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Hey weirdos, I'm Ash, Alina couldn't be here, and this is a mini morbid.
Mini, mini, mini, mini, mini morbid. Mini morbid, mini morbid, mini morbid.
So yeah, guys, this is real weird. I am currently sitting in the pod lab by myself about to record this episode.
One of Alina's little nuggets is sick right now, and she really, like, really wouldn't have been able to sit in on this episode because...
She's being a mom and doing the mom thing because she's a fucking rock star.
So... I'm sorry if this is super weird.
I'm literally just sitting in the pod lab talking to myself, which feels super strange.
But without further ado, since there's no one here to small talk with, maybe I should just pull up my Google Doc and get into this.
So this is my first solo mini morbid and I really hope you guys don't hate me for doing a solo mini morbid.
This week, I'm going to talk to you guys about the Silent Twins.
I have been wanting to cover this case forever. i remember the first time i heard this case i was like what the actual fuck this case is bananas It's not a murder, really, and it's not like a serial killer, but it is morbidly strange.
So without further ado. The silent twins Jennifer and June Gibbons were born in Aden, which is located in the Middle East, to their mother, Gloria, and their father, Audrey Gibbons.
The girls were born on April 11th, 1963.
Gloria and Aubrey were from Barbados, but after June and Jennifer were born, they moved to Wales.
I'm going to try to say this town the best I can.
I want to say it's Haverford West. To be exact, that's where they lived in Wales.
So growing up, the girls were really shy to other people.
They didn't like to interact much with the kids around them.
They didn't really like to interact with anybody around them except themselves.
They did have siblings. They had an older sister, Greta, an older brother, David, and eventually they would gain a younger sister named Rosie, who they...
They would talk to Rosie, but she was really the only, or I don't even know if they would really talk to her, but they would interact with her.
She was really the only other person that they paid attention to. uh june was technically sorry i just made a really gross mouth noise elena my apologies june was technically older than Jennifer.
I read somewhere by 10 minutes, but what's interesting is that Jennifer was seen as the more dominant one between the two of them.
When they were really little, like toddlers, it was really clear to their parents that they were going to have some kind of speech problem.
Their mom said in an interview... In the home, they'd talk, they'd make sounds and all that, but we knew they weren't quite like, you know, normal children talking rapidly.
So like I said, they would really only talk to each other and most of the time nobody even understood what they were saying to each other because they talked so fast it was almost like they had this secret language. between each other.
They also did this thing where one of them would start to do some kind of movement And the other would finish what the first twin had started doing.
They were always in sync, like always 100% in sync.
One of them would walk in front of the other one, and the other would be behind them, and their steps would be in perfect... synchronicity, which is Elena told me how to say that earlier because I was like, how the fuck do I say that?
So I hope I said that correctly. Thanks, Elena.
Love you. When someone would kind of do a double take to look at them like, holy fuck, they're in perfect synchronicity.
Hope I said that right again. They would literally just freeze there and stare at that person until that person just went about their business.
At the time when the girls lived in Wales, unfortunately, it was a super racist scene.
They were the only people of color in their neighborhood, and I'm pretty sure they were the only people of color in their school.
And at school, they were bullied so badly.
Like, I'm talking other kids pulling out their hair, which is the most disgusting thing.
I can't even put myself in that... in that time because I just don't understand how humans treat other humans like that.
But they were bullied so badly. Like I said, they had to be sent home early.
They had to leave school like five minutes early every day to get... ahead of all the other kids that were going to leave so that they wouldn't be subject to like this horrible torture.
Um, the girl's parents tried sending them to speech therapists, regular therapists, pretty much anyone that was willing to see them to get to the bottom of the case of violence. what they became known as the silent twins but they wouldn't speak to the therapists and actually they wouldn't even speak to each other in front of the therapists Really, the only thing that the therapist could get them to do was to read on tape and only when the therapist left the room.
That's how therapist Anne Traharn, I'm going to say, she was the chief speech therapist at Haverford West's Withy Bush Hospital.
She discovered their secret language wasn't actually a made-up language.
It was a mixture of Barbados slang and English. just sped up so quickly that other people could not make out what the twins were saying to each other.
So it wasn't a fake language, a made-up language, but it really was their kind of language to talk to each other.
Anne at one point said she felt as though Jennifer was able to control or possess June through what June referred to as an eye language.
The only person they would ever talk to other than themselves, like I said before, was their little sister Rosie who could sometimes decode what they were saying.
They wouldn't talk to their parents. They didn't talk to their older siblings.
They would literally just sit at the family dinner table in silence while their whole family would just try to act normal. and kind of go about dinner and maybe hope that they would chime in at some point, but obviously they didn't.
And their older sister, Greta, would be so overwhelmed by this that she would start to cry.
So obviously their parents were genuinely concerned.
So when they were advised by the girls' multiple therapists... that they should be sent to separate boarding schools.
They were like, yeah, if it's going to work, we hope it does.
Like, let's try it. When the girls found out that they were going to be separated, they lost their fucking noodles.
I'm talking they were screaming, they were crying.
For some reason, they were hitting each other.
One was digging their nails into the other.
And June even pulled out a huge chunk of Jennifer's hair.
And they like ran out of the therapist's office. while doing all of this i'm sure it was a horrific scene as a parent as a therapist as a fucking passerby as anybody They both responded the exact same way and isolated themselves even further than they did when they were together.
I'm talking when they got moved to the separate boarding schools.
That's what they did. They just totally isolated themselves.
To the point where they would just lay there like they were in a coma or something, but obviously they were not.
Anybody that tried to move them said that they were totally dead weight and it was impossible to get them to move like next to impossible.
Since separating them obviously was not working, their parents and therapists were like, yep, cool, never mind, this is...
Worse than we thought that it could ever be.
And this is probably just not fixable. So y'all can just get reunited.
And that's actually a direct quote. That's what everybody on the scene said.
No, I'm totally kidding. It's not. And there's no one here to laugh at my jokes, so I feel weird about it.
Whatever. I miss you, Elena. Anyways, when the girls did come together again, they seemed better, but they still weren't into communicating with anyone outside in the world around them or even their other family members.
They always hung out around their room doing weird shit.
I found in an article from the New Yorker, which...
I got a lot of my information from this article and you guys should all go read it if you're interested in this case because it goes super, super in depth.
Elena probably is going to edit this, so I'm going to give it to her to put in the show notes.
You can find the link to the New Yorker article.
Seriously, it goes super in-depth. It was so interesting to read.
But I read in there that Jennifer would say to June...
She was June. And they would take turns being each other.
And when they wanted to be themselves again, they would say...
Give me back myself. If you give me back myself, I'll give you back yourself.
Which I'm just like... What? Like that is creepy and I don't understand.
Like I just want to be Ash. I don't want to be anybody else.
I'm afraid. The girls spent their days playing with dolls and writing some really creepy, one might even say morbid, fiction stories.
They would write stories about their dolls and they would be sure to include the doll's death date specifically.
And how each and every single one of them died.
They like created almost like families with these dolls.
Yeah, you know, like just typical kid shit like you always wrote down when your Barbie doll was dying and what she was dying of, right?
No, not me. Not me. Wrong. I'm sorry, but if I found backstories with causes of death for dolls in my kid's room someday, I would give them back and my Uber would be peeling down the fucking street.
But their parents sounded like they were super accommodating because they probably had no idea what else to possibly do.
I mean, the twins wouldn't even eat meals at the family table at this point.
All their food had to be sent up to their room and left on trays outside their door.
When the girls weren't busy writing creepy doll novels, they would write in their journals, which their mom gave to them for Christmas, hoping that they would somehow, like... self-identify and maybe separate from each other.
Oftentimes they wrote about each other, so obviously it wasn't working.
Jennifer wrote in her diary at one point, We have become fatal enemies in each other's eyes.
We feel the irritating deadly rays come out of our bodies stinging each other's skin.
I say to myself, can I get rid of my own shadow?
Impossible or not possible? Without my shadow, would I die?
Without my shadow, would I gain life? Be free or left to die? without my shadow, which I identify with a face of misery, deception, murder.
Like, oh, that's light and uplifting. I love that.
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June once wrote of Jennifer, quote, Nobody suffers the way I do.
Not with a sister. With a husband, yes. With a wife, yes.
With a child, yes. But this sister of mine, a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment.
She also wrote one time, quote, she is not normal someone is driving her insane it is me so you know just typical sister stuff and also imagine if they ever You know, like obviously I think a lot of siblings – I never did this because I didn't totally grow up with siblings really –
But I know siblings steal each other's diaries.
Can you imagine stealing your sister's diary and you read all this horrible shit about yourself?
But like... It's like dark and scary and it's like she is my shadow and she has a murderous gleam in her eye.
I'm just scared of this whole entire thing.
So at this point you're probably like, wow this pot is really starting to boil over.
And you my weirdos are absolutely right.
Because June and Jennifer were clearly starting to piss each other off.
They had been spending a shit ton of time together and it was bound to happen.
So, so much so that one time June tried to kill Jennifer by drowning her.
They would get into these violent fights with each other that would lead to strangling, hitting, and apparently attempted drowning.
But the weird thing is that as much as they fought like savages, they would calm down and come together again.
And when they became teenagers, they started experimenting with marijuana and alcohol.
Which honestly is confusing to me because I'm like, how did you purchase the weed if you didn't talk to people or like communicate with anybody at all? but whatever that's beside the point i guess the first time they broke into somebody's house it was an old classmate of theirs uh his name was lance kennedy And they remembered that he had stuck up for them in the school years when other people were like absolutely horrible to them.
I don't know. But when they got there to his house, nobody was home, but the door to the home was open.
So they went in there, they went about their business, they snooped around, I don't fucking know.
And then Lance's parents got home. But the parents felt bad and let June and Jennifer go, even though they had, oh, broken a door while they were in there. gone through the clothes belonging to Lance's brothers.
It turns out Lance himself had actually moved away at this point.
And the parents were like trying to get information out of them.
Like, hello, why are you in our fucking house?
Like, why did you do this? And they just were staring back at them or like looking at the floor, not responding to them because they were the silent twins.
They didn't talk. So the parents were like, okay, whatever, you can just go.
They moved away from their obsession with Lance and eventually settled on his brothers, who they began to hang out with a lot.
And that's kind of when a lot more of the smoking and drinking started.
They would get super dolled up to hang out with these guys.
They'd bring a bottle of And I think they would talk to these guys.
Eventually, Jennifer lost her virginity to Lance's younger brother, Carl.
And she wrote about it in her diary. I don't have a direct quote, but I do know that...
She lost her virginity to Carl in a church not too far from his house, and that June was there to watch, which is really just too much for my... brain to process and i don't want to talk about it anymore you know why choose a sleep number smart bed can i make my site softer Can I make my sight firmer?
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Jennifer and June were really embracing this whole teen rebellion thing.
They were running around playing Ding Dong Ditch.
They were spray painting graffiti. Oh, and they also tried this fun new activity called burning down properties.
Yep, not kidding. Together, they burned down a tractor store.
They burned down the Pembroke Technical College, which is actually how they got caught and arrested.
And so they were arrested at age 19 for this.
And a judge committed them to Broadmoor Hospital, which is a psychiatric hospital in England.
Broadmoor Hospital is really one of the most well-known psychiatric hospitals in England, and it has a bunch of infamous patients, including the Yorkshire Ripper.
Spook fucking spook. So June and Jennifer lived in Broadmoor for 11 to 12 years.
And throughout that time, they were studied by a ton of experts that had never encountered anyone before like the twins.
When anyone would try to separate them, they would go fucking bananas.
But other than that, they were catatonic at best.
They didn't talk. They barely moved and when they did it was creepy as fuck.
The nurses and doctors said that they would enter a cell and one twin would be frozen in this like super weird specific pose and in a completely separate room in a completely different part of the hospital.
At the exact same time, the other twin would be found doing the exact same creepy weird pose.
They would also do this thing where one of them would eat like a ton of food and the other would barely eat anything at all.
And then they would just switch off. June even attempted suicide at one point while they were at Broadmoor.
They were just like, shit got crazier when they got there.
So then this journalist, Marjorie Wallace, was working for the Sunday Times, and she became interested in the case of the Silent Twins.
She began spending a ton of time with them.
She read most of their diaries after she kind of... gained the trust of their parents.
The parents handed over the diaries. She read their works of fiction and she just pretty much tried to interview them.
Marjorie is really the person that got a lot of awareness out about the case.
And throughout her time with the twins... she came to the conclusion that they really weren't the psychopaths everybody thought they were, and they really were amazing writers.
It also became clear that that the twins felt trapped within each other, and they both agreed that one of them would have to die for the other to have any chance at living a free life.
And at almost 30 years old, after spending nearly 12 years at Broadmoor Hospital, The Silent Twins were to be released to a more minimum security hospital, which was in Wales.
It was the morning of March 9th, 1993, and on the bus ride there, Jennifer laid down on June, and she said, at long last, we're out.
The eeriest part of that fucking statement is that's the last fucking thing Jennifer ever said to June.
At long last, we're out. That night she died of an apparent inflammation of the heart, even though she had no previous heart condition on record.
There was nothing found in her system to indicate any kind of overdose any poisoning anything like that.
She just suddenly passed away. June said that she felt free at last and liberated and she knew that Jennifer gave up her life for her.
She thinks the only explanation is that Jennifer willed herself to die. june went through a period of grief of course but then she went on to live her life to the fullest for the both of them she says She was released from the psychiatric care of that hospital shortly after Jennifer's death.
And she really went on to live a pretty normal life.
Like, she... She wasn't super, super outgoing, but she talked to people and she went about her fucking business.
And... She wrote the poem that is inscribed on Jennifer's headstone that reads, We once were two.
We two made one. We know more too, though life be one.
Rest in peace. And that is the case of the silent twins.
It is absolutely bonkers. And like I said, if you want more information about it, you should definitely check out that New Yorker piece because.
It goes like crazy, crazy in depth. It is so interesting to read.
And This was your Ash solo mini morbid.
Maybe now I will start to do more of these.
I will... Well, probably not that many more because it's really weird to be sitting in this pod lab without Elena.
But this was pretty fun. And if it ever needs to happen again, I am willing to do more of these.
So yeah, I hope you keep listening and I hope you keep it weird.
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The town of Agde in France is famous for sun, sand, sea and sex.
But lately, life on the coast has taken a strange turn.
The town's mayor, a respected pillar of the community, has been arrested for corruption.
His wife claims he's been bewitched by a beautiful clairvoyant.
Then there's the mysterious phone calls that local people have been getting.
I am the Archangel Michael. The whole town has been thrown into chaos.
As the mayor is unable to carry out his duties, I would like to address you all.
Legal proceedings have been initiated. Join me, Anna Richardson, and journalist Leo Schick for The Mystic and the Mayor as we investigate a story of power, corruption, and magic.
Binge all episodes of The Mystic and the Mare exclusively and ad-free right now on Wondery+.
Start your free trial in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the Wondery app.
Thank you.
