On May 5th of 1957, two young English sisters, Joanna Pollock, 11, and Jacqueline Pollock, 6, died in a tragic car accident while walking to church with a nine year old friend named Anthony. The driver was deeply distraught at having her own children removed from her care, and apparently intentionally hit the three children in a misguided attempt at vengeance. Joanna and Jacqueline both died at the scene while Anthony died en route to the hospital.
Their parent, John and Florence Pollcok were very shocked, after losing both of their daughters. And then, John claimed to have a vision from God in the days after his daughters’ deaths, and also claimed to somehow know that Joanna and Jacqueline had been killed in retribution for John praying for proof of reincarnation. John had read a book as a child about past lives and reincarnation, and the idea had fascinated him ever since.
One year after the tragedy, Florence got pregnant in early 1958. John was adamant that the pregnancy was going to be twin girls, and that both Joanna’s and Jacqueline’s souls would be in the new babies. Even when the doctor told the couple it was to be a single birth, John held firm – this was the girls coming back.
On October 4, 1958, Florence gave birth to two identical twins. The girls were named Gillian and Jennifer.
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| Diane Arbus photograph, Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967. Image credit: Wikipedia |
Immediately, the parents noticed a weird coincidence.
Jennifer had two birthmarks. One was a round dark mark on the left side of her waist — identical to a birthmark little Jacqueline had had. The other was a slightly depressed mark on her forehead — over the right eye. This one was identical to a scar Jacqueline got when she accidentally fell and hit her head on a bucket.
But there was more to come.
When the twins were old enough to talk, they began identifying and requesting toys that had belonged to their dead sisters.
When the twins were nine months old, the family moved away from Hexham. Three or four years later, the Pollocks returned for the first time, the girls began talking about a nearby park where they liked to swing at. A park they had never been to before, also pointing out landmarks only their dead sisters would have known (such as a school they’d attended).
The girls also apparently had some slight form of PTSD related to cars, as they often had extreme reactions to the sounds of cars – they often flinched away and screamed that the car was coming to get them. Florence also claimed that the girls often spoke of the accident that killed their sisters, saying such things like “blood’s coming out of your eyes. That’s where the car hit you.”
After the twins turned five, these incidents became less frequent, and the girls went on to lead normal lives. Still, the story of the Pollock Sisters made its way to Dr. Ian Stevenson (1918–2007), a psychologist who studied reincarnation. After studying thousands of supposed cases, Dr. Stevenson wrote a book telling of 14 cases he believed to have been real, including that of the Pollock Sisters.
References:
The twins pictured are named Cathleen and Colleen, from Roselle NJ, and the picture is called Identical Twins by the photographer Diane Arbus, a well-known work from the mid-1960s.
ReplyDelete@antoine: Hi, thanks a lot for your information. I searched the web and got the image source from Wikipedia. I have corrected the image caption and source
DeletePlease don't put your website link in Comment section. This is for discussion article related only. Thank you :)