The Case of Hanan Monsour | Suzanne Ghanem
Hanan was born in Lebanon, in the mid-1930s. When she was twenty, Hanan married Farouk Mansour, a member of a well to do Lebanese family. The couple had two daughters, named Leila and Galareh. Hanan had a brother named Nabih, who became prominent in Lebanese society, but died as a young man in a plane crash.
After having her second daughter, Hanan developed a heart problem and her doctors advised her not to have any more children. Not heeding the warning, Hanan had a third child, a son, in 1962. In 1963, shortly after the death of her brother Nabih, Hanan's health started to deteriorate. Hanan then started to talk about dying. Farouk, Hanan's husband, said that Hanan told him that "she was going to be reincarnated and have lots to say about her previous life." This was two years before her death. At age of thirty-six, Hanan traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to have heart surgery. Hanan tried to telephone her daughter Leila before the operation, but couldn’t get through. Hanan died of complications the day after surgery.
Ten days after Hanan died, Suzanne Ghanem was born. Suzanne’s mother told Ian Stevenson that shortly before Suzanne’s birth, “I dreamed I was going to have a baby girl. I met a woman and I kissed and hugged her. She said, ‘I am going to come to you.’ The woman in was about forty. Later, when I saw Hanan’s picture, I thought it looked like the woman in my dream.” In other words, Suzanne Ghanem’s mother had a dream that she would have a child that had the appearance of Hanan Monsour, and this dream became reality.
At 16 months of age, Suzanne pulled the phone off the hook as if she was trying to talk into it and said, over and over, “Hello, Leila?” The family didn’t know who Leila was. When she got older, Suzanne explained that Leila was one of her children and that she was not Suzanne, but Hanan. The family asked, “Hanan what?” Suzanne replied, “My head is still small. Wait until it is bigger, and I might tell you.” By the time she was two, she had mentioned the names of her other children, her husband, Farouk, and the names of her parents and her brothers--thirteen names in all.
Acquaintances made inquiries in the town where the Monsours lived. When they heard about the case, the Monsours visited Suzanne. The Monsours were initially skeptical about the girl's claims. They became believers when Suzanne identified all of Hanan’s relatives, picking them out and naming them accurately. Suzanne also knew that Hanan had given her jewels to her brother Hercule in Virginia, prior to her heart surgery. Hanan instructed her brother to divide the jewelry among her daughters. No one outside of the Monsour family knew about the jewels.
Before she could read or write, Suzanne scribbled a phone number on a piece of paper. Later, when the family went to the Monsour's home, they found that the phone number matched the Monsour’s number, except that the lasttwo digits were transposed. As a child, Suzanne could recite the oration spoken at the funeral of Hanan's brother, Nabih. Suzanne's family taped the recitation, though the tape was eventually lost.
At five years of age, Suzanne would call Farouk three times a day. When Suzanne visited Farouk, she would sit on his lap and rest her head against his chest. At 25 years of age, Suzanne still telephones Farouk. Farouk, a career policeman, has accepted Suzanne as the reincarnation of his deceased wife, Hanan. To support this conclusion, Farouk points out that from photographs, Suzanne accurately picked out scores of people they had been acquainted with, and knew other information that only Hanan would have known.
