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by Wikipedia
A
doppelgänger is the ghostly double of a living person. The word
doppelgänger is adapted from German doppel, meaning "double", and gänger,
translated as "goer". The term has, in the vernacular, come to refer to
any double or look-alike of a person, most commonly in reference to a
so-called evil twin, or to bilocation.
Alternatively, the word is used to
describe a phenomenon where you catch your own image out of the corner
of your eye. In some mythologies, seeing one's own doppelgänger is an
omen of death. A doppelgänger seen by friends or relatives of a person
may sometimes bring bad luck, or indicate an approaching illness or
health problem.
In folklore
The doppelgängers of folklore
cast no shadow, and have no reflection in a mirror or in water. They are
supposed to provide advice to the person they shadow, but this advice can
be misleading or malicious. They can also, in rare instances, plant ideas
in their victim's mind or appear before friends and relatives, causing
confusion.
Famous reports of the
Doppelgänger phenomenon
-
Emilie Sagée was a schoolteacher
in the nineteenth century whose Doppelgänger's public appearances were
recorded by Robert Dale Owen after being reported to him by Julie von
Güldenstubbe.
-
Guy de Maupassant recorded his own
Doppelgänger experiences in his story Lui.
-
Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed to
have met his Doppelgänger foreboding his own death.
-
John Donne, the English
metaphysical poet, apparently met his wife's Doppelgänger in Paris,
foreboding the death of his yet unborn daughter.
-
Abraham Lincoln told his wife,
while shaving after his election as president, that he saw an image of
himself in the distance fade away while shaving in front of a mirror. He
believed this to mean he would be elected to a second term but would not
survive.
Emilie Sagée
Robert Dale Owen was responsible for writing down the
singular case of Emilie Sagée. He was told this anecdote by Julie von
Güldenstubbe, a Latvian aristocrat. Von Güldenstubbe reported that in
the year 1845–46, at the age of 13, she witnessed, along with audiences
of between 13 and 42 children, her 32-year-old French teacher Sagée
bilocate, in broad daylight, inside her school (Pensionat von Neuwelcke).
The actions of Sagée's Doppelgänger included:
- Mimicking writing and eating,
but with nothing in its hands.
- Moving independently of Sagée,
and remaining motionless while she moved.
- Appearing to be in full health
while Sagée was badly ill.
Apparently also, the Doppelgänger
exerted resistance to the touch, but was non-physical (two girls passed
through the Doppelgänger's body).
The doppelgänger phenomenon in
popular culture
The doppelgänger
concept is popular in fiction, such as the androgynous doppelganger of
the Dungeons & Dragons setting.
Doppelgängers
appear in a variety of science fiction and fantasy works, in which they
are a type of shapeshifter that mimics a particular person or species
for some typically nefarious reason.
A temporal
doppelgänger is any version of oneself one may meet during time travel.
It is an exact likeness of one at a specific time in your history (or
future). Meetings with oneself may occur when one version of oneself
travels backwards through the timestream and encounters a younger
version of oneself, or when two or more of the same person from
different timestreams travel to the same moment in their futures.
Nigel Watson
writes about the Doppelgänger Effect in flying saucer tales, which have
a long history of lookalikes. In the February 2006 edition of Fortean
Times (pp50-53) he does a double-take on ufologists, fairies and their
links to modern science fiction.
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