Michael Nahm, in his Bigelow award-winning essay, "Climbing Mount Evidence: A Strategic Assessment of the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death," writes:
Following Stevenson’s footsteps through the mountains surrounding Beirut, you’ll meet Suzanne Ghanem. Here is a short summary of her case:
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| Suzanne Ghanem |
As soon as she could speak at the age of 16 months, she’d pull the phone off the hook as if trying to talk into it. Again and again, she said “Hello, Leila?” Later, Suzanne told her parents she was actually called Hanan and provided ample further information about her supposed previous life. She even scribbled a six-digit telephone number of her family before she had learned to read or write. But the number didn’t work. Nevertheless, when an acquaintance of Suzanne’s family made inquiries in the town she claimed to belong to, a Hanan matching Suzanne’s numerous statements was identified. Even the phone number was almost right: Suzanne had only transposed the last two digits. However, the two families were entirely unknown to each other. The day before Hanan died after a critical operation, she tried to reach her daughter Leila on the phone—in vain. When little Suzanne met Hanan’s former husband for the first time at the age of five, he being a complete stranger to her in conventional terms, she immediately recognized him as “her” husband and forged a strong relationship with him. When she visited him, the little girl sat on his lap and rested her head against his chest. From her home, she’d call him three times a day. Obviously, this caused a bit of a strain in this man’s new family life because his second wife wasn’t too pleased with the constant phone calls from a five-year-old who insisted on being her husband’s first wife. Twenty years later, Suzanne was still unmarried and called Hanan’s former husband “maybe more than once a week”.
But this is only one example. Tom Shroder, author of Old Souls, was particularly impressed by the abundance of CORT in Lebanon, where new cases worthy of investigation seemed to pop up at every turn. They were just normal. Visiting India, you’ll meet seven-year-old Preeti in a difficult to reach end-of-the-road village.
As soon as she could speak, Preeti explained to her siblings that “this is your house, not my house. These are your parents, not mine.” She provided further information about the life of a girl named Sheila who died in a car accident. Ultimately, when Preeti was four, a matching family was identified in the village she claimed to belong to. When Sheila’s father paid Preeti his first visit to her home—unannounced and again, as a complete stranger to this girl in conventional terms—she recognized him, clung to him, and insisted so stubbornly on going with this stranger to their alleged former home that her parents eventually agreed.
Strong emotions and a stubborn identification with the previous personality are not unusual in CORT. In one particularly moving case, the CORT subject married the widow of the man whose life he remembered as soon as he was grown up; he even had children with his previous wife again. But also when the children talk about the death of the person whose life they claim to remember, they may exhibit strong emotions and identifications. Indian psychologist Satwant Pasricha, who
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| Satwant Pasricha |
“When she talked about her memories of dying [...] I could see she was really reliving the terror of it. You can’t quantify that, but that was the sort of thing that persuaded me these stories might be real.”
Pasricha was not the only scientist who accompanied Stevenson during his decades of research, or who performed similar research without his help. In India, for example, Professor P. Pal investigated the case of a girl named Sukla Gupta before Stevenson was able to investigate the case himself.
Sukla remembered the life of a mother who died leaving a small baby behind her, Minu. Her last thoughts were concerned with who would be taking care of Minu. Even before Sukla spoke about her previous life, she would cradle a pillow or a piece of wood in her arms, calling it “Minu”. When Sukla later provided sufficient information to allow identification of Minu’s family and was eventually reunited with all of them including Minu, she was overwhelmed with emotion.
Pal concluded the article about his investigation with these thoughts about Sukla’s behavior, sympathizing with the reincarnation model:
“How else one can explain [her] emotions in the presence of Minu, who is eight years her senior, or wifely feelings for a man of 42 years in a girl under six [...] A girl of five cannot be tutored to simulate these feelings and that too not for an hour or two but for days and months.”
Michael Nahm is a German biologist and parapsychologist whose psi research has focused on terminal lucidity, near-death experiences, cases of the reincarnation type, physical mediumship, hauntings, the history of parapsychology, and various other riddles of the mind and the evolution of life. In 2018 he accepted an appointment at the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) (Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health) in Freiburg, Germany. His publications are available at http://www.michaelnahm.com/publications-and-downloads and his Bigelow essay may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes have been deleted in these excerpts but are available in his text posted on the Bigelow website.
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