By Kristi O’Toole

The bond between twins is unlike any other sibling connection. It’s powerful and unique; only 3.3 percent of births are twins, according to data from the CDC. For those who aren’t part of this small club, it’s fascinating to think about what life is like as a twin.

The thought of having a ‘built in’ best friend is a fascinating one to me. As an only child I can barely imagine what life with a regular sibling would be like, much less another me. Actually, two of me would be pretty stinking awesome come to think of it.

From what I have read during my research I have come to the conclusion that twins do indeed share something special. It seems that there is even varying degrees of closeness depending on the type of twin pair. To clarify, identical twin girls appear to have the strongest bond while fraternal boy/girl sets tend to have the weakest. Although, I don’t mean to say that they have a weak relationship with each other by any means, just relative to the other types of twin pairs. Which makes sense, as women, in general, tend to forge the strongest relationships with each other.

Imagine going through life with someone who looks just like you. Some identical twins will embrace their similarities, while some will strive for individuality. Either way, there’s no escaping the fact that you are a twin when your physical features are so alike. This can be the same for some fraternal pairs too when they have very similar features. Maybe this is one of the reasons for such a strong bond between twins. Understanding each other so completely. From being singled out due to your appearance or the mere fact that you are a twin, to dealing with the everyday questions from strangers. This understanding of the feelings, thoughts, ideas, etc. of a co-twin must play into the development of such a close relationship.

My intent during this article is not to bring forward the fact that twins can finish each others sentences, no, my intent was to uncover the deeper link, the psychic bond that can span any distance or overcome any hurdle.

I’m certain some of the psychic accounts between twins can be ruled out as coincidence, but there are a other stories that I cannot simply brush aside. Here are a few such stories: (in step goosebumps).

-One spring day in 2009, 15-year-old Gemma Houghton was suddenly struck with the strong feeling that her twin sister Leanne was in trouble. Gemma hurried to the bathroom, where she knew Leanne was taking a bath and found her sister submerged, unconscious and turning blue. Leanna is an epileptic and had suffered a seizure in the tub.

Gemma pulled her sister from the tub, administered CPR and revived her, saving her life. “I got this sudden feeling to check on her. It was like a voice telling me ‘your sister needs you’,” Gemma later told reporters. “She was under the water. At first I thought she was washing her hair or playing a trick, but when I lifted her head out I saw she had turned blue.”

-Paula Wombwell, a teacher and mother of identical twin girls recounts an unexplained event when they were about four years old. One twin, Heather was with Paula in the classroom while the other twin, Catherine was in the gymnasium on another floor. Suddenly, Paula heard Catherine crying downstairs, and Heather declared that it was because a certain person had just run over her with a scooter. There was no way Heather could have seen what happened. Sure enough, when Paula asked Catherine about what had happened she confirmed that that certain person had run over her with a scooter.

-At Twin Connections, a website that celebrates “the mysterious bond between twins” and collects stories from twins, we find this experience: “I am a mother of identical twin boys,” writes Aiya. “Gabriel and Ethan just turned 5 this year and are in kindergarten. My twin story happened when they were 4. My mother wanted to spend some time with them, but she was never able to handle both of them at the same time. We decided to let Gabriel go for a visit for three days and then Ethan would go for three days. Ethan and I were driving in the car on our way to make the switch; he was sitting in his car seat as quiet as can be just looking out the window, when he tells me, ‘Mom, tell Gabriel to get his clothes on.’ I looked at him and told him Gabriel was with grandma and he wasn’t here. He told me, ‘Just tell him mom. He needs to get his clothes on.’ So I called my mom out of curiosity and asked her if she was having a hard time getting Gabriel dressed, and she said yes, they were having an argument because Gabriel didn’t want to get dressed because it was too cold and he wanted to stay in his jammies.”

Most scientists are naturally skeptical of such anecdotes as evidence of telepathic communication. “We do hear of things like this happening between identical twins more often than fraternal, but it isn’t telepathy,” says Dr. Nancy Segal, professor of psychology and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University in an article for Lawrence Journal-World. “They’re merely coincidences that occur when two people are so much alike in the first place. It’s nature and nurture – same heredity, same environment. [Identical twins] come from the same egg, and they tend to have the same general thought patterns, intelligence levels, likes and dislikes.”

Much like a husband and wife that have spent many years together, they get to know each other and their ways and it has nothing to do with psychic ability. But what happened when a scientific experiment involving twins took place?

For a television show in 2003, Playfair set up a test for twins Richard and Damien Powles. Richard was placed in a sound-proof booth with a bucket of ice water while Damien was some distance away in another studio hooked up to a polygraph machine (a “lie detector” machine that measures respiration, muscle and skin response. When Richard plunged his hand into the ice water and let out a gasp, there was an obvious blip on Damien’s polygraph that measured his respiration, as if he too had let out a gasp.

During the same experiment, Richard was instructed to open a cardboard box, from which he expected a nice surprise. Instead, a rubber snake popped out, startling him. At that exact moment, the polygraph recorded a jump in Damien’s pulse rate, as if he was having the same experience.

In a similar experiment before a live TV audience, twin teenagers Elaine and Evelyn Dove were likewise separated. Elaine was in the sound proof booth with a pyramid shaped box while Evelyn was sequestered in another room with the polygraph. When Elaine was sitting relaxed, suddenly the box exploded in a harmless but shocking pop of sparks, flashes and colored smoke. Evelyn’s polygraph recorded her psychic reaction at the same moment, with one of the needles running right off the edge of the paper.
Playfair is quick to admit that these were not experiments conducted with the strictest scientific protocols, yet it is difficult to explain their outcomes.

While the previous stories of psychic connections between twins are more heartwarming than anything else, the following stories… yeah, not so much.

-Swedish twins Ursula and Sabina Eriksson had no history of mental illness and lived normal, happy lives with their respective families. Then, one day, Ursula traveled from the U.S. to Ireland to visit her sister … and what followed was a spree of violence and shared madness that resulted in several traffic accidents, one murder victim, and a whole bunch of baffled cops.

Sabina and Ursula were in Ireland when, for unknown reasons, they hopped on a plane to London without telling anyone. Then boarding a bus the twins were apparently behaving like hooligans whose team had just lost, so the driver kicked them out in the middle of the highway and told them to walk it off. They did just that. They started walking in the middle of the highway, not giving a care about the speeding cars. Jaywalking lead to a knock down drag out fight with police, both sisters running out in front of speeding cars at separate times and despite a broken leg, getting up and attacking officers again.

-Twins can be freaky, but we all understand why they’re so disturbingly alike: Not only do they share the same DNA, but they also tend to grow up surrounded by the same people, playing with the same toys, and doing the same activities. They were most likely traumatized by the same cartoons and disappointed by the same birthday presents. It’s when they don’t do any of those things and still turn out exactly the same that you should be freaked out.

Take Ohio resident James Edward Lewis, who married a woman named Linda, but divorced her and married a woman named Betty, with whom he had a son named James Alan. Lewis had been adopted as a baby, and when he was in his late 30s, he tracked down and met for the very first time his twin brother, James Arthur Springer … who married a woman named Linda, but divorced her and married a woman named Betty, with whom he had a son named James Allan.

-Twins Jennifer and June Gibbons became notorious in the ’80s when they carried out a two-woman crime spree at age 18 that resulted in both sisters being declared psychopaths and sent to England’s most famous high-security hospital for the criminally insane. However, they already had plenty of experience being creepy before that: As kids they were known as “the silent twins” because they refused to speak to anyone but each other, and even then they used their own secret language that no one else could understand.

Born to Barbadian parents and raised in Wales, Jennifer and June refused to read or write in school, but at home it was the opposite: They read voraciously and filled dozens of diaries with writing, including full novels with names like The Pepsi-Cola Addict and Discomania. Like all children, they liked to play games, but rather than settling for Barbies or Monopoly, they had bizarre rituals where they decided which one would wake up in the morning first or which one would breathe first, and the other one wasn’t allowed to do anything until the first one did so.

Their relationship was complicated. On one hand, they were best friends, and on the other, they occasionally tried to kill each other — Jennifer tried to strangle June with the cord of a radio, and June responded by throwing Jennifer off a bridge. Their odd behavior escalated as they grew older and turned to petty theft and arson. It was at this point that their parents realized there might be something wrong with the girls and agreed to have them committed (and if they hadn’t, the authorities probably would have insisted).

It was toward the end of their 14-year stay at Broadmoor Hospital that the twins would pull off their magnum opus. One day, they told their only friend, journalist Marjorie Wallace (author of their biography, published years earlier), that one of them wouldn’t make it out of the hospital alive. Jennifer just looked at Wallace and said, “I’m going to die. We’ve decided.”

You see, the twins had realized that they could never be free or normal as long as they were both alive, and so, according to Wallace and later interviews by a reformed June, Jennifer agreed to be the one to die. And what do you know, on the day that they were being transferred to a lower security hospital, Jennifer suddenly passed away from a rare heart problem that was never fully explained. As predicted, June became considerably less creepy after she stopped being a twin, and today she lives a quiet life with her family. Which somehow just makes all of the above even weirder.

And on that note I’m going to turn my shopping cart the other way the next time I come across twins whilst shopping. Next time I’ll discuss the ghostly fate of the Mary Celeste and other mysterious ships.

Until then, keep the night light burning.

When Kristi isn’t writing for NewzBreaker, she writes supernatural suspense novels having three currently published. If you would like to check out any of her books they can be found online and at other major retailers like Books a Million and Amazon. Never one to rest, she also paints/designs shoes and items for the home. Check out her eBay store, Watered Down Vodka and her FB page.

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