The Silent Twins: The Mysterious History of the Gibbons Sisters. The mystery of the "silent twins": the life story of the mysterious Gibbons sisters And how did she die

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 the same language they knew, which was 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 they could socialize far from each other and begin to perceive the world around them. 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.

June and Jennifer Gibbons (born April 11, 1963) are twin sisters, best known as The Silent Twins, after the name given to them because of the decision to communicate only with each other and members of their family. As a teenager, they became interested in literary work, but after a series of crimes they committed, including arson (according to one version, to attract attention to themselves), they were sent to a psychiatric clinic prison type Broadmoor Hospital, where they spent 14 years and, due to the action of drugs, stopped writing new works.

The Gibbos sisters were born in Barbados (Caribbean), but soon moved to Wales, England (the father was an RAF mechanic). The girls had a speech impediment(hyper-speed speech with a specific pronunciation) - they were hardly understood outside the family circle. The twins could even talk to each other with head nods, facial expressions, finish each other's phrases, they were inseparable. The girls were the only black children in an English school and were constantly bullied by their classmates. The school eventually began sending the twins home early to avoid traumatic bullying from classmates.
[pictured journalist Majorie Wallace, Jennifer and June Gibbons]

When the sisters were 14 years old, only their younger sister Rose could understand them, British doctors unsuccessfully tried to get them to talk to other people, dividing them and sent to study in different boarding schools, but after the separation of the sisters, they completely withdrew into themselves. They were soon reunited. The sisters spent the first couple of years shutting themselves off from the world in their bedroom, creating puppet shows, many plays and stories, which they usually dedicated to their sister Rose.

After receiving a couple of diaries as a Christmas present, they began to write. They ordered a mail-order course in writing, and the sisters each wrote several novels, mostly set in the United States, about young people caught up in strange, often criminal behavior. The sisters wrote in a very peculiar style, often with funny unusual combinations of words. Their novels were published in samizdat (small edition created by hand).
Jennifer and June unsuccessfully tried to sell their stories to magazines. Many years later one of the stories, "Pepsi-Cola Addict", has become a rare collector's book(not because of the artistic qualities of course).

According to author and journalist Majorie Wallace (who made them famous by writing The Silent Twins about them), the sisters had a long-standing agreement that if one of them died, the other should start talking and live a normal life.
In March 1993, while moving to a different, more open clinic, Jennifer died in her sleep at the age of 29 from myocarditis, an acute inflammation of the heart.
A few days later, June said: I'm finally free, set free, and finally Jennifer gave me her life “("I"m free at last, liberated, and at last Jennifer has given up her life for me."").

According to 2008 data, June lives alone, near her parents in West Wales, and no longer uses the services of a psychiatrist.

Yes, by the way, in this dramatic story there is also a mysterious moment, the biography of the twins miraculously echoes the plot of the novel "Balagan, or the end of loneliness"(Slapstick, or Lonesome no more!, 1976) by American writer Kurt Vonnegut.

The case of silent twins has forever remained a mystery to psychiatrists, psychologists, linguists, speech therapists and pediatricians, but became a real source of inspiration for musicians, screenwriters, journalists, actors and other creative bohemia. Several plays were also written about the Gibbons sisters, and in 1999 the song Tsunami by the Manic Street Preachers, with lyrics dedicated to the Gibbons sisters, reached number 11 in the UK music charts (fragment):
Tsunami tsunami
came washing over me
Can't speak, can't think, won't talk, won't walk

Doctors tells me that I "m cynic
I tell them that it must be chemical
So what am I doing girl
Cry into my drink I disappear

Eyes for teeth grating over me
Bring down the shadows of my mind

P.S.: in recent years, the Broadmoor Hospital psychiatric prison, which discouraged the sisters from the craving for creativity, was mired in a series of scandals and lawsuits, including sexual violence, it was revealed that some administration employees from 1968 to 2004 had a double set of keys and visited prisoners "out of work time".

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 Haverfordwest in Wales for a better life. 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 tape-recorded speech, 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 a dictaphone in order to later give the recordings to their 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 when they were at different ends of the hospital. 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.

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 Lover, 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 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 novel Pepsi-Cola Addict has been reprinted several times and has become a valuable collector's book.

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The spiritual bond between twins cannot be broken. The fate of the sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons is a vivid proof of this. The expression "become one" is unable to reflect the degree of their unity. The girls rose to a whole new level of empathy: they created their own language and did not communicate with anyone but each other. Unstable relationships, a psychiatric hospital and the mysterious death of one of the sisters who sacrificed herself for the sake of the other… It was love and hate in one bottle. Their history is shrouded in a dense veil of secrets to this day. the site tried to find out what was behind all this - intimacy or obsession?

Twins June and Jennifer were born on April 11, 1963 in the family of Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons - Barbadian immigrants. Shortly after their birth, their parents moved to the small Welsh town of Haverfordwest: their father, a mechanic in the RAF, was transferred there on duty. The older Gibbons were delighted with the quiet place and were in full confidence that it was in the United Kingdom that they could bring up their girls in the best way.

Gloria was a housewife, so the family decided not to send their daughters to kindergarten: only their mother was supposed to be involved in their development. The woman spent a lot of time with the girls and quickly noticed that June and Jennifer were behaving strangely. At first, Mrs. Gibbons thought the twins were just too shy to talk to anyone but each other. Gloria tried to look for pluses in such behavior. “The main thing is that the daughters get along great. In adulthood, they can always rely on each other, ”the woman naively believed.

Months and years passed, but the girls did not seek to expand their social circle. However, there was an explanation for this: both sisters had serious speech impairments, because of which almost no one understood them.

No one dreamed of making friends with their peers. June and Jennifer were so withdrawn and shy that they hardly left the house. But they literally understood each other perfectly and were inseparable. For some reason, parents did not consider it necessary to show their daughters to specialists. The Gibbons unanimously concluded that the twins were lagging behind in development, and let the situation take its course. So they lived for five years.

Outsider Sisters

In 1968, the youngest daughter Rosie was born in the family, and Gloria had no time to deal with older children. However, it's time to send them to school. Parents were worried about how the girls would communicate with classmates: at that time, even the mother could hardly understand their phrases. The elders' concerns were not in vain. The population of Haverfordwest was predominantly white, and the Gibbons girls were the only black babies in their area. Children are known to be very cruel: peers constantly teased the twins and made racist comments. The older children completely terrorized the sisters, giving them slaps in the face every day. Teenagers were amused by the inability of the Gibbons girls to stand up for themselves: they endured bullying in silence.

The teachers were unable to do anything against a bunch of militant children - or maybe they didn’t want to. In addition, the little ones answered in silence to any questions from teachers about how they could help. In the end, June and Jennifer began to leave home early so they could avoid meeting with high school students.

The status of outsiders did not contribute to their socialization. On the contrary, the girls began to withdraw more and more into themselves, became embittered and silent. At the same time, they never complained about the school situation to their parents: Jennifer and June were so removed from the world that they stopped even talking to them. The exception was the younger sister Rosie: the twins occasionally exchanged a couple of phrases with her.

Parents did not seem to notice the strange behavior of their own children. The Gibbons seemed to have given up on the twins.

The family seemed to split into two parts: Gloria, Aubrey and Rosie were on one side of the barricades, and June and Jennifer were on the other. Everything that concerned the school life of the sisters was not in the sphere of interests of the parents. Father and mother openly ignored the degradation of girls.

The atmosphere of bullying and aggression, in which already uncommunicative children with serious speech problems grew up, only aggravated the situation. Constant bullying led to irreparable consequences: in the end, June and Jennifer completely separated from society. They invented their own language, understood only by the two of them. This phenomenon is called cryptophasia. Science knows many cases when twins at a younger age developed a way of communication that was incomprehensible to outsiders, which was then replaced by their native language. The Gibbons sisters turned out to be an exception to the rule: every month their speech became more individual and unclear to others, and they practiced English only in writing.

Impossible without each other

When the girls were fourteen years old, a school psychologist became interested in their case. She recommended that the parents take the twins to a psychotherapist so that he "unearthed" the reason for the voluntary isolation of teenagers. The treatment did not bring results: June and Jennifer flatly refused to talk with a specialist. Then the psychologist advised Gloria and Aubrey to send the sisters to different boarding schools so that they would finally start talking to other people. This only aggravated the situation: each fell into a catatonic stupor. This condition is characterized by motor retardation and prolonged stay in the same position. Both June and Jennifer lay in the same position for weeks, not responding to either the requests or the pleas of the medical staff. Worse, they refused to eat.

For the first time in a long time, parents began to worry about their daughters and decided to take them home. The embittered sisters hardly left their own room. There they talked, played with dolls (although they were already fifteen years old) and even began to engage in literary work. They lived in their own world, where outsiders were not allowed to enter. Gloria had to leave food for her daughters at the door.

Each of the twins wrote several novels, the plots of which were very strange, and sometimes evil, so to speak. For example, one of Jennifer's works was called "Discomania". It told about the terrible deeds that people were encouraged to commit by the atmosphere of the local disco. June's opuses were even more brutal. So, the novel "Pepsicol Addict" tells the story of a high school student who was seduced by a teacher. Instead of jailing the woman, the authorities sent the boy to a correctional facility, where he was molested by a homosexual man.

The girls really wanted to become famous writers and were confident in their literary talent. Publishing houses refused to publish their works.

Along with writing novels, the sisters kept personal diaries, from which much of their behavior later became clear. The twins were inseparable, but their relationship, it turns out, was far from ideal. According to Jennifer, her sister was her shadow, without which she could finally find the desired freedom. The Englishwoman was sure that she would not be able to live a long life precisely because of a relative. Looking ahead, let's say that she was right ... June, on the other hand, often expressed fears that her sister was capable of murder: "I see a bloody gleam in her eyes." The girl looked into the water: once the twin tried to strangle her with a wire. It was a relationship that drove them to the depths of despair: teenagers equally loved and hated each other.

Together forever

After leaving school, the girls' behavior became violent and unpredictable. They began to abuse alcohol, take illegal substances and often fought. They were not at all interested in the male sex: they considered boys to be second-class people. When the sisters realized that they were not destined to become famous writers, they decided to gain fame in a different way - criminal. They burned down a tractor shop, robbed a local college, repeatedly vandalized and even attacked passers-by.

The last attempt to attract attention was the failed arson of the Broadmoor Asylum. This is the most terrible psychiatric hospital in the UK: since the nineteenth century, serial killers, maniacs and rapists have been kept in it.

This event fully met the expectations of the Gibbons sisters: all the British media wrote about them. In the meantime, the district judge sentenced the girls to fourteen years of treatment in the same mental hospital ... "June and Jennifer Gibbons suffer from a serious anxiety disorder and should be isolated from society in Broadmoor," the lawyer explained his decision. Well, the sisters finally got what they have been seeking for many years!

The girls were placed in solitary confinement in different parts of the hospital. After some time, the medical staff discovered that the patients ate in turn - every other day. They again fell into a catatonic state and at the same time took the same strange postures.

Despite the fact that the sisters, unlike other prisoners, behaved calmly and did not attempt to escape, the doctors tried to enter their cells as rarely as possible. Eleven years later, the English journalist Majorie Wallace came to the hospital to interview the "stars". Jennifer and June had their first conversation with an outsider. During rare meetings in the hospital corridors, they communicated with each other in a fictitious language, and still did not speak to other people. By the way, parents and Rosie were not allowed to see the twins ...

Beginning of the End

The sisters told Majorie that there was a long-standing agreement between them: if one of them died, the other would begin to communicate with people. Jennifer immediately added that she would leave first, because they decided so. “We cannot live apart and will always possess each other. One of us must die so that the other can become a normal person, ”the girl said.

Soon, for exemplary behavior, the twins were allowed to transfer to another clinic. As they got into the car, Jennifer whispered to her sister that soon she would finally be gone. She laid her head on June's knees and fell asleep, but they could not wake her up at the hospital: the girl died on the way. The cause of death was myocarditis, an acute inflammation of the heart. She was only thirty years old ... Some time later, Majorie Wallace again came to interview - this time only with June. “I am free: finally, Jennifer gave me her life,” the girl said happily.

How Jennifer could have known about the approaching end is still unclear to specialists. No traces of drugs or any poison were found in her body, so the investigation dismissed the version of suicide from the very beginning. Three years later, June was discharged from the clinic, and, oddly enough, she began to interact normally with people. The girl really did not violate the contract with her sister: now she lives not far from her parents' house and works as a saleswoman, but she never created a family. No matter how hard Gibbons tried to recover, she could not learn to trust people after spending eleven years side by side with rapists, maniacs and murderers.

Maybe Jennifer sacrificed herself so that June could live a fulfilling life? “We are tired of the war. It was a long battle… Someone has to break the vicious circle,” the last entry in the diary of the deceased ends with this line. This story once again proves that the twins really have incredible empathy. Unfortunately, sometimes such closeness ends very tragically.