Doubt | 5

Summary

Extrasensory: Episode "Doubt | 5" Summary

Release Date: November 18, 2024
Host: Will Sharpe (Apple TV+ / Blanchard House)
Produced by: Blanchard House

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Introduction

In the fifth episode of Extrasensory, titled "Doubt," host Will Sharpe delves deep into the enigmatic story of John Pollock, a milkman from 1950s Bristol, England. This episode explores themes of reincarnation, family secrets, and the thin veil between life and death, intertwining real-life events with investigative storytelling to question the veracity of alleged past lives.

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The John Pollock Prophecy ([00:14] - [05:22])

Will Sharp opens with a vivid recounting of John Pollock's haunting prophecy:

"In 1950s England, milkman John Pollock makes a sensational prophecy: His dead daughters will be reborn." ([00:14])

Initially dismissed as folly by even his wife, Florence Pollock, John's prediction gains credibility when twin girls are born with eerie similarities to their deceased sisters. The twins' uncanny resemblances, including birthmarks and behaviors, catch global attention, drawing in American scientist Ian Stevenson to investigate.

Notable Quote:

Ian Wilson: "John Pollock was absolutely believing that this is what he had done in a previous life." ([04:13])

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Ian Stevenson’s Investigation and Personal Struggles ([05:18] - [12:37])

Ian Stevenson, a prominent figure in reincarnation research, becomes deeply involved in verifying Pollock's claims. However, his investigation uncovers inconsistencies:

Will Sharp: "Nehemiah Bradford wasn't a widower at all. He died before his wife." ([04:37])

This revelation casts doubt on John’s past life narrative, revealing that Stevenson’s meticulous research doesn't support Pollock's story. Stevenson grapples with similar personal struggles, particularly his strained marriage to Octavia, whose frustration with his obsession over reincarnation parallels Florence Pollock’s skepticism of John.

Notable Quotes:

Jesse Baring: "Unfortunately, I think as the result of that sort of myopic focus on his parapsychological research and his extensive travels, they just kind of grew apart." ([07:31])

Ian Wilson: "John Pollock's enthusiasm for reincarnation may diminish the strength of the case..." ([25:57])

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The Personal Toll of Reincarnation Research ([07:40] - [13:32])

Stevenson’s dedication to his work mirrors Pollock's commitment, yet it costs him dearly on a personal level. His wife, Octavia, feels neglected and disillusioned by his relentless pursuit of evidence for reincarnation, leading to emotional distance and unresolved grief after losing a child.

Jesse Baring: "She could never speak of it again. I mean, it was decades later. She was clearly traumatized by the experience." ([09:20])

Stevenson's continued research despite personal losses underscores the deep-seated belief driving his investigations, akin to Darwin's transformative theory albeit in the realm of the metaphysical.

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Reincarnation Theories and Cultural Perspectives ([14:21] - [21:00])

The episode transitions into a broader exploration of reincarnation beliefs across cultures, referencing ancient Greek notions of souls experiencing reward or punishment before rebirth. Dr. Jeffrey Long elaborates on the temporary states of afterlife experiences:

Ian Wilson: "Each human soul, to use a convenient expression, could have had, on the average, opportunities for 20 incarnations." ([20:48])

Stevenson emphasizes empirical fieldwork over hypnotic regression, advocating for direct interviews and verifications to substantiate claims of past lives.

Ian Wilson: "He actually talked to people... and tried to verify." ([14:44])

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The Demise of John Pollock and Philosophical Questions ([17:14] - [22:51])

John Pollock’s life concludes tragically on Good Friday, April 5, 1985, as he succumbs to a sudden and severe illness, paralleling the agony experienced by his deceased daughters. This moment raises profound questions about the soul’s journey post-death:

Will Sharp: "What can John expect? Like right now? Well, his old chum Stevenson says that according to the evidence, the interval between death and rebirth may be greater in the west than it is in Asia." ([18:49])

The episode delves into the dual possibilities of reincarnation or eternal judgment, juxtaposing Stevenson’s scientific pursuit with potential spiritual doctrines that deny multiple lifetimes.

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Similar Cases and Emerging Doubts ([23:19] - [26:13])

Stevenson draws parallels between Pollock's case and other reincarnation claims, such as the Burmese girl who recalls being a Japanese soldier, highlighting recurring patterns like birthmarks corresponding to past traumas. However, Ian Wilson introduces skepticism:

Ian Wilson: "John Pollock's enthusiasm for reincarnation may diminish the strength of the case..." ([25:57])

Discrepancies in Pollock’s story, such as the lack of a proper burial and family estrangement, further cast shadows on the legitimacy of his claims, suggesting that the narrative may be a blend of reality and fabricated memories.

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Unveiling Family Secrets ([26:13] - [29:17])

The episode shifts to present-day ramifications, where Lauren, John’s granddaughter, discovers a family documentary without prior knowledge of her grandfather’s controversial legacy. Lisa, another granddaughter, reveals hidden truths about John Pollock, indicating that the public persona may mask a more complex and troubled individual.

Lisa: "He's definitely not what people thought he was. There's always two sides to the story." ([29:17])

This revelation underscores the theme that public narratives can obscure personal realities, leaving lingering doubts about the authenticity of reincarnation stories presented to the world.

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Conclusion

"Doubt | 5" intricately weaves the haunting tale of John Pollock with Ian Stevenson’s investigative endeavors, set against the backdrop of personal loss and familial tensions. As the episode progresses, it challenges listeners to question the authenticity of reincarnation claims, the reliability of memories extracted through hypnosis, and the potential biases that shape our understanding of life after death. The unfolding family secrets serve as a poignant reminder that beneath every sensational story lies a complex web of truths and deceptions.

Notable Closing Quote:

Will Sharp: "Don't always believe what you see in a person because there's always two sides to the story." ([29:17])

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Key Takeaways

• John Pollock’s Prophecy: A milkman’s prediction of his daughters' reincarnation sparks intense scrutiny and scientific interest.

• Ian Stevenson’s Pursuit: Balancing groundbreaking research with personal sacrifices, Stevenson embodies the relentless quest for understanding reincarnation.

• Cultural and Philosophical Dimensions: The episode explores varied beliefs about the soul’s journey, highlighting the intersection of science, spirituality, and personal experience.

• Emerging Doubts: Inconsistencies in Pollock’s story and family estrangements cast shadows on the legitimacy of reincarnation claims.

• Family Secrets: Discoveries by Pollock’s granddaughters reveal the hidden complexities behind public narratives, emphasizing the multifaceted nature of truth.

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Additional Information

Extrasensory is an Apple Original podcast produced by Blanchard House, available on Apple Podcasts. For more episodes and information, visit apple.co/Extrasensory.

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Transcript

[Will Sharp]

Bristol, England. December 1815. A full moon. He finds her corpse surprisingly hard to carry. A younger man would have found it easy, of course. But even with her small frame, his aging limbs are struggling. As he staggers from his house, he pauses, looks around. Nobody. The night watchman has just been round on patrol and won't be back for hours. He decides to drag the body. Thankfully, it's just a few steps to the churchyard and he's had an idea. He pulls the corpse to the plot where a funeral was held this afternoon. A freshly filled in grave. He'll dig up the top few feet of soil and bury her in there. He hadn't intended to kill her, of course. Hadn't intended any of it. But here we are. She was his servant. A young woman. After his wife had died, he'd become obsessed, infatuated. Of course, this man is no stranger to corpses. He's a surgeon, after all. So yes, he's seen plenty of corpses in his time. Eventually, he can't dig anymore. He's exhausted. He drags the body into the shallow grave and pauses. Gets his breath back. Her eyes staring up at him. Wide open, lifeless, grotesque. He looks away. Then he starts to shovel the earth back in, burying her. And little by little, she's gone. Nobody will ever know. And with that, the subject is back in the room. He's sweating profusely. The hypnotist offers him a glass of water. The subject loosens his cravat and reaches for his pipe. Any guesses who it is? Yes. The man who's just recalled his past life. His past life as a murderer is John. John Pollock. So now it's John who's saying he's been reincarnated. I know, right? John goes through it all with an author sometime later, at his home in Bridlington, late one night. It was all done under hypnosis. Nehemiah Bradford was the man's name. And there really was a Nehemiah Bradford at that time. Late 17th century, early 18th. And yes, he was a surgeon. And he lived in that area of Bristol. All true. I couldn't get over it. It was all so real, I tell you. So real, so vivid. Are you sure you won't take a drop of Scotch? Ian Wilson is the author John's telling it all to. He's doing research for a book about claims of reincarnation called Mind out of Time. And let's just say John's in no hurry to let his guest go.

[Ian Wilson]

He could talk behind the leg of a donkey and he was a chainsmoker as well. And I'm not a strains smoker.

[Will Sharp]

John's smoking cigarettes tonight, lighting each one from the dying embers of the last. An hour passes, then another, then another. The room is thick with smoke.

[Ian Wilson]

I don't think either of us are aware that time had gone on so much, so we just simply were happily conversing. But I think by 3am I was fairly, fairly done so.

[Will Sharp]

And Ian has no doubt that John is sincere.

[Ian Wilson]

John Pollock was absolutely believing that this is what he had done in a previous life.

[Will Sharp]

John says he even knows exactly where the servant's body is buried. He draws a map. Ian leaves John's place and does what he's doing with all the stories for his new book. He checks out what John's told him, he starts digging into it and that's when things get kind of sticky.

[Ian Wilson]

When I researched the whole thing, in fact, nothing like that had happened at all.

[Will Sharp]

It's a pattern Ian has become familiar with time and again with these sorts of stories. When he tries to verify the details, they just don't stack up. Turns out Nehemiah Bradford wasn't a widower at all. He died before his wife. And sure, there had been a murder of a servant in that part of Bristol, but it wasn't Nehemiah Bradford servant. And granted, it was a surgeon who'd been accused of that murder, but it was another surgeon, not Nehemiah Bradford. And in any case, it was a false accusation. It didn't go anywhere.

[Ian Wilson]

Ultimately, when you looked into the real history, it fell apart.

[Will Sharp]

So John's story is a mess, full of holes, a weird mashup of who knows. But in any case, one thing is clear. John's got it wrong. And if John got that wrong, what else has he got wrong? This is extrasensory. An Apple Original podcast produced by Blanchard House. I'm will sharp. Episode 55 doubt Charlottesville, Virginia. November 30, 1983. The doctors tell Stevenson that the end is near. His wife Octavia is in her final hours, complications from diabetes, and she's leaving far too soon. She's just 58 years old. Stevenson has put all of his reincarnation work on hold and he's been nursing Octavia. No visits to the Pollacks, no jaunts to the Far East. Stephenson has just been trying to make his wife's last few months on Earth more comfortable. But while Octavia's illness has brought them closer, to be honest, they haven't really been happy for some time. She's grown sick of Stevenson's obsession with reincarnation. In fact, it's pretty much destroyed their marriage. All those hours he spent on airplanes overseas rather than at home with her.

[Jesse Baring]

Unfortunately, I think as the result of that sort of myopic focus on his parapsychological research and his extensive travels, they just kind of grew apart.

[Will Sharp]

That, of course, is biographer Jesse Baring. So, yes, Octavia might well wish that Stevenson had spent a little more time thinking about this life rather than the next. But there have been good times. When they first meet, it's a proper romance, a real meeting of minds.

[Jesse Baring]

She was tall, graceful, beautiful, brilliant, kind of a Renaissance woman. She had a deep interest in biochemistry, but also she was an artist and a poet, and they really just hit it off.

[Will Sharp]

They're equals, both very, very smart. They marry in 1947, when Stevenson is 29 and she is 22. Like Stephenson, Octavia qualifies as a doctor, but she doesn't practice for long. Instead, she takes care of their home, a large farmhouse set in 80 acres.

[Jesse Baring]

She spent time with the horses and with the dogs and painting and writing poetry.

[Will Sharp]

They also have an old cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Very nice. They want to start a family. But that's when things take a turn. And it's where Stephenson can maybe relate to the Pollocks, I guess, even if the circumstances are quite different, because he and Octavia also know what it's like to lose a child.

[Jesse Baring]

She had a stillbirth delivery and they were never able to have children. So I think that loss affected them severely.

[Will Sharp]

Jesse reckons that happens sometime in the 50s, which, of course, is when the Pollocks lose their two girls. And, of course, it's devastating for Stevenson and his wife.

[Jesse Baring]

She could never speak of it again. I mean, it was decades later. She was clearly traumatized by the experience. You know, I do think that it's kind of interesting that he, in the wake of that loss, he basically spent the rest of his career surrounded by children.

[Will Sharp]

And this is pretty much when Stephenson starts getting into reincarnation, throws himself into his work. The only thing is, Octavia thinks all this past lives stuff is, well, basically garbage.

[Jesse Baring]

She thought it was mostly wasted time. She didn't understand it.

[Will Sharp]

It drives a wedge between them, a big wedge. She just doesn't get it. She doesn't get it at all. And she's almost kind of angry about it. I mean, certainly disappointed in terms of.

[Jesse Baring]

How can you put your reputation, all this hard work as a medical scientist at risk by this sensationalistic work? So I think that she never really understood why he was doing what he was doing.

[Will Sharp]

And maybe this is another reason why Stevenson can relate to John Pollock. Because remember when John Pollock first predicted the reincarnation of his two little girls? His wife Florence was also hostile, very hostile. Two men each crying out in their own the professor and the prophet. So maybe Stevenson's pondering all of this as he sits by Octavia's bedside in her last few hours on earth. Is he sitting there tortured by regrets? Sure, in the last year he's become devoted to his wife, but all the years before that, does he wish that he'd spent more time in the farmhouse or in the cabin in the mountains with Octavia and the dogs? Less time on planes, less time interviewing kids in far off lands? Life's short, after all, and Octavia's life has been shorter than most. Maybe he got his priorities all wrong, screwed everything up. Well, it kind of depends, I guess. I mean, maybe Stephenson isn't thinking any of that because are these Octavia's last few hours on earth? That's the million dollar question. The million dollar question Stevenson is trying to answer. His life's work is, well, death, or at least what comes after it. And that is bigger than his marriage to Octavia. Far bigger. So, yes, Stevenson is tortured, but he isn't tortured by regrets. Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Because he thinks that he's right, Completely right. He's tortured by being ignored, by being ridiculed. And he's tortured because his colleagues, mainstream science, I mean, even his own wife, for goodness sake, can't see just how massive, how important and how profound all of this is to him.

[Jesse Baring]

This was a dramatic scientific breakthrough on the scale of Darwin's theory of natural selection. That's what he thought he was doing and nobody was listening.

[Will Sharp]

Darwin, those are some big shoes. So, as his wife, Octavia, finally slips away, what does Stevenson feel about her death? Is he consoled by all his research, by the idea that Octavia is still out there somewhere? Or does he just feel loss, grief, pain? Continental Airlines Flight 172 to Bang. Either way, he thinks the work must go on. Stephenson resumes his travel trip after trip after trip throughout the mid-80s, gathering yet more examples. The more the better, he seems to think.

[Jesse Baring]

Thousands of cases.

[Will Sharp]

Flight 233 to Istanbul. Game now.

[Jesse Baring]

You know, maybe just by virtue of the preponderance of evidence that suggested reincarnation or survival of death, people would be persuaded that there was something enough there to warrant further study.

[Will Sharp]

Stevenson writes, he publishes articles, books, one after another. But here's something kind of curious. He never writes about John Pollock's past life, that weird story about him murdering his servant and burying the body. Why not? Well, there's a very good reason why Stephenson would give John's story a wide berth. Because Stevenson thinks hypnosis, or so called hypnotic regression, is, well, a bit dubious.

[Ian Wilson]

I shall try to quench misguided and sometimes shameful exploited enthusiasm for hypnosis, especially when it is proposed as a sure means of eliciting memories of past lives. What Stevenson did, by contrast, is go out into the field and actually talk to people.

[Will Sharp]

Jim Matlock is a research fellow at the Parapsychology Foundation.

[Ian Wilson]

And then Stevenson, after talking to the children, talking to their families, went out and tried to verify. Confirm what the kids were saying, confirm their memories. And that was very different from regressing an adult and bringing up what they felt to be memories. It was just their narratives, their fantasies, really.

[Will Sharp]

And as far as we know, John's past life is just that, a fantasy. Sure, the name of his alter ego is real enough, but everything else a figment of the imagination, never happened. Now, we don't know for certain if John and Stephenson ever discuss John's weird story. But in any case, they won't get a chance now because they've run out of time. John Pollock and Ian Stevenson don't know it yet, but they'll never see each other again. April 5, 1985. Good Friday. @ first, John thinks it's indigestion. The grease from the fish and chips, maybe. John's at home listening to one of his old records. He's just filled his pipe with fresh tobacco. Music and tobacco. John's remaining pleasures. His arthritis is bad and cash is tight. He really misses his milk round. Back in Hexham, that was a great little earner. Though he did have a nice holiday a while back, touring the British canals, paid for by his daughter Gillian, one of the twins. Anyway, as I say, it's Good Friday and now John starts to feel a bit dizzy. This isn't indigestion, he thinks. A rising sense of dread. John starts sweating. I mean really sweating. And then comes this crushing pain. A crushing pain which starts in his chest but spreads to his jaw, to his neck, right down to his stomach. John's in agony. The same agony felt by his wife Florence. The same agony felt by Chester Coulson. And now it's John's turn. Just 10 minutes drive to the hospital. And amidst it all is John, able to think about anything but the pain. Do Scenes from his life play out.

[Ian Wilson]

It's good to see you again, John.

[Will Sharp]

All those visits from Stevenson. The birth of the twins.

[Ian Wilson]

The earth shall cast out the dead.

[Will Sharp]

The reincarnation of his two little girls who died that day 28 years years ago. A beautiful spring day that was also pierced by the sound of an ambulance. Stay with me, John. Stay with me. The paramedic says, just a few more minutes. Then the paramedic rips off John's tie and his shirt. Amidst the excruciating pain, does John even remember his conviction that this isn't the end? Does he have regrets? Does he have doubt? Either way, it makes no difference. Because for John Pollock, in this form, in this body, in this life, it's over. He'll never make it to the hospital. It's Good Friday, and John Pollock is dead. He's 64. Or at least his body is dead. Right. So what happens next? What can John expect? Like right now? Well, his old chum Stevenson says that according to the evidence, the interval between.

[Ian Wilson]

Death and rebirth may be greater in the west than it is in Asia and other parts of the world.

[Will Sharp]

So John may have a bit of a wait. He's entered what Stevenson calls the intermission between lives, what Buddhists call the bardo, the in between. As per Stevenson's writing in his paper.

[Ian Wilson]

Titled Some Questions Related to Cases of the Reincarnation, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.

[Will Sharp]

Okay, so following that logic for now, John's soul, his consciousness, is now without a body. It's discarnate, as the experts say. Jim Matlock.

[Ian Wilson]

It exists for a while in a discarnate state, and then it unites with the body. And I think of that uniting with the body as being a sort of possession of the body.

[Will Sharp]

So what's going to happen while John is without a body? Well, the ancient Greeks had a pretty good hunch. Souls first experience either a kind of reward or punishment, depending on their behavior in the last life. So you have something like a heaven and a hell. Dr. Jeffrey Long is a professor of religion, philosophy and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College. That's there in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, too. But it's not for eternity. It's a temporary state, and then it's time to get reborn. And the Greeks believed that souls do have a choice. Somehow getting out of the embodied state gives us greater clarity and that we're able to see that. For example, oh, I did terrible things in that lifetime. And so I need to learn humility or I need to learn compassion. And if that's true. John is about to get a second chance. Or is it a third or fourth chance? Maybe even fifth chance? Well, Stevenson's done the math on that, too.

[Ian Wilson]

Each human soul, to use a convenient expression, could have had, on the average, opportunities for 20 incarnations.

[Will Sharp]

So John's soul will sort of waft around for a while without a body, and then he'll be reborn into a new body and he'll get another go. But there is, of course, another possibility. And this feels more risky because, well, what if John has got all of this wrong? What if reincarnation isn't real? I mean, remember at one point, John was a Catholic. He was a Catholic who believed the death of his two little girls was punishment. Punishment for all of those years praying for evidence of reincarnation. So consider this. What if it's John's old faith that has all the answers? But by your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself. On the Day of Wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed, that would mean something very different. That would mean that it's Judgment Day for John Pollock. In that case, there are no second chances. In fact, there are only two possibilities. John is going to heaven, or John Pollock is going straight to hell. So we don't know how news of John's death reaches Stevenson or how he feels about it. Maybe he considers jumping on a plane to go to the funeral. After all, the two men have known each other for over 20 years. Or maybe Stephenson's just too busy bashing.

[Ian Wilson]

Out his new book, Children who Remember Previous Lives, A Question of Reincarnation.

[Will Sharp]

And his books are selling pretty well. His publisher is happy. But Stevenson, on the other hand, not so much. Because, yes, his books are making an impact, just not with the right people. They're making an impact with the general public. And Stevenson doesn't want to be loved by the public. No, Stevenson is still pining for the love of his peers. And maybe, just maybe, this book will be the one to seduce them.

[Ian Wilson]

Are human beings things, or are they more than that? If they have something more than a thing has, can that something more, whatever it is, survive death?

[Will Sharp]

Stevenson outlines some of his favorite examples. And time and again, there are striking similarities to the Pollock case. Like a pregnant woman in India who.

[Ian Wilson]

Dreamed that a recently deceased man of their village, Maha Ram Singh, appeared to her and said, I am coming to you.

[Will Sharp]

When the woman's son is born, he.

[Ian Wilson]

Has a prominent birthmark on the lower part of his chest near the midline.

[Will Sharp]

And when the son is Around a year old, he starts talking as if he's a man called Maharani, and, pointing.

[Ian Wilson]

To his birthmark, said that he had been shot there.

[Will Sharp]

And sure enough, Maharam had been murdered, shot in the chest a year before the little boy was born. Stevenson then tells the story of a woman from Burma, now Myanmar. She is also pregnant and she has three dreams, three dreams about a Japanese soldier. When her daughter is born and old.

[Ian Wilson]

Enough to speak, she gradually told about having been a Japanese soldier during World War II, when the Japanese army occupied Burma.

[Will Sharp]

The daughter said that in her past life as a Japanese soldier, the village where the soldier was stationed came under attack by the Allies, and that's when the soldier was killed.

[Ian Wilson]

She described what the Japanese soldier had been wearing and doing when the strafing airplane came over and how he had tried to avoid being hit by its bullets. She said that he was struck in the groin and died immediately.

[Will Sharp]

And just as the Pollock twins had a phobia of cars, this little Burmese girl had a phobia of airplanes. Then, of course, Stevenson turns to the.

[Ian Wilson]

Case of Gillian and Jennifer Pollock.

[Will Sharp]

And here's where things get really interesting. Sure enough, Stevenson goes through the story just as we know it. The crash, John's prediction, the birth of the twins, and so on and so on. John's story, John's narrative. But just for a moment. In just one sentence, Stevenson entertains doubt.

[Ian Wilson]

John Pollock's enthusiasm for reincarnation may diminish the strength of the case among persons who cannot believe that he and his wife or some other member of the family did not talk about the deceased sisters in front of the twins.

[Will Sharp]

But let's just stay with that thought for a moment, the doubt, and consider this. Sure, there are lots of things about the Pollock case that correspond quite neatly with Stephenson's other cases. The violent death, the premonition, the birthmarks, the phobias. I mean, that all fits very neatly, doesn't it? But is it almost too neat? Now, remember how producer Poppy found Lauren, John's granddaughter?

[Ian Wilson]

It may just be a little bit.

[Will Sharp]

Further, because 43, 55, there it is. It was through that grave in Hexham where Lauren's father and sister are buried. But where is John buried? Well, the answer to that is this. John's not buried anywhere. He had a spiritualist funeral and was cremated. Then his ashes were divided up among the family, but there's no gravestone, no plaque, nothing. And remember how his sons, Keith and Ian, were mad at their father? Well, they were mad at him to the very end. Keith was Lauren's dad, I think when he found out he died, he said, oh, so the old man's dead. So what? There was no reconciliation, no forgiveness, no resolution? I know my dad didn't go to his funeral, but Lauren doesn't know any of this actually from her dad. He never spoke about him. You know, he just didn't ever speak about his parents. So, yeah, Keith didn't talk about John, not a single word. And he didn't talk about the whole reincarnation thing either. It was a family secret, remember? Lauren found out about that in a religious studies class when she was a teenager. And of course, John died two years before Lauren was born. So Lauren never met John. And then Keith sadly died too, very young. And all of that bad blood has made it very hard to track down Jennifer Pollock, the only surviving twin, which, as we know, Poppy is working on. But what about the other brothers? Well, Bobby didn't want to be interviewed. David didn't respond to our message, and Ian, he died a few years ago, but he did have daughters, Lauren's cousins. Now, Lauren and her cousins don't see each other a lot, but Lauren has been able to put us in touch with one of them, Lisa. Just to be clear, Lisa is another of John's granddaughters and she told us this story. It may ring a few bells. It's sometime in the 80s. Lisa can't remember when exactly, but she's in her late teens. She's home alone and looking for something to watch. She's going through all the videos on the shelf beneath the TV and comes across one that looks kind of interesting. She puts it in the machine and she has a shock. This looks like an ordinary family photograph.

[Ian Wilson]

But it tells a quite remarkable story.

[Will Sharp]

I might have even watched it with friends going, oh, you know, that's my. That's my aunt and that's my uncle. Oh, look. And that's the house. It's the documentary about the Pollock twins, Lisa's aunties. And Lisa is stunned because this is the first time she's heard about any of this. There was no talk of it. There was no talk of it at all. There's no mention of it. So, yes, just like Lauren, Lisa learns about her family secret from the tv. But that's not all Lisa tells us, far from it, because it turns out she's quite a bit older than Lauren and she actually knew her grandfather John. And what she tells us, well, it changes everything. He's not what you thought he was. He's definitely not what people thought he was. And Lisa has. I mean, I guess you'd call it a warning. Don't always believe what you see in a person because there's always two sides to the story. There's always the public version and then the private version. And they are completely different. You've been listening to Extrasensory, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House and hosted by me, Will Sharp. Produced by Poppy Damon and Seren Jones, Extrasensory is written by Lawrence Grissel. Original music by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nank Manel and Toby Matimong. Sound design and mix engineering by Vulcan Kiseltug and Daniel Lloyd Evans. The part of John Pollock is played by Peter Peverly and Dr. Ian Stevenson by Mark Arnold. Other parts by Mark Gillis, Ben Fox and Saul Boyer research by Alan Sargent fact checking by Jesse Baring and Karen Walton. Our managing producer is Amica Shortino Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Grisel, RA.