Do you believe in Reincarnation?

No, don't worry, this is not going to be a philosophical post about reincarnation but rather an account of a strange thing that's happened here:
For the last month or so, I've been waking up every morning to the sound of ...hammering. That's what I thought it was to start with. But the only person who would use a hammer in our house would be my husband, so when he's lying next to me in bed, he can hardly be doing DIY work at the same time.
So I investigated the noise.
And there it was: a little bird, a great tit to all accounts, was hammering against the window with its beak, flying up and down outside the window and pecking at the glass. It looked like it was trying to get into the house.
Since my first observation, this has happened every morning and sometimes during the day as well. The tit flies to different windows of the house and starts pecking. Not one morning has gone by without me waking to the hammering noise.
We have been talking about this at home and the most likely explanation we've come up with is that this bird is, well, a reincarnation of a person or animal who lived in our house some time in the past. We first said this jokingly, but the more we think about it, the more sense it makes.
The only animal that has died here in the last few years is our cat who was allowed in the house, but she wouldn't have been in the upstairs bedrooms. But it's those windows in particular that the tit pecks at as well as the living room downstairs. And it positively looks like it's trying to get into the house.
Our house is an old house and many generations of people have lived here over the decades, so assuming that reincarnation exists, why shouldn't it happen here?
I'd be most interested to hear from people who have observed something similar. Or maybe there's a zoologist among you who has a perfectly reasonable explanation for this bird's behaviour?

I posted a picture of the little bird in this blog 31st October 2009.