Did Natasha Beketova live in France?” [in Russian]. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 15 May 2003. https://www.kp.ru/daily/23031/3669/
- Kuzina S. “Does the transmigration of souls exist?” [in Russian]. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 22 May 2003. https://www.kp.ru/daily/23036/3837/
- Gerasimenko A. “Language will take you to Shanghai” [in Russian]. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 10 September 2014. https://www.kp.ru/daily/26281.3/3158126/
- Wikinews (Russian). “A shop assistant from Anapa speaks 120 languages”, 24 June 2003 (citing Ananova).
- Mikhail Rechkin. Interesnaya Gazeta. Mir Nepoznannogo [Interesting Newspaper. The World of the Unknown], no. 15, 2009.
- TV programme Globalny Vzglyad. Neveroyatnoye v Ochevidnom [Global View: The Incredible in the Obvious], host Igor Globa, Sintez TV (Krasnodar), 2003 (recording “The Phenomenon of Natasha Beketova: 120 Lives Lived”, 3 h 16 min [in Russian]; timestamps in the text refer to this recording): 0:02:01–0:03:15, 0:06:34–0:08:47, 0:10:08–0:13:18, 0:15:47–0:20:30, 0:24:15–0:26:13, 1:22:26–1:23:06, 2:16:40–2:20:51.
- Film Ochertaniya Fenomena [Outlines of a Phenomenon]: Natasha Beketova, Tatti Valo: 0:03:31–0:04:16, 0:07:53–0:08:39.
- Stevenson I., Pasricha S. A case of secondary personality with xenoglossy. American Journal of Psychiatry 136(12), 1979. doi:10.1176/ajp.136.12.1591
- Cozzolino P. J., Pehlivanova M., Tucker J. B. Past-life memories and foreign languages. Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition, 2025. doi:10.31156/jaex.27464
- Lazar Freidgeim. “The Mystification of Natalia Beketova”. Zametki po evreiskoi istorii (club.berkovich-zametki.com), 2019 — quotes from N. Beketova’s 2003 interviews and the account of her stay with T. P. Grigorieva.
- Svetlana Kuzina. Reports on N. Beketova with the “Test protocol” (2001) and the testimony of M. N. Rechkin [in Russian]. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 2003 (reprinted at rootsbar.ru).