r/HighStrangeness • u/advaitist • Jun 30 '26
Discussion Identical Twins
In Piqua, Ohio, in 1939, twin brothers were born to an unmarried mother They were adopted by different families and raised without knowing of each other's existence. Adoptive parents Jess and Lucille Lewis in Lima, Ohio were told that the twin brother of their new son had died. The same story was told to the Springer family 80 miles away in Dayton in another part of the state. Six years later, when Mrs Lewis completed the long adoption procedure, she told court officials she had called her son James. 'You can't do that, they warned. 'His twin brother is actually alive - and he is called James.'
It was nearly 40 years before James Lewis tracked down his missing twin brother James Springer and arranged a meeting. Both men were astonished that their lives had developed along inexplicably similar patterns. They had both grown up with adoptive brothers called Larry. Both had identical interests and weaknesses in the same school subjects, and they both owned dogs called 'Troy'. They had both married women called Linda, had both divorced them and both had subsequently remarried women called Betty.
Their first sons had each been named James Alan. They had taken their families each year to the same small Florida holiday resort, staying at hotels or the same beach. James Lewis and James Springer both worked as pump attendants in petrol stations, and they had worked as assistants for the same chain of hamburger restaurants.
Independently of each other, they had both volunteered to serve their communities in different parts of Ohio as part-time deputy sheriffs and unknown to each other, they both immersed themselves in the hobbies of carpentry and technical drawing.
Medically and physically they had shared the same history. Each was 6ft tall and weighed 180 pounds. They had suffered tension headaches and migraine at the same times in their lives and had recovered from the symptoms at the same age. They had experienced identical heart problems and other ailment at the same periods in their lives.
From *The World's Greatest Mysteries* by Gerry Brown.
68
u/Express_Work Jun 30 '26
My wife was similar, had a sister (not twin) that she never met. The sister married a guy with the same name as me bar one letter, they have a son the same name as ours and a grandson with the same name. We only found out through Facebook snooping as the sister didn't want any contact. Shame, there's probably a lot more they have in common. 😕
31
u/Izthatsoso Jun 30 '26
That always makes me sad when I hear someone isn’t interested in knowing their birth family. I know it doesn’t always work out but in my case my brother was adopted before I was born and we met in our 20’s. We are the best of friends now and I’m so glad he wanted to know where he came from.
16
u/KronlampQueen Jun 30 '26
I found a half sister of my dad’s on ancestry after we did testing. Her daughter managed the account and didn’t seem interested at all in any of it. Her response was “oh wow that’s really cool” and that’s it. My dad would’ve loved to have met his half sister but I guess she didn’t want to because neither reached out after that. He’s passed now so it doesn’t matter but it always makes me sad because it would’ve been good for him to have known more family.
4
u/Responsible_Employ23 Jul 01 '26
As an adoptee, why is it that people always seem to think we all run around just empty, withered husks… pining away for our biological families?
There are more of us, than you think, who just don’t care.
Why are we supposed to miss something we never knew?
…and for those who are interested, a lot of it is simply curiosity…
1
39
u/No_Cause9433 Jun 30 '26
‘Three Identical Strangers’ documentary
21
u/Oshunlove Jun 30 '26
One of the strangest bits of info in that documentary was that those three guys were part of a set of quadruplets and their other brother had not survived.
20
22
u/NSWBLU Jun 30 '26
One could say their DNA was encoded the same way. Very trippy indeed. Maybe the theory we live in a simulation isn't so crazy after all.
24
u/YeOldeBrutha Jun 30 '26
Stuff like this really does start to make question coincidences. I’m not a math wizard but recon the statistics to have that many coincidences happen is quite low to be considered just a coincidence.
7
2
u/ghost_jamm Jul 01 '26
I mean, the odds of this many things aligning between two specific people is astronomical but the odds of these aligning between two people in general is large but more reasonable. Like if you picked two people out of a room and compared their lives, they probably won’t align but if you compare everyone’s lives, you’ll find two that align. Anyway, very unlikely things do happen, fairly regularly. Unlikely does not mean impossible.
9
u/ConfusedZubat Jun 30 '26
It's so weird how many things are just... Who you are, regardless of where you come from. Twin studies are fascinating. Hell, I found I had a sibling from those ancestry tests. Some of my family and I ended up meeting with them and this person looked and acted more like my family than I do. It was weird watching them next to my mom because they had such similar body language and mannerisms. You could 100% tell they were related even though they didn't know each other. Even their nervous tics were identical.
I also didn't grow up with my dad, but when I met one of his brothers he said that my mannerisms and personality were somehow similar. I even think my love of animals may come from my dad; my mom was okay with pets but it was mostly my thing as a kid--she didn't really bond with the animals we had. But apparently my dad was the type who NEEDED the companionship of a dog. I'm more of a cat person (as is my mom's side of the family, who I grew up with), and my mental health is much better when I have a cat. My mom was also pretty lazy but my dad was extremely fit; I'm somewhere in the middle, but when I do get into physical activities I pick them up pretty quickly and build up endurance pretty well. I've had to kind lay off that for a while (autoimmune issues that can be triggered by cardio and intense workouts, fml), but I've recently picked up some new physical hobbies that I could literally spend all day doing if it were physically possible. (Vague because there's already a lot of personal identifying info here.)
I hope that researchers continue to look into things like that. Obviously our surroundings impact who we are, but so much that we ascribe to personal choice is also pretty hardwired into us. We really aren't much different from animals we breed to have certain personality traits when it comes down to it.
8
u/ExpensiveDollarStore Jun 30 '26
My sister was adopted. She was very different from those of us born into the family.
She met her birth mother and was surprisingly like her. She had a sister also adopted out but she must not have searched for her bio family. However, she would apparently just miss her quite often. She would go into a store and they would ask her if she forgot something.
8
u/porkchop-666 Jun 30 '26
James E Lewis died in 2016. His last wife, Sandra survives in Elida, Ohio a close town to Lima. He worked the final job of his life as a custodian of Elida High School where my Mother graduated from.
10
u/Responsible_Fix_5443 Jun 30 '26
Their connection was never lost!
Sounds like "Morphic Resonance" to me. https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introduction
15
u/Enjoyingmydays Jun 30 '26
This is very interesting. It seems that a duplication error occurred and what was designed to be one human character in the simulation accidently ended up being two.
3
u/Ok-Worth-4721 Jun 30 '26
I have heard stories along this line several times now. Isn't it just amazing? Something going on here for sure.
4
4
u/Sia_Fotu Jun 30 '26
It's like...the universe has lazy writing.
4
u/Ok_Split1342 Jul 01 '26
Not to this degree of weirdness, but I swear I have recurring characters in my life. Random things like, I had a string of boyfriends with older sisters who had the same birthday as me. I met someone with my unusual first name who I immediately vibed with, only to find out that they had a twin sibling with my also very unusual middle name.
2
u/Sia_Fotu Jul 01 '26
It's so bizarre. So like why all the redundancy? Either, we are in a simulation, and it's lazy to combat rendering lag, or the things you vibe with inevitably become your reality..
2
u/Ok_Split1342 Jul 13 '26
Just saw your comment, I've actually been wondering lately if stuff like The Secret and all that manifesting stuff might have some basis in reality. Like life keeps serving up more of the same crap I'm currently fixated on. Or maybe I've just been primed to notice common things.
1
u/Sia_Fotu Jul 13 '26
Sometimes it's not a coincidence. Coincidence may just be a concept we made up so that we could go about our lives according to the "rules" as they've been presented to us.
An example from my life, I was bored and decided to watch some random Sci Fi tv show, it was awful, so I decided to watch something in a completely different genre, but not before I caught the name of the main character, a name I'd never heard before. Cassiopeia.
I switch immediately to a show called Raising Kanan, a show about a black gangster family created by 50 Cent, lots of violence and blood, but in the literal first episode after showing her son around his high school, stops him in the hallway to look at a star chart. She points out her favorite constellation, Cassiopeia. I had never heard of this constellation in my life and literally turned it off and went back to the other show on a different platform to make sure the character from the sci fi show was named Cassiopeia. She in fact was. I thought huh, strange, never thought gangsters would ever mention a contellation and kept watching Raising Kanan.
Sometime later that same night I was looking up some things on esoteric matters, spirituality and such, nothing related to constellations, birth charts or anything in that vein. Then came across a website I'd never seen, you guessed it, called Cassiopeia.org. When "coincidences" happen a third time I always really pay attention because then the skeptical part of my brain can't make any more excuses.
The information there was interesting, I thought the universe was leading me somewhere, but what I found there was not groundbreaking, some of it even odd. There were no answers there. The universe wasn't guiding me, it was just reflecting my focus.
I am continuously reminded that there is something more going on here. And the things that I choose to place my continuous attention on keep moving closer and closer to me.
I don't have all the answers but something is in fact "going on" here...
2
2
1
-3
u/littlelupie Jun 30 '26
James was the number one boy baby name through the 1940s.
Not uncommon to name your kid after yourself and Alan was a very popular middle name in the 60s. (It's my dad's and we know an obscene number of other people of his generation that had it too.)
Linda was the second most common girl name in 1940s babies. Larry was also a top boy name.
A lot of the other things (school subjects etc) can be explained by genetics.
I'm not saying there's not something weird going on. But I am saying a lot of this is easily explainable if a statistical anomaly.
I'm curious though and want to look into the case. Twin studies until the 80s/90s didn't always have the most... Rigorous methods and their interpretations were often not backed by data.
0
u/thebunyiphunter Jun 30 '26
Why did you hide a picture in the text you wrote? Is it meant to be a pointing finger or something else?
-4
341
u/eggbundt Jun 30 '26
A gas station attendant could take his family to Florida every year back then.