Extrasensory - Doubt | 5

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

John makes an extraordinary new claim. Stevenson tends to his wife on her deathbed, then throws himself back into his reincarnation work. John gets the opportunity to test out his belief in r...eincarnation once and for all. Producer Poppy tracks down one of John’s granddaughters, who suggests John is not quite who he seems to be.Extrasensory is an Apple Original podcast produced by Blanchard House. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/Extrasensory

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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 engrave. He'll dig up the top few feet of soil and bury her in there.
Starting point is 00:01:09 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.
Starting point is 00:01:42 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.
Starting point is 00:02:32 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. I assure you, you won't take a drop of scotch.
Starting point is 00:03:31 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. He could talk behind the leg of a donkey, and he was chaining smoke as well, and I'm not chaining smoke. John's smoking cigarettes tonight, lighting each one from the dying embers of the last.
Starting point is 00:03:54 An hour passes, then another, then another. The room is thick with smoke. 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 done. And Ian has no doubt that John is sincere. John Pollock was absolutely believing that this is what he had done in a previous life.
Starting point is 00:04:18 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. When I researched the whole thing, in fact, nothing like that had happened at all. 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.
Starting point is 00:04:54 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's 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. Ultimately, when you looked into the real history, it fell apart. So John's story is a mess, full of holes, a weird mashup of who knows.
Starting point is 00:05:30 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 Sharpe. Episode 5, Doubt Charlottesville, Virginia, November 30th, 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.
Starting point is 00:06:56 Stevenson has put all of his reincarnation work on hold and he's been nursing Octavia. No visits to the Pollux, no jaunts to the Far East, Stevenson 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. Unfortunately, I think as the result of
Starting point is 00:07:33 that sort of myopic focus on his parapsychological research and his extensive travels, they just kind of grew apart. That of course is biographer Jesse Behring. 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. 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. They're equals, both very, very smart. They marry in 1947 when Stevenson is 29 and she is 22. Like Stevenson, Octavia qualifies as a doctor, but she doesn't practice for long.
Starting point is 00:08:26 Instead, she takes care of their home, a large farmhouse set in 80 acres. She spent time with the horses and with the dogs and painting and writing poetry. 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 Stevenson 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.
Starting point is 00:09:00 She had a stillbirth delivery and they were never able to have children. So I think that loss affected them severely. Jesse reckons that happened 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. 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 and this is pretty much when Stevenson starts getting into reincarnation
Starting point is 00:09:40 Throws himself into his work. The only thing is Octavia thinks all this past life stuff is, well, basically garbage. She thought it was mostly waste of time. She didn't understand it. It drives a wedge between them, a big wedge. She just doesn't get it. She doesn't get it at all.
Starting point is 00:10:00 And she's almost kind of angry about it. I mean, certainly disappointed. In terms of 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. And maybe this is another reason
Starting point is 00:10:19 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 wilderness, 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.
Starting point is 00:10:52 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.
Starting point is 00:11:24 Well, it kind of depends, I guess. I mean, maybe Stevenson 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.
Starting point is 00:12:08 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… 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. Darwin?
Starting point is 00:12:38 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? Pain. Either way, he thinks the work must go on. Stevenson resumes his travel, trip after trip after trip throughout the mid-80s. Gathering yet more examples, the more the better, he seems to think.
Starting point is 00:13:25 Thousands of cases. Flight 233 to Istanbul, inbound 30. 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. 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 Stevenson would give John's story a wide birth.
Starting point is 00:14:13 Because Stevenson thinks hypnosis, or so-called hypnotic regression, is, well, a bit dubious. I shall try to quench misguided and sometimes shamefully 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. Jim Matlock is a research fellow at the Parapsychology Foundation. 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 aggressing an adult and bringing up what they felt to be memories.
Starting point is 00:15:03 It was just their narratives, their fantasies, really. 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 Stevenson ever discuss John's weird story, but in any case, they won't get a chance now. Because they've run out of time.
Starting point is 00:15:36 John Pollock and Ian Stevenson don't know it yet, but they'll never see each other again. April 5th, 1985, Good Friday. At 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.
Starting point is 00:16:10 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,
Starting point is 00:16:47 right down to his stomach. John's in agony. The same agony felt by his wife Florence. The same agony felt by Chester Carlson. And now it's John's turn. Just ten 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? It's good to see you again, John.
Starting point is 00:17:18 Or those visits from Stevenson? The birth of the twins? The earth shall cast out the dead the reincarnation of his two little girls who died that day 28 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?
Starting point is 00:17:58 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.
Starting point is 00:18:30 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 death and rebirth may be greater in the West than it is in Asia and other parts of the world. 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,
Starting point is 00:19:12 as per Stevenson's writing in his paper titled Some Questions Related to Cases of the Reincarnation Type Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. 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. It exists for a while in a discarnate state,
Starting point is 00:19:41 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. So what's gonna 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.
Starting point is 00:20:03 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 believe 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. Each human soul, to use a convenient expression, could have had,
Starting point is 00:20:53 on the average, opportunities for 20 incarnations. 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 that 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
Starting point is 00:21:56 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.
Starting point is 00:22:43 Or maybe Stevenson's just too busy bashing out his new book. Children who remember previous lives. A question of reincarnation. 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.
Starting point is 00:23:10 No, Stevenson is still pining for the love of his peers. And maybe, just maybe, this book will be the one to seduce them. 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? Stevenson outlines some of his favorite examples and time and again there are striking similarities to the Pollock case.
Starting point is 00:23:42 Like a pregnant woman in India who dreamed that a recently deceased man of their village, Maharam Singh, appeared to her and said I am coming to you. When the woman's son is born, he has a prominent birthmark on the lower part of his chest near the midline and when the son is around a year old, he starts talking as if he's a man called Maharam. And pointing to his birthmark, said that he had been shot there. And sure enough, Maharam had been murdered, shot in the chest a year before the little boy was born.
Starting point is 00:24:25 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 enough to speak. She gradually told about having been a Japanese soldier during World War II, when the Japanese army occupied Burma. 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.
Starting point is 00:24:59 And that's when the soldier was killed. 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. And just as the Pollock twins had a phobia of cars, this little Burmese girl had a phobia of cars, this little Burmese girl had a phobia of airplanes. Then of course, Stevenson turns to the case of Gillian and Jennifer Pollock. And here's where things get really interesting. Sure enough, Stevenson goes through the story,
Starting point is 00:25:40 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. 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.
Starting point is 00:26:13 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 Stevenson'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? It might just be a little bit further because... ...45, 43, 55. There it is. It was through that grave in Hexham where Lauren's father and sister are buried.
Starting point is 00:26:59 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,
Starting point is 00:27:27 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.
Starting point is 00:27:53 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.
Starting point is 00:28:23 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.
Starting point is 00:28:48 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, but it tells a quite remarkable story. I might have even watched it with friends going, oh, you know, that's my aunt and that's my uncle.
Starting point is 00:29:23 Oh, look, 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,
Starting point is 00:29:45 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.
Starting point is 00:30:16 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 Extra Sensory, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House and hosted by me, Will Sharpe. Produced by Poppy Damon and Seren Jones. Extra Sensory
Starting point is 00:30:53 is written by Lawrence Grizzel. 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 Pevely 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 Behring and Karen Walton. Our managing producer is Amika Shortino-Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Laurence Grizzell.

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