June and Jennifer Gibbons were born in April 1963 in Yemen, where their father worked with the Royal Air Force. When the twin girls were babies, everything seemed fine. But as they grew older, their parents started to worry. The girls could not talk like other kids their age. They seemed to have their own way of speaking that only they understood.
Their father, Aubrey, said that the girls would make sounds and talk at home, but they were not like other children who could speak normally. The family moved to Wales in the early 1960s. Things got worse for the twins there. They were the only Black children in their school, and other kids bullied them badly. Many people thought they had created their own language, but June later said it was just English with a very bad speech problem that even their parents could not understand.
By the time they were teenagers, they copied each other’s movements, refused to read or write in school, and people started calling them the silent twins. In 1977, doctors came up with a plan to help June and Jennifer, according to Wikipedia. They decided to send the girls to different boarding schools. The doctors thought that if the twins were apart, they would stop depending on each other so much.
However, instead of opening up to others, the twins completely shut down. June got so bad that two people had to lift her out of bed. After they got her up, she just stood against a wall, “stiff and heavy as a corpse.” The doctors quickly gave up and brought the twins back together.
Things only got worse after that.
When June and Jennifer were back together, they became even more closed off than before. They stopped talking to their parents completely. If they needed to tell their parents something, they would write it down instead. The girls spent almost all their time in their bedroom with the door locked. Inside, they played with dolls and made up complicated fantasy worlds.
They even started their own pretend radio show called Radio Gibbons: The Living Facts of Life, but they only played it for themselves. June wrote a book titled *The Pepsi-Cola Addict* about a teenage boy and his teacher. They used money from unemployment benefits to pay a company to print it.
When the twins turned 18, they got tired of just making up stories. They wanted to actually live life instead of just imagining it. They started drinking and taking drugs. They also began stealing things from stores. But then their crimes escalated.
In October 1981, June and Jennifer burned down a tractor store. The fire caused about $200,000 worth of damage. After that, they tried to set fire to a technical college too. The police caught them and charged them with arson, breaking into buildings, and theft.
A judge sent them to Broadmoor Hospital, a facility for people who commit crimes but have mental health problems. The twins were only 19 years old and were among the youngest ever sent there.
June and Jennifer stayed at Broadmoor for 14 years. During that time, they kept acting strangely. Sometimes they would not move or speak for hours. Other times, they got violent and would hurt each other or the staff.
A journalist named Marjorie Wallace visited them many times and wrote a book about their lives called *The Silent Twins*.
In 1993, doctors decided to move the twins to a different hospital that was less strict. Right before they left, Jennifer said something chilling to Wallace. She told her, “I’m going to have to die,” explaining that she and June had talked about it and agreed.
On the way to the new hospital, Jennifer suddenly fell over. She died from her heart stopping. She was only 29 years old.
Like other mysterious cases where deaths happen without clear explanation, doctors could not determine why Jennifer’s heart just stopped working.
https://wegotthiscovered.com/fyi/twin-sisters-created-their-own-language-and-refused-to-speak-to-anyone-else-then-doctors-separated-them-and-the-result-was-a-disaster/
