On a Sunday morning in May 1957, two young sisters were walking to church in the small English town of Hexham when tragedy struck. Joanna Pollock, who was 11 years old, and her 6-year-old sister Jacqueline were hit by a car and died right there on the street. The driver was a woman dealing with serious mental health problems who was trying to end her own life. A friend walking with the girls also died in the crash. For their parents, John and Florence Pollock, the pain was almost too much to bear.
John believed strongly in reincarnation, even though he was Catholic and most people in his church did not agree with that idea. Florence thought the whole concept was nonsense and got really upset when John kept saying their daughters would come back to them somehow. They fought about it so much that Florence almost left him.
According to Encyclopedia, about a year after losing their girls, Florence got pregnant again. Her doctor checked her several times and said she was only having one baby. But when the time came in October 1958, Florence had twins. Nobody in either John’s or Florence’s family had ever had twins before. Right after the babies were born, John and Florence noticed something odd about Jennifer, one of the twin girls.
More weird stuff kept happening
She had a brown mark on her side in the exact same spot where Jacqueline used to have one. Even stranger, Jennifer also had a white line on her forehead right where Jacqueline had gotten a scar years earlier after falling onto a bucket. When the twins were about three years old, they started doing things that really freaked their parents out.
The girls asked for specific toys that used to belong to Joanna and Jacqueline. These toys had been put away in boxes and nobody had talked about them much. Somehow the twins knew which toys were whose and they split them up the same way their dead sisters had done.
The Pollocks had moved away from Hexham after the accident happened, but they went back to visit when the twins were still little. During that visit, Gillian and Jennifer started pointing at buildings and places around town like they had been there before.
In 1957, in Hexham, England, two sisters, Joanna (11) and Jacqueline Pollock (6), were killed in a horrific car accident. Their parents, shattered by grief, never expected what would come next. A year later, Florence Pollock gave birth to twins, Jennifer and Gillian. And from the… pic.twitter.com/usfm57AAbx
— Jason Wilde (@JasonWilde108) August 17, 2025
They showed their parents where Joanna and Jacqueline’s school was, and they even knew about an old playground that had been torn down before they were born. The way the twins acted was creepy too. Gillian bossed Jennifer around and took care of her, just like Joanna used to do with Jacqueline. Jennifer acted shy and needed help with things, the same way Jacqueline had been.
Cars scared both girls really badly. If a car drove by too fast or made a loud noise, they would grab onto each other and scream that the car was coming to get them. One day Florence walked into a room and saw the twins playing a game that made her blood run cold. Gillian was holding Jennifer’s head in her lap and saying that blood was coming out of her eyes from where the car hit her. Florence had never told the girls how their sisters died.
The Pollock Twins (1957): Reincarnation? Samsara??
— Jason Wilde (@JasonWilde108) March 18, 2024
After the tragic death of their daughters, Joanna and Jacqueline Pollock, in a car accident, John and Florence Pollock from Hexham, England, had twins Gillian and Jennifer. The twins purportedly displayed behaviors and… pic.twitter.com/odqs3EJslf
A researcher named Dr. Ian Stevenson heard about the Pollock family and came all the way from America to meet them in 1963. Stevenson spent years studying kids who said they remembered being someone else before they were born. He had looked into thousands of these cases from all over the world. While there are other strange behavior, but worth it.
Stevenson came back to visit the Pollock family many times over the next 20 years and wrote down everything he saw and heard. Later on, doctors did blood tests that proved Gillian and Jennifer were identical twins, which made it even weirder that only Jennifer had those birthmarks. Stevenson wrote that the Pollock case was one of the best examples he had ever found of possible reincarnation.
The Pollock Twins: Proof of Reincarnation?#mystery #paranormal #history #reincarnation pic.twitter.com/lkwaAujMg6
— InformOverload (@InformOverload) October 3, 2025
All the strange things the twins said and did stopped happening when they turned five. They grew up like normal kids and became adults who did not remember anything unusual from when they were little. But the story got complicated in 2024 when a podcast called Extrasensory dug into what really happened. Two of John’s granddaughters came forward and said he was mean and controlling, and they claimed he made the whole reincarnation thing up. While there are other strange phenomena where meteorite turns into something else.
Jennifer, who is now in her 60s, talked to reporters for the first time in decades and said that was not true. She defended her dad and said he really believed what he was saying and never made her or her sister say things that were not true. Jennifer said she thinks there is an 80 percent chance the reincarnation was real, but she also said nobody will probably ever know for sure.
