We'll Be Back

Often times, it's not uniqueness that makes people curious, but their similarities. Today's tour should reveal exactly what we mean.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. What happens when we die? Everyone has their
own theory. According to some religions, if we're good people
on earth, then our souls are rewarded in heaven, or
if not, they're tormented down below. Others believe that our

(00:48):
souls are joined with a higher power in what is
known as eternal unity. In Buddhism, there is something called
the rebirth doctrine or reincarnation. A person may be reborn
into an existence at drew death based on how they
acted when they were still alive. As far as we know,
the Pollock family of Hexham, England, were not Buddhists, but
what we do know is that what happened to them

(01:10):
has confounded experts for decades. Jacqueline and Joanna were six
and eleven, respectively when the unthinkable happened. It was May
of nineteen fifty seven, and the girls were walking to
church with a friend of theirs. A woman driving under
the influence of drugs hit them, killing all three children.
It was a horrific tragedy and the girls parents, Florence

(01:31):
and John, were racked with grief. In the months following
the incident, Florence became pregnant, and something about the pregnancy
affected John somehow. He knew that his little girls were
not gone forever well. One year after the accident, Florence
gave birth to twin daughters, Jillian and Jennifer. Both babies
were almost identical save for differing sets of birth marks,

(01:53):
but to add to the strangeness of the birth marks themselves,
their locations were also highly unusual. Jennifer had a mark
on her left hip and a spot on her forehead,
which was eerily similar to her late sister Jacqueline, who
had a similar marking of her own on her hip
and a scar in the same spot on her forehead.
Three months after Jennifer and Jillian were born, the whole

(02:15):
family moved out of Hexham to nearby Whitley Bay. As
they were only a few months old when they moved,
they shouldn't have remembered anything about their time in Hexham,
and yet upon a return visit four years later, they
started exhibiting some odd behavior. For one, the twins knew
several landmarks in Hexham despite never having seen them before.
The school, for example, seemed very known to them, even

(02:37):
though they had never stepped foot inside it. There was
also a local playground they never been to, yet they
knew exactly how to get there. The only members of
the family who had known about that playground were their
parents and their older brothers, and of course, their late sisters,
Jacqueline and Joanna. Only a few years earlier, the girls
had started asking to play with certain toys. These had

(02:58):
been their late sisters to poise that their mother, Florence,
had packed away after their death. Jennifer and Jillian had
never seen them before, didn't even know they existed, but
they started asking to play with them by name, as
if they had done so all their lives. And the
more John and Florence watched their girls, the more similarities
they saw between them and the sisters they had never known.

(03:19):
They played the same games and loved the same foods.
John was convinced that Jacqueline and Joanna had come back
to them that they had been reincarnated as Jennifer and Jillian,
but Florence refused to listen, and then the twins started
talking about the car accident Florence once heard. The girls
re enacted the event, with Jillian holding Jennifer in her arms,

(03:40):
telling her the blood's coming out of your eyes. That's
where the car hit you. After that, Florence quickly changed
her mind. Jillian once told her sister that the birthmark
on her forehead was a result of Jennifer falling on
a bucket. That was actually how Jacqueline had received a
scar before she died. And perhaps the most bizarre behavior,

(04:00):
the twins exhibited their fear of cars. They hated being
around them, and once held on to each other at
the sound of a car starting, they screamed that it
was coming to get them. It wasn't after Jillian and
Jennifer turned five that the memories and similarities with their
deceased sisters began to disappear. As they continued to grow,
they developed personalities of our own, although Jillian did have

(04:23):
occasional instances where she remembered something Joanna had done years earlier.
The case of the Pollock Twins is widely considered to
be proof that reincarnation is real. Others have claimed that
the girls went through was simply the past lives overlapping
with the present time. Whatever the case, it was enough
to convince their parents that at least for a short while,

(04:45):
Joanna and Jacqueline had come back to them, perhaps to
say the goodbyes they never could, or to hug their
mom and dad again. Either way, it gives us hope
that the ones we love are never truly gone, and
if we're lucky, we might get to see them one
last time. June and Jennifer Gibbons were close, like really

(05:18):
really close. They were both born on April eleven of
nineteen sixty three to Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons, a West
Indian couple who noticed strange behavior from the girls early
on after they moved from Barbados to England. Shortly after
the twins birth, those behaviors started to grow more noticeable.
For one, they didn't speak, at least not to their

(05:39):
parents or anyone else. June and Jennifer were known as
elective mutes. They could speak, they just chose not to
unless they were talking to each other. They came up
with their own language based on a sped up version
of Beijing Creole that only they could understand. Their special
language also helps solidify their bond. The girls were in

(05:59):
separate r bowl One time, when they were teenagers, June
and Jennifer were split up and sent to different boarding schools.
Each twin immediately started pulling away from everyone else, classmates, teachers, administrators, everyone.
They eventually reached a catatonic states and were unable to
function until they were finally reunited. Their childhood was tough.

(06:21):
The girls and their three other siblings were the only
black children in their neighborhood. They were shunned at school,
and teachers often allowed them to leave before the bell
rings so that they could avoid being bullied on their
way home. Their lack of friendships with the other kids
only drove them closer together, especially June and Jennifer, who
only played with and spoke to one another in their bedroom.

(06:42):
They did everything together, much of it creative in nature.
The girls would often use their toys and dolls to
put on plays, which they recorded on tape for their
younger sister Rosie to play. They were also given diaries
one Christmas, which ignited a passion for writing within them.
Around nineteen seventy nine, June and Jennifer used a mail
order creative writing course to learn how to write short

(07:04):
stories and novels, becoming prolific authors early on in their lives,
but their lack of a connection to others influenced their
work in questionable ways. One book was titled Pepsicola Addict,
and the twins put the money they earned from their
unemployment together to have it published. It remains the only
publicly available work by either of the sisters, and although

(07:25):
it's no longer in print, copies are held within the
collection of five libraries all over the world. Jennifer's work
was similar, if not darker. Her novel The Pugilist told
the story of a doctor who used the heart from
the family dog to save the life of his son,
but the dog's spirit took over the child and got
revenge on the man who killed him. One of the

(07:45):
few things about their lives that followed a typical childhood
was the rebellious teenage phase for the twins that included
drinking and drugs and acts of petty theft. Eventually, those
crimes grew into vandalism and arson, resulting in the burning
down of attract shop. They almost torched a local technical
school as well, but were arrested and sent to Broadmoor

(08:06):
Hospital in Berkshire, England. That was a high security mental
facility where they lived for over ten years. June believed
that they were being punished for refusing to speak. She
was quoted as saying, juvenile delinquents get two years in prison.
We got twelve years of hell because we didn't speak.
She once wrote the Queen for a pardon, but it
never came. Sadly, the medication they were placed on, as

(08:29):
well as their time of confinement, affected them deeply. They
continued to write in their diaries, but their passion for
creative writing had gone. But they did become more social
as the twins grew more comfortable with life within the hospital.
They even joined the choir. But they also had a secret.
Unbeknownst to the hospital staff or anyone really, June and
Jennifer had made a pact with one another. If one

(08:51):
of them were to somehow die first, then the surviving
twin was to begin speaking and living her life as
normally as possible. It was a Roman It's an idea,
this notion that the surviving sister had to carry on
and succeed, but it was life in broad Moore that
turned that promise into reality. In March of n as
the twins were being transferred to a more relaxed facility

(09:14):
in Wales, Jennifer placed her head in her sister's lap
and fell asleep. When she failed to wake up, she
was rushed to the hospital, but sadly, she was pronounced dead.
The cause, they said, was an inflamed heart. There was
nothing in her system that could have caused it either.
It was almost as if she had given up on
her own life for the sake of her sister. June

(09:36):
believed that Jennifer's sacrifice had a cleansing effect on her,
and in a way it did. She left the hospital
system and moved into a place near her parents. She
also started giving interviews to newspapers and magazines about her
life growing up, and she became an active member of
her community. A journalist who met the girls while they
were incarcerated read their diaries. She determined that June and

(09:58):
Jennifer Gibbons wanted two things from life, fame and freedom,
but not freedom from the hospital. Freedom, they said from
each other. They loved one another, but their bond had
become a burden. Jennifer gave her sister the freedom she
craved and the fame. Well that happened anyway. The Silent Twins,

(10:19):
as they were called, became the subjects of numerous documentaries,
a play, songs, and even a feature film, and for
good reason, their story was quite unique. Throughout it all,
June and Jennifer Gibbons never shied away from who they
really were. Smart, resourceful and creative women with a bond
as deep as the ocean, and a relationship that was

(10:42):
more than a little curious. I hope you've enjoyed today's
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show is created by
me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I

(11:04):
make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,