When Lauren Pollock’s religious studies teacher informed her class they were to be shown a documentary about reincarnation, the 12-year-old schoolgirl little predicted what she was about to see.
She watched in stunned silence as a familiar photo loomed from the television screen – the original of which stood on the mantelpiece at her family home. It showed her dad Keith, with his parents, three brothers and two young sisters, Jacqueline and Joanna. What the documentary went on to disclose was even more startling.
Not only had the two little girls been tragically killed aged just six and 11 in a road accident in May 1957, but their father John had then prophesied that his wife would give birth to identical twin girls – who, he said, would be the reincarnation of Jacqueline and Joanna.
Astonishingly, 15 months later, she did, indeed, give birth to identical twins, confounding doctors who had discovered only one heartbeat during her pregnancy. What’s more, the younger twin, Jennifer, had a birthmark above her eye in exactly the same place that the younger of the two dead sisters, Jacqueline, bore a scar from a childhood mishap.
It was one of many eerie similarities between the twins and their dead siblings, and their father John went to his grave in 1985 still insisting that his girls had been reborn.
Yet this film, made in 1979 and already 20 years old by the time Lauren saw it, was the first she had ever heard of her grandfather’s claims. Her dad Keith had never mentioned what happened to his sisters, and on the rare occasions he did talk about his father, it was far from fondly.
‘I just couldn’t get my head around it,’ Lauren, now a 37-year-old television producer, recalls today. ‘We literally never spoke about it. I told Mum when I got home and she told me not to mention it to Dad, because it was upsetting for him, and he didn’t believe any of it.’
Keith wasn’t the only one. From the moment John made his claims, many, including members of his own family, dismissed him as a crackpot or desperate publicity-seeker. Yet others, including scientists who travelled from far and wide to the Pollocks’ Northumberland home, viewed the twins as one of the most compelling pieces of proof that the souls of the departed could reappear in the bodies of the living.
Twins Gillian and Jennifer Pollock, pictured in 1965, shared eerie similarities with their dead siblings, and their father believed the girls were reincarnations of their sisters
Either way, for years the story was lost to history – until now. For today, the full extraordinary tale is being told for the first time in nearly half a century in Extrasensory, a fascinating eight-part podcast that revisits the case and tracks down members of the Pollock family, uncovering a web of secrets and contradictions.
The story of what the podcast’s producer Rosie Pye calls the ‘spooky twins’ is underpinned by one central question: what happens after we die?
‘It’s something we all think about,’ she says. ‘This thing happened, and feeds into one narrative that there’s something supernatural at play, but then there’s a counter-narrative, which is that coincidences happen.’
That story begins in post-war England, where first Joanna then Jacqueline were born into the Pollock clan. Their dapper father John, often clad in a three-piece suit and cravat, ran a milk-delivery business and while not wealthy the family was comfortable.
Then, on a sunny Sunday morning in 1957, tragedy struck. Jacqueline and Joanna were walking hand in hand to church with a friend called Tony when a green car mounted the footpath and crashed into them. All three were killed. The driver, Marjorie Winn, was found to be intoxicated after overdosing on aspirin and the epilepsy medication phenobarbitone. She was later committed to a psychiatric hospital.
The devastating incident plunged the tight-knit community into mourning – but John seemed to make a speedy recovery from his grief. Long fascinated by the concept of reincarnation, he told everyone who would listen that he would soon see his daughters again – not in the after-life but here on Earth.
His claim that his wife Florence would soon give birth to the reincarnated spirits of Joanna and Jacqueline, was an extraordinary belief in buttoned-up 1950s England, and particularly for a man raised a devout Catholic.
John Pollock’s daughters Joanna and Jacqueline were killed by a car on their way to church in Hexham, Northumberland in 1957
Yet Florence did become pregnant again, and on October 4, 1958, against no small odds (having identical twin girls is around 1 in 500), she gave birth to Gillian and Jennifer, aided by an apparently astonished midwife.
‘John was delivering milk when it happened,’ Lauren says. ‘And the story goes that a friend raced to find him and said: “I have some good news for you.” And straightaway John says: “Yes, I know. Twins.”’ What’s more, even the sceptical – and devoutly Catholic – Florence couldn’t help but notice the birthmark on Jennifer’s forehead, in precisely the same place where Jacqueline’s scar had been. She also had an identical darker patch of skin, the size and shape of a thumbprint, on her hip.
That John’s prophecy had apparently come to pass was enough to cause unease among the locals in the market town of Hexham: some shunned the Pollocks, and by the time the twins were six months old the entire family had decamped 30 miles to Whitley Bay.
The ‘reincarnated’ sisters with a photo of their deceased siblings, inset, with whom they apparently shared memories and mannerisms
But as the twins grew up, it was not just their increasing resemblance to their deceased siblings that struck their parents. Both seemed to channel their feelings and instincts: Gillian of Joanna and Jennifer of Jacqueline. This despite, the Pollocks insisted, being told nothing of their tragic story. ‘We’ve never told them anything,’ John repeatedly insisted to the newspaper reporters who visited them at home.
Yet somehow, both parents claimed, the twins liked the same clothing and songs as their dead sisters and talked about their sisters’ friends whom they’d never met. When Florence brought down the family’s old toys from the attic, she said, the girls automatically approached different toys without arguing or hesitation, Gillian taking Joanna’s favourite toys while Jennifer picked out Jacqueline’s.
When they returned to Hexham – a place both Pollocks said they had never previously taken the twins, the parents claimed their daughters were able to identify areas they couldn’t possibly have seen before in their lives.
Both also had a phobia of cars, suffering recurring nightmares of being hit by one and, when startled by passing vehicles, would shout things like ‘The car! It’s coming for us!’ In another incident, Gillian recounted how Jacqueline had got her scar, by pointing at it and saying: ‘That is the mark Jennifer got when she fell on a bucket.’
Their mother, who continued to struggle to believe in the concept of reincarnation, let alone that her own daughters may embody it, also recalled how she had once stumbled across the twins playing a game in which Jennifer cradled her sister’s head in her lap, saying: ‘The blood’s coming out of your eyes. That’s where the car hit you.’
So compelling was their story that Professor Ian Stevenson, an American psychiatrist regarded as one of the foremost researchers into reincarnation, crossed the Atlantic six times to interview the family. He remained convinced until his dying breath in 2007 that the twins were the most persuasive case study he had ever come across during decades of research.
Yet some members of the Pollock family thought it was nonsense – and they also had little good to say about John. That included Lauren’s father Keith (the twins’ brother), who died in 2015. ‘When my grandfather died, my father said something like “Well, the old man’s dead.” Which is not like my dad at all,’ she tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘A lot of people had not very nice things to say about my grandfather.’
That included Liza and Joanna – the daughters of Keith’s brother Ian, who has also passed away. Interviewed on the podcast, they describe their grandfather as ‘a narcissistic, gaslighting little man’ who bullied his sweet-natured wife Florence and invented the reincarnation claim for attention.
Family divisions were also longstanding. In 1980, a year after Florence died of a heart attack aged 57, John had remarried with what seemed like unseemly haste, creating what Lauren today calls ‘a big rift’. ‘I think the fact that, once their mother had died, he moved on so quickly and remarried so quickly, it pulled the family apart,’ she says. Five years after his second marriage, John died from a heart attack aged 64.
Years passed until that late-Nineties RE lesson, in which a 1979 ITV documentary called The Hexham Reincarnation – the last public airing of the story and filmed when the twins were 21 – was shown. ‘I couldn’t wrap my head around it to be honest,’ says Lauren. And with her father reluctant to discuss the family history until his death in 2015, the circumstances around it seemed destined to lie under a permanent question mark. That is until Lauren received a call from the
Extrasensory podcast team who had struggled to find members of the extended Pollock family but eventually tracked her down and, earlier this year, Jennifer who by now was 66 and the only surviving twin.
She still has the fair hair and light blue eyes of her youth, as well as that birthmark, and lives with Steve, her husband of 28 years, in the North West of England. It took months before Jennifer agreed to be interviewed.
And when the podcast team visited her at home, her memories were not remotely what they expected.
Far from the portrait of an indifferent, sometimes cruel and ‘pathetic’ man ringing in their ears from other family members, Jennifer remembers a ‘really good dad’. ‘Because the lads were a lot older than us, we were like the babies of the family.
‘He spoiled us,’ she recalls. ‘He used to call us “my two princesses”. He loved us dearly.’ There were camping trips to Scotland and picnics at the beach. Jennifer fondly recalled how, at Christmas, the entire family gathered round the piano and sang carols played by their father.
As far as she was concerned, her mother and father enjoyed a happy marriage. ‘They were really happy,’ she recalls. ‘I’ve never seen Mum and Dad argue. I never saw any physical abuse with my father.’
All this, of course, could be explained by the rose-tinted memories of a favourite daughter – who backs her father’s claims to the hilt. For just as John insisted to those reporters all those years ago, Jennifer is vehement that neither she nor Gillian had the slightest knowledge of the existence of their older sisters until well into their teenage years, when both parents told them what had happened.
‘Gill and I were gobsmacked,’ she says. She remembers how she and Gill were ‘terrified to cross a road’ and that Gill’s splay-footed gait – directly reminiscent of Joanna’s – led to her being nicknamed ‘the penguin’.
Gill, of course, is no longer alive to give her account, and Jennifer misses her dearly, describing her death from a series of heart attacks as ‘one of the most awful things I’ve been through’. She says she feels Gill’s presence today: that when she’s upset, she can hear her late twin whispering ‘Don’t cry Jenny’ in her ear.
The crucial question, of course, is whether she believes her father’s prophecy – that she is the reincarnated spirit of her sister Jacqueline. ‘I think what he said was the truth, the whole truth, as he believed it,’ she says. ‘I don’t think he would put us all through that if he was lying about it,’ she says. That latter sentiment is shared by her niece Lauren.
‘I think John was probably a driving force pushing for all of this narrative, but I also think some things can’t be explained,’ she says. ‘Joanna and Jacqueline were so little and had never seen the world, and so if they were going to come back, where else would they go, other than to their own family?’As podcast producer Rosie puts it, ‘The story is so gripping because you’re left thinking: what do I believe?’
- Extrasensory can be accessed at apple.co/Extrasensory
