The Shared PSYCHOTIC Break That Played Out in Public — The Eriksson Twins

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The handler one day told her this whole thing about how they've been terraforming on Mars, and they're building a colony, and they're recruiting specific people, a specific blood lines, and specific talents and skill sets to go on to the planet. On Richard Sarrett's Strange Planet, we're redefining reality. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. Now there are limits as to what we understand about the human mind. I'm sure we know how neurons fire and can even name disorders and assign diagnoses, but there are moments, rare ones, or something breaks inside a person's head in ways we may never fully understand. And today, we have a true story so crazy you'll find it hard to believe, but it most certainly happened, and a lot of it was all caught on camera. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to every town where today I got a wild one for you and it's crazy that this story isn't more mainstream and well known. We got a lot to get into, so let's head on over to England and check out the share at Psychotic Break of the Ericsson Twins. May 17, 2008 was a clear day out on the M6 motorway in England. It's a major roadway, multiple lanes of traffic, so lots of cars and trucks moving out of fast-click. A BBC camera crew is out that day riding along with traffic officers filming for a documentary series called Motorway Cops, and the idea for the show is simple, follow police as they deal with speeding drivers installed vehicles, the repetitive but sometimes interesting hazards of day-to-day highway patrolling. As they're cruising, a call comes over the radio. They're not near an exit or on the shoulder, we're talking the narrow strip of pavement between opposing lanes of high-speed traffic, basically the last place two people should be out for a stroll. When the officers pull up, they see them immediately. It's two women standing still, separated from death by only a few feet of moving air and metal. To add the oddness of the sight, well the women look totally identical. They're the same height and build, same hair, and that's because their identical twins, that are identified as 40-year-old Swedish nationals. Each is carrying a bag, neither appears injured, and neither seems panicked in the way you'd expect someone to be given where they were. The cars whizzed by as officers tried to talk to them to figure out how they got there and what they're doing, the women respond but not in a way that makes much sense at all. Their answers are out there and their behavior feels detached, almost like they're somewhere else entirely. Now the cameras are rolling the entire time on this, and then without any warning or visible trigger, one of the women drops her bag, turns, and runs directly into traffic. A semi-truck traveling rough of 60 miles per hour hits her almost instantly. The impact is catastrophic and her body collapses onto the roadway, her legs completely shattered before she even reaches the ground. There's barely any time to react, though, because seconds later, her sister does the exact same thing, sprinting in the opposite direction into the oncoming lanes. A car then strikes her at full speed, and she's thrown into the air landing hard on the asphalt motionless. The officers stand stunned, they've now just watched two people step willing into traffic right in front of them, in broad daylight and it's all caught in HD. The traffic is shut down and paramedics rush in, and the women lie still on the roadway, bodies broken and her eyes closed, officers assume they're unconscious or worse. And then, about 15 minutes later, one of the twins opens her eyes, sits up, then stands. Before anyone can fully understand what they're seeing, she smacks a police officer in the face and tries to run, again, back into traffic. Her strength was absolutely phenomenal. The only time I've dealt with people with similar strengths are those people that have been on drugs or under the influence of alcohol. Ultimately it takes six people to restrain her. Witnesses will later struggle to describe what they saw. One will say her strength didn't make sense, that it didn't look human, that no one gets hit by cars at 60 or 70 miles an hour, eyes unconscious on the road and then stands up swinging. And yet, that's what actually happened. And this moment in time, as shocking as it is, isn't even the story, it's just the opening. Because within the next 24 hours, one of these women will walk into a stranger's home and kill them. Ursula and Sabina Erickson were born on November 3rd, 1967, in soon, quiet town and western Sweden, surrounded by forests and farmland. Their identical twins raised alongside two older siblings, a brother named Bjorn and a sister named Mona. By every available account their childhood was unremarkable in the best possible way. No instability and no early warning signs that anyone could point to later and say, "Yeah, that's where it all started." And they grew up in a steady household, went to school and moved through life like millions of other kids in rural Scandinavia. Even twins was part of their identity, but it wasn't their whole story, and they weren't known to be troubled or to be violent. By the early 2000s, their lives had split in very real ways. Ursula left Sweden around then and moved to the United States, starting over in a different country entirely. Sabina meanwhile stayed closer to home, eventually settling in Mallow Island. She married, had two children, built a life that revolved around her family. The sister stayed connected, but they were living separate lives thousands of miles apart, and for years that distance didn't seem to cause any problems. And then in May of 2008, Ursula decided it was time to visit her sister. She flew over to Ireland and arrived at Sabina's home on Friday, May 16th. A day before it all went down on that highway. Whatever happened during that visit unfolded quickly, because by the end of the night, both women were gone. They left without warning, and I mean Sabina just walked out on her husband and left her two young children behind, and neither woman told anyone where they were going or why. The next morning, Saturday, May 17th, Ursula and Sabina show up in Liverpool, England. One of the first places we know they went was a police station on St. Anstery, and that was around 8.30am in there. They told officers that they were concerned for the well-being of Sabina's children back in Ireland. To the police contacted Irish authorities to check in on the situation. And they learned that Sabina had argued with her husband the night before leaving, but there was no indication that the children were in any danger. With no crime reported and no immediate risk, there was nothing the police could legally do, so the twins walked out. At around 11.30am, they then boarded a national express bus. headed for London. And from that point forward, nothing about their behavior followed a normal pattern. This is where things begin to come apart. During the bus ride, the driver started to notice them. The twins stayed close, gripping their bags against their chests, leaning in toward each other, whispering non-stop. They never settled into their seats, whatever they were talking about seemed urgent and private. At the time the coach reached Keel's services, a rest stop along the M6 highway. The driver had made up his mind, and this wasn't even a scheduled stop, but he pulled in anyway and told the women they weren't getting back on. He asked a look inside their bags, and they refused, so he left them there. The manager of the service station watched the sisters pace around outside, something about them felt off and off that he eventually called the police. Officers arrived, spoke with the twins briefly and decided there was no immediate cause for concern, and with no clear reason to detain them, they left. In our long after, Ursula and Sabina walked away from the rest stop and on to the M6 itself, telling them they ended up on that median. At one point, Sabina was even clipped by a passing vehicle, suffering minor injuries. She never stopped, though, and neither of them did. Call started flooding in from there, and that's when the officers headed their way and the rest, while we know. But here's what we didn't get to. Ursula was the first to jet out into traffic, and she got hit by that truck, and her sister, and the rest of them watched as it happened. Sabina then did the same, and miraculously, neither one of them died. Ursula was actually the first to wake up, screaming she fought with the officers trying to help her. Like I mentioned, her legs were damaged, pretty bad, so she couldn't do all that much. Her words came out fractured and paranoid. She told one officer she recognized them, and that he wasn't real. And she told another, and they were going to steal her organs. Sabina, meanwhile, wasn't moving. In paramedics got to her and couldn't find a pulse. As they prepared to have her airlift into the hospital, the scene settled into that quiet, sunned pause that follows some link out of traffic. That's when she opened her eyes and started fighting everybody in sight. She punched a female officer hard enough to knock her to the ground and bolted back toward the highway, and people chased her. A driver, from a nearby van, tried to stop her, and she kicked him with such force that she fractured his rib. Like I said, it took six people to finally get control of her, and force her into an ambulance, where she was handcuffed, the legs were strained and sedated. At the hospital, both sisters were of course tested for drugs and alcohol, but all that came back negative. Ursula was airlifted to Royal Stoke University Hospital with devastating injuries and rushed into emergency surgery. As Sabina was taken by ambulance to the same hospital, it just five hours later, when she was released. Despite having been struck by a car on a busy highway, her injuries were considered minor. She was taken into police custody, and finally her demeanor shifted completely. Now she was calm, relaxed, even joked with officers telling them she was a licensed boxer. The forensic physician, who examined her, found no immediate signs of a mental health crisis, when asked why she ran into traffic, she simply stated, "No comment." She did, however, make an off-hand remark to an officer at one point, one that would linger long after knowing what we know now. In Sweden, she said, "We have a saying, an accident rarely comes alone, usually at least one more follows, maybe two." And by then, the first accident was already over, and almost certainly was more to come. On May 19, Sabina appeared in court and pleaded guilty to trespassing on the highway and assaulting an officer. The judge sentenced her to one day in custody. Time she already served, so she was released immediately. Outside Sabina had nowhere to go and no money, Ursula was still hospitalized, so she began drifting through the city of Stokon Trent on foot. That evening around 7 pm, she was walking along Christchurch Street, in the Fenton area when she crossed paths with two men out walking a dog. One of them was 54-year-old Glenn Hollinshett, a former Royal Air Force Airman, trained paramedic and a self-employed welder, and the other was his friend, Peter Molly. As Sabina struck them as polite but visibly on edge, she bent down to pet the dog and asked if they knew any nearby bed and breakfast or hotels. She explained her situation, that her sister was in the hospital and she needed somewhere to stay. And Glenn felt sorry for, offered to take her back to his house on Duke Street, and she accepted. Back at Glenn's place, the three of them had a few drinks, but Sabina's behavior never quite settled. She kept getting up, pacing and checking the windows. At one point, she pulled out a pack of sigs and offered them to Glenn and Peter. As they were about to light up, she suddenly snatched the cigarettes from their mouths, warning them that they might be poisoned, even though she'd been smoking from the same pack all night. Peter started to get a little weirded out, and later he would describe a creeping sense of fear he had. A feeling that Sabina might be running from something, she wasn't saying out loud. And Glenn, on the other hand, he just brushed it off. He assumes she was shaken by the recent events, maybe eccentric, maybe still in shock. Around midnight, Peter decided to leave and Sabina stayed. The next day, Glenn called his brother to ask about nearby hospitals, trying to help Sabina locate Ursula, and he was still treating her like a guest, who had simply fallen on hard times. And that evening, around 7.40pm, Glenn and Sabina were preparing dinner when Glenn stepped outside briefly to ask his neighbor, Frank Booth, if he could borrow some tea bags. He went back inside, and less than a minute later, he stumbled out again, and this time, leading heavily. According to Frank, Glenn managed to say she stabbed me before collapsing in the alleyway. His last words were reportedly, "Look after my dog for me." And Glenn died from five stab wounds inflicted with his own kitchen knife, and Sabina then fled. Security cameras captured her running through nearby streets, blood soaked, striking herself in the head with a hammer. A passing driver, Joshua Grattage, stopped his car to help when he saw her injured. She attacked him too, hitting him in the back of the head with a roof tile she'd been carrying in her pocket. A paramedic spotted her, and they gave chase. Sabina ran onto a bridge over the A50, and jumped, falling roughly 40 feet under the roadway below. She fractured both her ankles, and suffered a skull fracture. In there, she was rushed back to the hospital. We're Dr. Hussain, the same physician who had evaluated her on the motorway, and later in police custody, now found himself treating her for the third time in three days. He would later say the situation felt stranger than fiction, something no one will believe if it weren't documented. Sabina was arrested on June 6, while recovering in the hospital and charged with murder. Ursula, after a long recovery, was released from the hospital in September, and she returned to Sweden briefly, and then went back to the States. She never gave any interviews, and offered no public explanation. She simply disappeared from public view. As Sabina's case finally went to trial a year later, on September 2, 2009, she pledged guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and throughout her interrogation and court proceedings, she never really explained what exactly happened. Every question was met with the same response she gave in police custody, no comment. While the prosecution and the defense agreed on one point, Sabina had been legally insane at the time she killed Glenn, but by the time she stood trial, she was considered sane again. A diagnosis presented by the defense was one most people it never heard of unless you're a fan of the Joker movies, "Tolia Doe", "Prench" for "Madness of Two". In English, it's known as "Shared Psychotic Disorder", and so what does that really mean? Well, it's exactly what it sounds like, a delusion that spreads from one person to another. It's extraordinarily rare, and the condition was first identified in France in the 1800s, and since then only a small number of documented cases have ever been recorded. In theory, it works like this. One person, known as the primary, develops a genuine psychotic disorder. They experience delusions, paranoia, perceive threats that don't exist. Through an intense, close relationship, those beliefs are gradually absorbed by a second person who begins to share the same distorted version of reality. It almost always appears in relationships where people are deeply bonded and isolated together, married couples, parents and children, siblings. And most often of all, identical twins. In this case, the defense argued that Ursula was the primary sufferer, experiencing a true psychotic break, and that Sabina's illness emerged through prolonged exposure to a sister's delusions. The prosecution disagreed on the mechanism, suggesting that Sabina experienced a sudden and severe detachment from reality, but it was all on her own. In either way, though, both sides agreed on one central point. During those days in May, Sabina was experiencing profound psychosis. And understand if this "foliadoo" could be a real thing in this case, it helps to understand what makes identical twins different from anybody else. Early impregnancy, a fertilized egg begins dividing, and one cell becomes two, two becomes four, and so on until it becomes a baby. And occasionally, that process splits cleanly in half, and instead of one embryo, they are two. The result isn't just siblings who look alike. It's two people who share nearly 100% of their DNA, a biological closeness, unlike any other human relationship, and in rare cases that closeness can extend beyond the physical and into the mind. They develop in the same womb, often share a placenta, and float in the same emniotic fluid, and are exposed to the same hormones at the same time. Their brains form along nearly identical pathways, even before birth, their nervous systems are being wired and parallel. Studies have shown that when one identical twin develops schizophrenia, the other one has roughly a 30-50% chance of developing it as well. Preferternal twins, who share about half their genes, will that number drop sharply, closer to 7-15%, about the same as ordinary siblings. The important point here is that the genetic vulnerability to severe mental illness is significantly higher in identical twins. Now we don't know how often they spoke on the phone or what they talked about growing up, but the available evidence here suggests Ursula was the primary sufferer of some mental issue. She then flew over to her sister's and essentially infected her with whatever she had, and, together, a flat island, apparently convinced they were in danger. On the bus they clutched their bags as if they were protecting something essential. When officers approached them on the highway, they didn't see how they saw a threat. Ursula told the police, "I know you're not real." And Sabina shouted, "They're going to steal your organs." These weren't metaphors or stress responses. They were classic paranoid delusions. The belief that reality itself is false and that the people around you are part of something hostile and unreal. And once that belief takes hold in this case, everything that follows begins to make a terrible kind of sense. After the accident, they were separated. Ursula stayed in the hospital with her injuries while Sabina was released, and for a moment, her regular self came through when she spoke to police and seemed like a semi-normal human being. That's why she didn't appear to have any mental health issues. But ultimately, she continued experiencing delusions and hearing voices. She believed she was in danger, and when Glenn left his house to borrow tea bags from his neighbor, it's possible Sabina thought they were plotting against her. And her broken reality, the kind man who'd offered her shelter, became a problem. She grabbed his kitchen knife and eliminated the threat. In the end, Sabina Erickson was sentenced to five years in prison, minus time already served. The judge made it clear that her culpability was considered low, that her actions were driven by severe mental illness. When the sentence he said wasn't meant to measure the value of Glenn's life, it was meant to protect the public. Staffordshire Police stated that throughout all this, officers had followed procedure. And on paper, well, they had. Looking back, it's hard not to wonder how something so obvious and hindsight went unseen in real time. The truth is, the human mind is still largely unexplored territory. We can map brain regions, and give names to mental health issues, but consciousness itself, how reality is perceived, and if folio do is real, remains something we don't fully understand. When someone becomes convinced they're in danger from threats that don't exist, or that the world around them isn't real, we can name it, we just can't always predict it. A triggered Ursula psychosis is still unknown, as she had no documented history of mental illness, just traveled to Ireland to visit her sister, and within roughly 36 hours, both women were living inside the same distorted reality. Was there a specific moment that set it off, a fight, a stress maybe? Or was it always there, written quietly into their genetics, waiting for the right conditions to surface? We'll probably never know, and either sisters have ever offered an explanation themselves because, well, they probably don't know. To being a servitor sentence and was released on parole in 2011, returning to Sweden, Ursula had already gone back to the States, reportedly living with a close-knit religious community. No interviews, no statements, no public reckoning. There have been no reports of further violent episodes, so by all outward measures, both women returned ordinary lives, as if those days in May of 2008 were a temporary rupture from reality that closed once they were separated. And that may be the most unsettling part, because this story doesn't end with answers, it ends with records, footage, court transcripts. Proof that something almost impossible still happened, not in a horror movie, not in fiction. On a highway in daylight right in front of cameras, once it was over, the world kept moving, leaving behind a story that sounds unbelievable, but that's only because it's true. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town, hope y'all enjoyed it. If you did, remember to subscribe, because that's the easiest way that really helps us out. I appreciate you very much, so thanks for tuning in and remember to come on back here next week for another episode filled with scary, strange and mysterious stories, because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.