Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Podcasting isn’t short of series about the paranormal. But last year brought one so addictive and ingenious, you could feel the big beasts of audio sit up and take note. Ghost Story told of strange visions in a London house and a real-life murder that occurred 87 years ago. A haunting wrapped in a murder mystery, and tied up with a series of remarkable coincidences, it was a runaway hit and deservedly so. Now, in time for Halloween, comes Extrasensory, a new podcast from Apple TV+ that hopes to pull off the same genre-hopping trick. Like Ghost Story, it has at its core a real-life tragedy: two sisters, aged six and 11, and their young friend in Hexham, Northumberland, killed in 1957 while walking to church after a car drove into them. But the response of the two girls’ father, a milkman named John Pollock, was unexpected. On the day of the accident, Pollock, who was obsessed with reincarnation, made a startling prophecy: his two girls would be reborn.Sure enough, the following year Pollock’s wife Florence gave birth to twins named Gillian and Jennifer. The babies, Pollock said, were his daughters come back to life. As they got older, he pointed to their physical similarities — including birthmarks — with their dead sisters, and claimed both had memories of their previous lives, from toys they had played with to a house where they had once lived. Both girls also had a phobia of cars. A load of old hokum? Possibly, but it was enough to get the attention of Dr Ian Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine with a keen interest in the afterlife. Over the course of 20 years, Stevenson frequently visited the Pollocks, and published a book, Children Who Remember Previous Lives, using the twins as a case studyExtrasensory is narrated by the actor Will Sharpe, of White Lotus fame. I’m not usually a fan of celebrities being parachuted in to narrate a story that could be told by the producers doing the legwork. But, with a sparky script that blends curiosity with scepticism, Sharpe is excellent here. Though most of the major players in the story are dead, the series chases down neighbours and relatives — including Pollock’s grandchildren — who either knew the family directly or who can recall the media interest after the twins arrived. Perhaps most surprising is that at least one of Pollock’s grandchildren knew nothing of her family history, her late father having cut ties with Pollock and seemingly vowed never to talk of what took place.Extrasensory builds to a climax that I won’t spoil. What I will say is that I greedily binged all eight episodes in a day. A spooky seasonal mystery, it is, above all, a family story, one that shows how fiercely held beliefs often come loaded with baggage and that memory is a matter of interpretation.apple.com/uk/tv-pr/originals/extrasensory
