The Pollock Sisters: Reincarnated?

I don’t really know what to think about the concept of past lives, karma and reincarnation. There are several religions that do believe in reincarnation, that is the transference of a soul into a new body after death, but while that concept is broadly agreed upon, the various rules got so granular that my eyes started to go funny. The basics seem to be that yes, what you do in your previous and current life does count towards what body your soul will inhabit next time.

This is the concept of “karma” practiced by followers of Buddhism or Hinduism. It’s also used by non-followers of Buddhism or Hinduism to mean almost the same thing but in a more immediate way, making karma almost synonymous with payback or getting what you deserve, either positively or negatively.

Some religions believe that if a soul manages to go round enough times, it will eventually attain a state whereupon it can exit out of the cycle altogether. It can then go and hang out with all the other super-enlightened souls somewhere else in the universe while the poor schmucks on planet earth go through the same process over and over again, sometimes advancing, sometimes regressing to animal or even a vegetable state and I guess it’s hard to work up any sort of karmic progress if you’re reincarnated as a carrot.

This concept of having lived many lives before has come up throughout history. You’re not supposed to be able to remember your past lives, although I would have thought this would come in handy for advancing society, but maybe it’s seen as cheating and you have to enter each new cycle without any hidden advantages or knowledge. These past lives generally pop up through hypnosis and people have said they used to be all kinds of important and famous people in the past.

Ancient Egyptian pharaohs often claimed to be the reincarnation of various gods and in more modern times, people have then claimed to be reincarnations of these Pharaohs. Not many people claim to have had past lives as bus drivers called Keith, for example, but maybe we just haven’t heard about the more mundane ones. The main question I have about reincarnation is when does a soul’s journey start?

Were these souls present right from the get-go in animals or plants? Are new ones being created all the time? They must be as the population keeps growing.

Or were there just, like, a thousand at the start of when things became conscious and they keep going round and round and these people exist slightly above everyone else who just has the one shot and that’s it? I remember hearing a long time ago that more people are alive today than have ever existed, meaning that reincarnation cannot be a thing or, at least, new souls must need to be created all the time to keep up with demand. This is not true, however, as the Population Reference Bureau states on its website PRB.org: “Given a current global population of about 7.8 billion, the revised estimate means those alive in 2020 represent nearly 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived.”

So put that in your pipe and smoke it, reincarnation-deniers. Those souls are all lining up, waiting for another spin around the sun. As I am not religious and am kind of fumbling my way through this bit, let’s breathe a sigh of relief and move on to the actual story.

Reincarnation is primarily a facet of Asian religions that started in India such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. Why then, is one of the most compelling cases for the transference of a soul from one body to the next based around a couple of girls from Northumberland in England? Let’s find out!

The Mystery

Just a quick note before we start, that this story does include the deaths of young children and a few potentially distressing details so please bear that in mind if you want to carry on.

In Hexham, England in May 1957, the lives of the Pollock family were changed forever when 11 year old Joanna and her younger sister, 6 year old Jacqueline, were hit by a car on their way to church and were killed almost instantly. The driver of the car was a woman in a drugged and mentally distressed state who, having just had her own children taken away from her, intentionally drove into the Pollock sisters and their friend when she saw them walking along the road. Their friend also later died in the hospital.

Even in the depths of his grief, their father, John Pollock, was convinced by a long-held interest in reincarnation that his daughters would return and be reborn into their family as twins. There was no history of twins on either side of their family and his wife Florence did not share the same belief in reincarnation as her husband. The very next year, however, Florence Pollock became pregnant and while only one heartbeat had been detected throughout the pregnancy, John’s beliefs were confirmed when she gave birth to twin girls in October 1958.

The signs that these twins were the reincarnations of their deceased sisters became apparent almost straight away. Slightly annoyingly, they all have quite similar names but I’ll try and keep it clear who’s who by referring to them either as a twin in the case of the twins or as a sister if we’re talking about the two deceased girls. New twin Jennifer was born with a birthmark on her waist and a white line on her forehead.

This made her seemingly the vessel for the deceased Jacqueline as she had had the same distinct birthmark on her waist and had cut her head by falling on a bucket when she was three, resulting in a thin scar on her forehead. This meant that Joanna, who was 11 when she died, was now reborn as new twin Gillian and as the twins grew, Gillian took on a more motherly role to her twin, just as Joanna had to Jacqueline. And speaking of motherly, when the sisters had been alive, both Florence and John were working together at their grocery delivery business, leaving the main childcare to the girls’ grandmother.

After the shock of losing her daughters and then having the twins, Florence Pollock stopped working to concentrate on looking after her girls but the twins still preferred the company of their grandmother, despite their mother now being available to them.

Nothing much else happened for a couple of years as the twins were just babies learning how to do stuff but when they started talking and generally becoming more aware as human beings, their parents were taken aback at the things they would come out with. Both girls had a palpable fear of cars and would visibly be scared if one was driving close to them. Once, they heard a car in an alleyway and shouted “The car! The car!

It’s coming for us!” Their mother, Florence, found them on more than one occasion apparently reliving the crash experience with Gillian touching Jennifer’s head and saying things like “The blood’s coming out of your eyes” and “That’s where the car hit you.” Their father confirmed that younger sister Jacqueline had been bandaged just above the eyes when he went to identify her body.

As well as seemingly having knowledge of the event that ended their lives, the twins also seemed to have knowledge of the everyday lives of their sisters. They started asking for toys that Florence had boxed away and hadn’t told them about and when the twins got them, they shared them between themselves with Jennifer claiming the deceased younger sister’s toys and Gillian naturally taking possession of older sister Joannna’s doll. They knew the names of the toys and which toys had been Christmas gifts and which hadn’t. Gillian enjoyed acting and dressing up which mirrored her older sister’s favourite activity and they both loved brushing their father’s hair, a very specific thing which their older sisters had also had great fun doing.

When the twins were around 4 years old, the family returned to Hexham for the first time since the twins had been babies and astonishingly, both girls seemed familiar with the place, knowing the way to a park with swings that their sisters had liked and even pointing out the school that the deceased sisters had attended. They would refer to some things as though they had experienced them when they hadn’t. For example, Florence once told the twins that they could always eat lunch at school if they didn’t like what she made for them.

They replied “we’ve done that before,” even though they hadn’t. Their older sisters, however, had.

As they started to develop more skills, it was noticeable to their parents that Gillian could naturally hold a pencil and took to writing more quickly than her twin Jennifer who would hold the pencil more in a fist grip and is noted to have had issues with writing and holding a pen into adulthood. This is not particularly significant until you hear that older sister Joanna enjoyed writing and had taken to it naturally, while her younger sister Jacqueline had struggled with holding a pencil in her short life and would usually revert to holding it in her fist.

Once, John Pollock put on an old smock that Florence used to use before the twins were born. Jennifer, who had never seen it before, asked “why are you wearing mummy’s coat?” Gillian did not have any reaction to the smock and Jennifer got annoyed with her and said their mother used to wear it when she was delivering milk, which was true. If Gillian was the reincarnation of the older deceased Pollock sister, she would not have been familiar with the coat as the older sister Joanna was always at school when their mother was doing deliveries, while the younger sister was at home and would have seen her in the coat.

Throughout these occurrences, their father John became more and more convinced that his dead daughters had returned to him but while Florence wavered back and forth, she never believed as strongly as he did. The older sister Joanna had also been fond of saying “I will never be a lady” which takes on a chilling meaning in the aftermath of her early death.

As the tale of the potentially reincarnated twins seeped out, a psychologist called Dr. Ian Stevenson got wind of them and conducted many interviews with them, their parents and other children for his book “Children Who Remember Previous Lives” which was first published in 1987. As they aged, however, the twins remembered less and less about their previous lives and by the age of around 5, they had stopped mentioning it altogether and the coincidences also stopped. Was this because as the youngest sister had only been 6 when she died, their previous life experience just came to an end?

Or is it just a natural thing that happens in reincarnation so that people can get on with the new life they have? Why was Dr. Ian Stevenson so convinced they were telling the truth? It’s time to decode.

Explanations

I do not like bashing stuff like this as it feels quite low, however, I’m quite surprised that this case is supposed to be some of the strongest evidence we have to prove reincarnation exists as, in my opinion, it’s still pretty weak. John Pollock was an admitted believer in reincarnation which was a little odd as he was a Catholic and Florence had converted to Catholicism when they got married. Catholicism and reincarnation don’t really mix so why was John so obsessed with the idea that his daughters would be brought back?

Apparently, John was under the impression that his first daughters died as punishment for him believing in reincarnation so there you go, a bit of Catholic guilt for you after all. But it turned out he was right all along as - think about it - they had to die in order to prove that reincarnation really happens and, to ensure John was a witness to it, it had to happen while he and his wife were still of parenting age. I don’t know if I’ve made a point to prove or disprove it there but let’s carry on.

The main negative to this story is that, as is so often the case, we only have the word of a couple of people that any of the examples happened at all. The same couple of stories about the toys and the school keep getting trotted out but there doesn’t really seem to be much more to it than that. Neither twin came flat out and said she was Joanna or Jacqueline which you might expect if they had been immediately plonked back into new bodies.

The parents claimed they had not talked to the twins about the deaths of their sisters so how would they know any details? Well, they may have overheard their parents talking or heard about it some other way. Their grandmother spent a lot of time looking after the first sisters so may have talked to the twins about what had happened.

And it’s not normally mentioned as an important point but the Pollock twins also had FOUR older brothers at this point so it gets easier and easier to see where the information about their sisters might have come from. I mean, I can understand the parents maybe not mentioning the deaths around them but there is absolutely no way that one of the many other siblings wouldn’t have let it slip at one point or another, probably on purpose.

The holding the pencil thing is also not conclusive proof of reincarnation. I guess one twin just found it easier than the other to get to grips with writing. My own children hold pens in different ways and I myself use a modified version of the quote unquote “proper” way to hold a pen as it’s always just been easier and felt more natural.

The fact that sister Jacqueline had been using her fist to hold a pencil at the age of 6 isn’t that unusual and only takes on any importance because one of her twin sisters then did the same thing. I have no idea if how you hold a pen can be related to genetics but in examples similar to this, don’t you think it’s more of a case of genetic disposition over reincarnation?

Joanna repeatedly saying “I will never be a lady” only takes on significance because of her premature death. She might have said it in response to her mother or grandmother saying something about her behaviour. It’s easy to imagine a child being told “Young ladies don’t do XYZ” and then retorting “Well then, I will never be a lady.”

It would have been far more prescient for her to say something like “I will die young” or “I’m going to get hit by a car” but she never said anything like that. Also, let’s talk about Florence’s smock that John wore one day. Twin Jennifer said “why are you wearing mummy’s coat?”

She might just have been asking why her dad was wearing an item intended for a woman or that it looked like a dress or something. She might have got the information that her mum had worn it when she was still working from any one of her several brothers or her grandmother. And Gillian just might not have been told that or hadn’t been paying attention so it rang no bells when the item reappeared.

Also, when the older sisters were still alive, Florence and John worked together on their grocery and dairy delivery business so the children were looked after primarily by their grandmother. When the twins were born, Florence stopped working to concentrate on them but they still seemed to prefer spending time with their grandmother. This could just be that Florence was unconsciously acting in a slightly weird way with them after all that she’d recently been through or maybe the grandmother was also feeling such grief and guilt over the dead sisters that she poured extra attention into the twins, making them naturally gravitate to her for comfort.

The similarity in favourite activities that the twins had with their sisters can also be explained in this way. The grandmother and other family members might have consciously or unconsciously steered them towards things the older girls had enjoyed doing rather than the twins spontaneously deciding that they liked this thing or that thing.

There are various other biases at play here that could also have influenced the twins’ behaviour. If your children had been killed by a car, you’re probably going to be pretty wary around cars when your younger children start walking by themselves. It’s not difficult to imagine that Florence or the twins’ grandmother would act in an overprotective manner when crossing the road with them or that they might also have developed a fear of cars that could easily pass on to the young twins.

With regards to Dr. Ian Stevenson, he came to some very weird conclusions in his book. In a different example of potential twin reincarnation, he theorized that the twins were born as twins thanks to the conscious will of their mother. In the next sentence, he goes on to say that in the case of the Pollock twins, as Florence didn’t share her husband’s belief in reincarnation: “if she brought about the twin birth, she did not do so consciously.”

So you can will twins into existence but you might do it without realizing. Thanks, Doc, that explains that.

Stevenson also theorized that as Jennifer was born with birthmarks matching those of her older sister and her identical twin was not, that reincarnation was more likely to be the explanation than just a coincidence. The birthmarks on Jennifer do seem to be the main evidence for reincarnation and in other cases, birthmarks or traces from previous accidents are commonly found on the new body. There’s no real way to explain this apart from genetics, the development in the womb and plain old coincidence.

The mark on Jennifer’s forehead, while similar, was not exactly like Jacqueline’s scar and I wasn’t able to find pictures of the waist birthmarks to compare similarities. Dr. Stevenson also posited that Florence could have psychically transferred the marks on to Jennifer as her thoughts would still have been dominated by the deaths of her older daughters.

Would this be evidence of reincarnation or something else, then? I’m not sure but either way it sounds a little wacky.

As time went on, the twins were said to grow up looking more like their older sisters with one being taller and the other shorter and a bit more “stocky” to quote from other articles. I’ve found some pictures of them as adults, however, and they look pretty similar in face, body shape and height to me. And while twins from a single egg, or “monozygotic” twins are also called “identical twins”, there is always something a little different about each one and in rare cases some monozygotic twins can even have different coloured skin, hair and eyes.

And the Pollock twins had the same parents as their older sisters so it’s not really surprising if they strongly resembled them in some way. The only confirmed picture of the older Joanna and Jacqueline that I found was on the front page of a newspaper when they died. The girls pictured there do not resemble the twins in any striking way, at least not to me.

Isn’t it also a less convincing case for reincarnation that the twins were born back into the same family? All the things they picked up on and seemingly knew without being told could have been told to them by their brothers or they could have just been saying anything and their parents made connections that weren’t really there. We all know that young children say all kinds of weird and sometimes creepy stuff but it doesn’t mean they’re hosting a spirit that died violently a few years previously.

Wouldn’t you think that more compelling cases for reincarnation would be of children that were coming out with things they couldn’t possibly have knowledge of or been exposed to where they were living? Nowadays especially, it would be quite easy to research what a child was saying and find out if this or that person had actually existed. I’m not suggesting that this was a deliberate hoax, more that maybe John Pollock was so desperate to believe in reincarnation that he probably saw anything as proof that his first daughters had come back.

The Pollocks actually ended up leaving the Catholic church in the 1960s due to negative reactions from fellow members regarding John’s views. So where did that leave the twins? Did their parents, especially their father, treat them differently than they would have had the older sisters still been alive?

Were they allowed to develop by themselves as individuals from infancy or were they pushed into this or that direction depending on what their older sisters had done at that age? I suppose it was lucky for them that the past life remembrance stopped and they could continue as regular children from the age of 5. The twins themselves apparently accepted their father’s views that they were the reincarnations of their older sisters but didn’t come out as reincarnation experts or advocates as they got older.

As all parallel behaviour and memories had stopped when they were still only 5, they probably couldn’t even remember doing any of those things as time went on. Maybe they just nodded and agreed with whatever their dad said because it was just easier.

I’m not anti the idea of reincarnation - as well as reading about it independently in the past, I’ve also read several novels recently where past lives or repeated lives were the major theme. Cloud Atlas is one of my favourite books of all time - stick with it, it’s worth it. I haven’t seen the film though.

It’s a cool and comforting idea that we can improve our souls and eventually get off this damn rock to where the really good stuff’s happening. I just don’t believe that this particular case of the Pollock twins is cold hard evidence of souls leaving one body and coming back in another. There are other, more recent cases where children have talked about totally bizarre things and unconnected past lives that ended up actually relating to real people.

The only issue with these, though, is that it is almost always children that are the case studies. After a while they forget or grow out of it, four and five year olds not being the most reliable of narrators. Also, whaddya going to do?

Your four year old suddenly announces he used to write movies, had a daughter called Jennifer and died at the age of 48 (this was a real case, by the way), what is there to be done? I guess you can sit him in front of some old classics to see if he can bring in the big bucks when he gets older but apart from that you’re just going to carry on with your day-to-day routine and hope he stops talking about it.

There is an interesting footnote to the Pollock twins’ story, though. While they had no recollection of past lives as they got older, twin Gillian Pollock experienced some sort of vision or flashback as an adult. She spoke to her dad and described in great detail a house and garden where she saw herself playing in a sandpit. John recognised the description as a house the family had lived in in Wickham.

The only issue? The Pollocks had lived there before Gillian was born. Older sister Joanna had lived there when she was young but Gillian had never been to the house or even the village in the whole of her current life.

Frequently Asked Questions

What religions believe in reincarnation?

Religions that believe in reincarnation include Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism.

What is the concept of karma?

Karma is the concept that what you do in your previous and current life counts towards what body your soul will inhabit next time. It is practiced by followers of Buddhism or Hinduism and is also used by non-followers to mean getting what you deserve, either positively or negatively.

What happened to the Pollock sisters in 1957?

In May 1957, Joanna (11) and Jacqueline (6) Pollock were hit by a car and killed almost instantly while walking to church. Their friend also died in the hospital.

What was John Pollock’s belief regarding his daughters’ deaths?

John Pollock believed in reincarnation and was convinced that his daughters would return and be reborn into their family as twins.

What signs indicated that the Pollock twins might be reincarnations of their deceased sisters?

The twins had birthmarks and behaviors that matched those of their deceased sisters. For example, Jennifer had a birthmark on her waist and a white line on her forehead similar to Jacqueline’s, and Gillian took on a more motherly role like Joanna had with Jacqueline.

What did the Pollock twins remember about their past lives?

The twins seemed to have knowledge of the event that ended their lives and everyday lives of their sisters. They had a fear of cars, knew the names of toys their sisters had, and recognized places their sisters had been.

What did Dr. Ian Stevenson conclude about the Pollock twins?

Dr. Ian Stevenson conducted interviews with the twins, their parents, and other children for his book ‘Children Who Remember Previous Lives.’ He was convinced that the twins were telling the truth about their past lives, but the twins stopped mentioning it by the age of around 5.

What are some alternative explanations for the Pollock twins’ behaviors?

Alternative explanations include the twins overhearing their parents or other family members talking about the deceased sisters, genetic dispositions, and the influence of their grandmother and older brothers.

What happened to the Pollock family’s religious beliefs?

The Pollocks left the Catholic church in the 1960s due to negative reactions from fellow members regarding John’s views on reincarnation.

What was the interesting footnote to the Pollock twins’ story?

As an adult, twin Gillian Pollock experienced a vision or flashback of a house and garden where she saw herself playing in a sandpit. John recognized the description as a house the family had lived in before Gillian was born, where older sister Joanna had lived.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Pollock Sisters: Reincarnated?
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.