We'll Be Back

if not, they're tormented down below. Others believe that our 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

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 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, 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

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

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 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. 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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,