RD201904

mystical visions

Twin Reincarnations

Identical twins Gillian and Jenni-

fer Pollock were born on October 4,

1958, into a family scarred by tragedy.

On a Sunday morning in May 1957,

their older sisters, Jacqueline, 6, and

Joanna, 11, had been struck and killed

by a car while walking hand in hand

to church in their small English parish

of Hexham. When the twins arrived

17 months later, their grieving father,

John Pollock, was certain they were

actually his dead daughters, reborn.

Their mother, Florence Pollock, wasn’t

so sure. But then odd things happened.

When the twins began talking, they

would ask for the same toys their sis-

ters had played with—toys they could

not have known existed, because

they had long been stored away. Al-

though the Pollocks had left Hexham

when the twins were less than a year

old, when they brought them for a

visit—their first—at age four, the twins

pointed out locations that had been

meaningful to their sisters but which

the twins had never seen, such as the

school the deceased sisters had at-

tended and their favorite playground.

Even more chilling were the twins’

apparent “memories” of the deaths of

their sisters. Up until the age of five,

each suffered recurring nightmares

of being run over by a car. These

nightmares sometimes evolved into

daytime terrors. “The car! It’s coming

for us,” the twins would shriek at the

mere sound of a car engine firing up

in a small alleyway.

Florence, a reincarnation skeptic,

couldn’t think of any rational expla-

nation for how the twins had come to

act out their sisters’ agonizing final

moments with such apparent accu-

racy: “The blood’s coming out of your

eyes,” Gillian would cry, cradling her

sister’s head tenderly in her arms as

John and Florence looked on in hor-

ror. “It’s where the car hit you.”

In 1963, Dr. Ian Stevenson, an expert

on reincarnation at the University of

Virginia, began to study the Pollock

sisters. Finding no evidence that the

twins’ apparent past-life memories

had been manufactured or suggested

by their parents, he concluded it was

virtually impossible not to believe they

were living proof of reincarnation.

The twins’ “memories” gradually

faded as they reached adolescence.

In 1957, three children—including

two sisters—were struck and killed

(1) by a car. A year later, the sisters’

grieving mother gave birth to

twins. When they learned to talk,

the twins recounted stories about

the accident (2) only the dead girls

would have known. Were Gillian

and Jennifer Pollock (3) the

reincarnation of their sisters?

Dr. Ian Stevenson (4), an expert

in the paranormal, thought so.

The Pollock Sisters

rd.com 63

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