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, would not 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, as per 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. But, 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 like “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 that they called Radio Gibbons: The Living Facts of Life, but they only played it for themselves. June wrote a book called The Pepsi-Cola Addict about a teenage boy and his teacher. They used money from unemployment to pay a company to print it. @akucorner Today in Black Womens History I researched this story. Bound by silence, separated by fate — the haunting story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, the Silent Twins. #scaryvideo#twinsisters#scarystorytime#truecrimeanytime#didyouknowfacts#fastvideo#haunting #HistoryTime#TikTokLearningCampaign ♬ original sound – Akucorner 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 got much more serious. 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 setting fires, breaking into buildings, and stealing. A judge sent them to Broadmoor Hospital, which is a place for people who commit crimes but have mental health problems. The twins were only 19 years old. They were some of the youngest people ever sent there. June and Jennifer stayed at Broadmoor for 14 years. View this post on Instagram During that time, they kept acting strange. Sometimes they would not move or speak for hours. Other times they got violent and would hurt each other or the people working there. 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 not as strict. Right before they left, Jennifer said something scary to Wallace. She told her “I’m going to have to die” and said 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 happened for no clear reason, doctors could not explain why Jennifer’s heart just stopped working After Jennifer died, June started talking to people like she had never had a problem before. “I felt liberated,” she said later. The hospital let her go soon after that, and she started living like everyone else. The strange parts of their story, especially how they spent so much time playing with dolls in their made-up worlds, reminds people of other weird stories about dolls and things that cannot be explained.