Crazy twins. The Mystery of the Silent Twins: The Life Story of the Mysterious Gibbons Sisters The Silent Twins
June and Jennifer Gibbons (born April 11, 1963, Jennifer died in 1993), identical twins, whose strange story is still of great interest to psychologists and linguists. The girls grew up in Wales, UK. Many called them "silent girls" due to the fact that the twins preferred to communicate only with their closest relatives. The twin girls spoke a peculiar language that no one but themselves could understand. In the end, the girls became so separated from the outside world that they began to communicate only with each other. They wrote strange stories and plays, and together they committed several crimes to get attention. Both spent 14 years in a psychiatric hospital.
The girls' parents, Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons, immigrated to Wales from the Caribbean. Gloria was a housewife and Aubrey worked as an RAF technician. Shortly after the girls were born in Barbados, the entire family moved to Haverfordwest, Wales. The twin sisters have been inseparable since childhood. Unfortunately, the girls had a speech impediment - they were hardly understood outside family circle. The girls were constantly offended by classmates. The school eventually began sending the twins home at the start of each day to avoid traumatic bullying from classmates. It was at this moment that the language of the girls became even more peculiar and incomprehensible to outsiders. They only spoke to each other and their little sister Rosa.
When the couple turned 14, after a series of unsuccessful attempts to get June and Jennifer to communicate, the therapists separated the sisters, sending them to separate boarding schools, suggesting that the girls would talk to others while isolated from each other. After parting, the girls completely went into themselves and stopped communicating at all.
When they met again, they locked themselves in a room for two years, where they played strange games with dolls all the time. They wrote many plays and stories in the style of " soap operas", recording some of them on a tape recorder as gifts for their little sister. Inspired by the diaries donated at Christmas 1979, the girls began to write without restraint. Both soon wrote several novels about young and beautiful people involved in strange and bloody crimes.
In the book "Pepsi-Cola Lover", June describes the main character - a student high school, who was seduced by the teacher, and then sent to a boarding school where the hero meets a homosexual guard. In the book Jennifer the Boxer, the doctor was so anxious to save his child's life that he kills his dog and transplants the dog's heart into the child. The spirit of the dog lives in the child and ultimately takes revenge on the doctor. The twins wrote in a unique style, often with funny, offbeat word choices.
Nobody wanted to publish their stories. Brief romance with American boys, the sons of a member of the US Navy, did not lead to anything. Desperate for recognition and fame (and perhaps publicity for their books), the girls committed several petty crimes, including arson, which led to the threshold of Broadmoor Hospital, a psychiatric hospital where the girls spent a long 14 years. After high doses of antipsychotic drugs, the girls were soon unable to concentrate. Jennifer apparently developed a mental disorder called tardive dyskinesia. The girls hardly continued to keep diaries, but by 1980 they abandoned them too.
The girls have long had an agreement that if one of them dies, the other will start talking and live a normal life. During their stay in the hospital, they began to believe that one of them simply needed to die in order to let the other live. After much discussion, Jennifer agreed to be the victim. Within hours of their release from the hospital, in 1993, Jennifer died of a sudden heart attack (originally thought to be myocarditis). An autopsy did not confirm the presence of either poison or drugs in the girl's body. To this day, Jennifer's death remains a mystery.
After Jennifer's death, June agreed to interviews with Harper's Bazaar and The Guardian. She became more sociable and was able to talk to other people. She lived in a house with her family in Haverfordwest apparently until 2005, after which she moved to live with her common-law husband in a nearby town. She wants to continue writing, but claims she has lost her "talent". The Pepsi-Cola Addict novel has been reprinted several times and has become a valuable collector's book.
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The Gibbons Twins are silent twins.
June and Jennifer Gibbons (born April 11, 1963, Jennifer died in 1993), identical twins, whose strange story is still of great interest to psychologists and linguists. The girls grew up in Wales, UK. Many called them "silent girls" due to the fact that the twins preferred to communicate only with their closest relatives. The twin girls spoke a peculiar language that no one but themselves could understand. In the end, the girls became so separated from the outside world that they began to communicate only with each other. They wrote strange stories and plays, and together they committed several crimes to get attention. Both spent 14 years in a psychiatric hospital.
The girls' parents, Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons, immigrated to Wales from the Caribbean. Gloria was a housewife and Aubrey worked as an RAF technician. Shortly after the girls were born in Barbados, the entire family moved to Haverfordwest, Wales. The twin sisters have been inseparable since childhood. Unfortunately, the girls had a speech impediment - they were hardly understood outside the family circle. The girls were constantly offended by classmates. The school eventually began sending the twins home at the start of each day to avoid traumatic bullying from classmates. It was at this moment that the language of the girls became even more peculiar and incomprehensible to outsiders. They only spoke to each other and their little sister Rosa.
When the couple turned 14, after a series of unsuccessful attempts to get June and Jennifer to communicate, the therapists separated the sisters, sending them to separate boarding schools, suggesting that the girls would talk to others while isolated from each other. After parting, the girls completely went into themselves and stopped communicating at all.
When they met again, they locked themselves in a room for two years, where they played strange games with dolls all the time. They wrote many soap opera-style plays and stories, recording some of them on tape as gifts for their little sister. Inspired by the diaries given to them for Christmas 1979, the girls began to write uncontrollably. Both soon wrote several novels about young and beautiful people involved in strange and bloody crimes.
In The Pepsi-Cola Drinker, June describes the main character as a high school student who is seduced by a teacher and then sent to a boarding school where the hero meets a homosexual security guard. In the book Jennifer the Boxer, the doctor was so anxious to save his child's life that he kills his dog and transplants the dog's heart into the child. The spirit of the dog lives in the child and ultimately takes revenge on the doctor. The twins wrote in a unique style, often with funny, offbeat word choices.
Nobody wanted to publish their stories. A brief affair with American boys, the sons of a US Navy soldier, came to nothing. Desperate for recognition and fame (and perhaps publicity for their books), the girls committed several petty crimes, including arson, which led to the threshold of Broadmoor Hospital, a psychiatric hospital where the girls spent a long 14 years. After high doses of antipsychotic drugs, the girls were soon unable to concentrate. Jennifer apparently developed a mental disorder called tardive dyskinesia. The girls hardly continued to keep diaries, but by 1980 they abandoned them too.
The girls have long had an agreement that if one of them dies, the other will start talking and live a normal life. During their stay in the hospital, they began to believe that one of them simply needed to die in order to let the other live. After much discussion, Jennifer agreed to be the victim. Within hours of their release from the hospital, in 1993, Jennifer died of a sudden heart attack (originally thought to be myocarditis). An autopsy did not confirm the presence of either poison or drugs in the girl's body. To this day, Jennifer's death remains a mystery.
After Jennifer's death, June agreed to interviews with Harper's Bazaar and The Guardian. She became more sociable and was able to talk to other people. She lived in a house with her family in Haverfordwest apparently until 2005, after which she moved to live with her common-law husband in a nearby town. She wants to continue writing, but claims she has lost her "talent". The Pepsi-Cola Addict novel has been reprinted several times and has become a valuable collector's book.
Source: peoples.com ©June and Jennifer Gibbons, known as the Silent Twins, are American twin sisters whose life story remains a mystery to psychiatrists, psychologists and linguists.
So, from childhood, girls communicated only and exclusively with each other, completely ignoring the outside world. They invented their own language and loved the only person in the world - their little sister. They wrote books that no one wanted to publish, but which were quite finished and not bad novels.
Later, after many years in a psychiatric hospital, June and Jennifer decided that one of them should disappear - and soon, under very strange circumstances, Jennifer died of a heart attack. After that, June became more sociable, was able to socialize and continue to live.
June and Jennifer Gibbons were born on the same day and at the same hour in 1963 and grew up in Wales. Their parents, Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons, came from the Caribbean, and in addition to the twins, their younger sister, Rose, appeared in the family.
June and Jennifer behaved very strangely from early childhood - they did not talk at all, but they communicated well with each other.
Soon they discovered a certain defect in speech, but this did not seem to be the reason for their silence - the parents were surprised to note that the whole huge world around seemed to not exist at all for the twins - they closed in on themselves and were completely satisfied only with each other's company.
Time passed, and June and Jennifer continued to be silent. However, they spoke excellently among themselves - in one familiar language, completely incomprehensible to those around them. At the school where the girls were assigned, they had a hard time - they became a target for cruel peers, and soon the school administration was forced to constantly send them home.
It was during this period that June and Jennifer decided to separate them - they were sent to different boarding schools so that, far from each other, they could socialize and begin to perceive the world. Alas, each of the sisters withdrew even more into themselves, and soon had to admit that this experiment had failed.
However, there was only one person in the world with whom June and Jennifer communicated normally - their little sister Rose, whom the girls simply adored and devoted all their games to her, and later the stories that they began to write together.
After the idea of boarding schools failed, June and Jennifer shut themselves up in their room for a couple of years, during which time they began to write books. Their stories were very entertaining, plot, but somewhat strange, with unexpected twists and characters. So, they wrote several novels, and also read something on the recorder, dedicating it all to the same Rose.
Alas, the sisters were never able to sell their novels, although later at least one of them, "Pepsi-Cola Addict", became a rare collector's book.
At the very end of the 1970s, the sisters committed several petty crimes like arson, and as a result, both ended up in the Broadmoor Hospital psychiatric hospital, where they spent a long 14 years. Over the years, they were seriously treated with all sorts of psychotropic drugs, after which both lost their literary abilities and stopped writing altogether. It is known that after the hospital, Jennifer began to suffer from a mental disorder.
It turned out that there had been an agreement between the sisters for a long time that if one of them died, then for the other it would be a signal to start talking and live a normal life. And in the end, after years of hospitalization, the sisters came to the conclusion that one of them should go. Jennifer volunteered herself, June agreed.
Soon an event occurred that still baffles medicine - in 1993, Jennifer died suddenly from acute myocarditis, which seemed to have arisen from nothing. It was strange and inexplicable, but there were no signs of violent death or suicide - it really looked like death due to a diseased heart.
Left alone, June, as the sisters agreed, began to talk a little.
She later said in an interview that she now feels free, and it was Jennifer who gave her life with her death. She then gave several interviews, including for Harper's Bazaar and The Guardian.
It is known that over time, June, who continued to live with her parents, completely got used to life, began to communicate and did not need psychiatric help at all. According to some information, she even began to live in a civil marriage. She never wrote any more books.
The case of the Silent Twins has forever remained a mystery to psychiatrists, psychologists and linguists, as well as to speech therapists and pediatricians.
Dark-skinned babies June and Jennifer Gibbons were born in 1963 in Barbados in the family of a housewife and a mechanic from the British Air Force. The family soon moved to a better life at Haverfordwest in Wales. Parents quickly noticed that something was wrong with the children - they were unusually silent, and contacted exclusively with each other. At first, the parents thought that June and Jennifer had a developmental delay, but it soon became clear that this assumption was wrong. After all, the girls talked!
Like many twins, they have invented their own language that only the two of them can understand. Such a language is called "cryptophasia" - a self-made sign system created for a narrow circle of people. Many years later, when one of the psychiatrists tried to decipher their speech, recorded on tape, he found that the girls spoke in ordinary English, just at such a speed that the sounds merged into a continuous stream that could not be caught by an unaccustomed ear.
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At school, the Gibbons were the only black children - girls were bullied, so that even teachers let them out of class earlier so that they could avoid confrontation with high school students. Obviously, this did not contribute to their openness, so the girls became even more withdrawn and detached from the world.
Only at the age of fourteen, when the problem reached its peak, as it seemed then, did the parents decide to seriously take up their treatment. June and Jennifer were taken to psychotherapists, and when the initial treatment failed, the doctors recommended that the sisters be separated and sent to different boarding schools. The problem from this only worsened: individually, the girls fell into catatonia.
Parents could not look at the torment of their daughters and again brought them together. After that, the sisters locked themselves in a room, isolating themselves from the rest of the family, and spent a long time there, talking and arranging puppet shows, whose content, however, was rather gloomy. The girls recited their work on the recorder to give the recordings later. younger sister Rose.
But although the girls could not live without each other, this did not always bring them joy. Here is what June wrote about her sister in her personal diary: “No one in the world suffers like my sister and I. When living with a spouse, child, or friend, people don't experience what we experience. My sister, like a gigantic shadow, robs me of the sunlight and is the center of my torment.”
The sisters began to write novels, which also had a very creepy content. For example, June's Pepsi-Cola Addict is about a teenager who is seduced by a teacher. After he goes to a juvenile correctional facility, where he becomes a victim of a gay guard. And in Jennifer's Wrestler, the fate of a doctor who, in order to save his child, kills a dog and transplants his son's heart, is described. After that, the spirit of the dog takes possession of the boy and begins to take revenge.
Although the sisters repeatedly tried to sell their works to magazines, they were refused everywhere - there was too much cruelty and aggression in their novels. Then they made an even stranger decision: the girls seriously intended to become criminals. No sooner said than done. The Gibbons attacked passers-by, each other, robbed shops and, in the end, were caught and taken to a strict psychiatric hospital, where they spent the next 11 years.
Despite the fact that the sisters were kept in different cells, they unmistakably copied each other's poses, even while on different ends hospitals. This terrible synchronicity scared the doctors away. During their stay in the asylum, the twins came to the conclusion that in order for one to live a free life, the other had to die. It was decided that Jennifer would die.
When it was time to move, Jennifer put her head in her sister's lap and seemed to fall asleep with her eyes closed. But only her dead body reached the hospital. The cause of death was called acute myocarditis - inflammation of the heart, no signs of poisoning or violent death were found.
"After a long wait, we are now free," that's what June said after Sister's death. Jennifer was buried, and on the tombstone they wrote: “Once there were two of us, we were one, but we are no longer two, be one in life, rest in peace.” Jennifer was only thirty.
It is known that in 2008, June lived alone near her parents' house. She was not seen by doctors and was accepted by society, determined to leave the past behind. In 2016, her sister Greta gave an interview in which she said that the family had a lot of trouble with the girls being deprived of their liberty. June blamed the clinic for ruining their lives and neglecting Jennifer's health.
