Reincarnation? The Strange Case of the Pollock Sisters

 

Joanna and Jacqueline Pollock, who died in a car accident. Photo: Reddit

In the late 1950s, the entire English-language press wrote about the Pollock family: two of their children died in a terrible car accident.

In the early 1960s, the whole world was already talking about the Pollock family: they had two girls born who looked exactly like the deceased. 

The Pollock Family

John and Florence met in the early 1940s. He was a deeply religious Catholic, she was a Protestant.

They became friends when they talked about reincarnation, then fell in love. A few years later they got married and Florence became a Catholic.

The Pollock family lived in love and prosperity in North East England. In 1946, the family had their first child, a girl named Joanna. Five years later, her sister Jacqueline was born.

When the youngest daughter was three years old, she got hurt while playing. . Because of this, a wound appeared on her forehead, which later turned into a scar. The girl was very worried that it was noticeable. But her sister and parents convinced Jacqueline that this was nonsense.

The sisters got along well with each other. They loved to play together, dress up in costumes, and put on performances. But most of all, they loved doing dad's new hairstyles. The girls grew up in a house full of love. The parents knew everything that was happening in their daughters' lives.

But when Jacqueline learned to speak in long sentences, she often repeated the phrase, “I will never be a lady.” And that scared John and Florence a little.

The disaster

In 1957, when Joanna was 11 and Jacqueline was 6, the girls went to church as usual on Sunday. They said goodbye to their parents, left the house, met up with a classmate, and the three set off on a familiar route.

On that Sunday morning in May 1957, a woman, consumed by despair after being forcibly separated from her children, decided to commit suicide. She took what she believed to be “lethal amounts of aspirin and phenobarbitone” and got into her car with the intention of crashing somewhere at full speed.

Residents of the small town of Hexham, Northumberland, England, saw her driving erratically through the quiet streets. Her last stop was a wall running alongside the pavement. She crashed head-on into it, but she didn't die. Instead, the collision killed three children who were walking to church at that very moment.

They were trapped between the car and the wall behind them. The impact “threw them into the air like cricket balls.”

The girls' parents were devastated. Florence fell into a deep depression. She cried constantly, replaying the events of those days in her head.

Her husband became even more immersed in his faith. It seems he tried to hide from what had happened there.

The parents of the deceased girls began to constantly quarrel and even considered divorce. But a miracle happened that forced the Pollock family to cancel the divorce proceedings: Florence became pregnant again.

The new beginning

More than a year after the tragedy on October 4, 1958, Florence gave birth to identical twins, Gillian and Jennifer.

The family started a new life. They moved to another city and tried to forget about what had happened.

But despite all the joy, the parents had many questions about what had happened. For example, the Pollocks had never had twins in their family, so the birth of two children was a true miracle.

But that wasn't the strangest part. The parents were surprised to find that Jennifer had the exact same birthmark as the deceased Jacqueline, and instead of the scar on her forehead, there was a mole.

John assured his wife that reincarnation had occurred, but Florence considered this nonsense and flatly refused to believe her husband's words until the children were older.

When the twins learned to talk, they began to ask their parents to give them the toys that Joanna and Jacqueline played with. Even though, of course, they had never seen them.

When their parents showed them the dolls of their dead sisters, the girls without hesitation named them and told them exactly when they had received each of the toys.

If the family went for a walk in the city, Jillian and Jennifer had no trouble describing the places they passed. They would point out where and what they had done before. If a car passed by on the street, the girls would go into hysterics.

They would start shouting, "Car! Car! She's coming to get us!"

The girls also had similarities in behavior with their dead sisters: Jillian and Jennifer loved to do their father's hair. And they got along well with each other. They often turned to their grandmother for advice, who raised their sisters throughout their childhood while their parents worked.

When Jillian and Jennifer turned five years old, absolutely all memories of their past lives disappeared from their memory.

The girls' story intrigued psychiatrist Ian Stevenson. He was convinced that the process of transmigration of souls could help in the development of medicine. Therefore, he studied the girls and their parents for a long time to find out whether this whole story was a fabrication of the spouses or whether reincarnation really happened in the Pollock family.

As a result, believing the family, in 1987 he published the book "Children Who Remember Past Lives." He collected 14 examples of reincarnation, including the case of the Pollock sisters. However, there were those who considered the family story a lie and a provocation.

For example, British historian Ian Wilson writes that it was all a fabrication of the parents. After all, there was not a single outsider who had heard the girls' stories about their past lives.

Ian Stevenson met with the Pollock sisters several times in adulthood to talk about their childhood. Each time they assured him that they no longer remembered anything. And in general, they doubted that reincarnation even existed.

However, in 1981, Gillian fell into a trance several times and was seen playing in the sandbox while in a "foreign" body. She described in detail the garden near the house. And everything in her stories matched the place where the Pollock family lived with their deceased daughters.

Even though the girl had never been there and had not seen any pictures.