Doppelgänger

A doppelgänger is a phantom of the living: an exact double of a person, seen by themselves or by others, often in a place where the real person could not be. The German word means “double-walker”. It was coined by the novelist Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), who used the form Doppeltgänger in his novel Siebenkäs in 1796, and it reached English readers through books such as Catherine Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature (1848).

The belief itself is far older and very widespread. Ancient Egyptians spoke of the ka, a spirit double. In Ireland and northern England the double was a “fetch”, and to meet your own fetch was a warning of approaching death. In Norway the vardøger, and in Finland the etiäinen, is a harmless forerunner: friends hear your footsteps, your key in the door or your voice shortly before you actually arrive. In many Muslim-majority countries the qareen is a spirit companion who shadows each person.

Some of the most famous accounts come from well-known names, always second-hand and impossible to check. Goethe wrote in his memoirs that, riding away from a farewell, he saw himself coming the other way in clothes he did not own – and years later found himself on the same road wearing them. Abraham Lincoln told friends that after his election in 1860 he saw two images of his face in a mirror, one paler than the other; the story was published by the journalist Noah Brooks in Harper’s in 1865, after the assassination gave it a grim significance. Mary Shelley reported that her husband Percy described meeting his own double weeks before he drowned in 1822, and in 1893 Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon was said to have been seen at his wife’s London party at the moment his ship went down off Lebanon.

The most elaborate case is that of Émilie Sagée, a French teacher said to have worked in 1845–46 at a girls’ school at Neuwelcke in Livonia (now Latvia), where pupils reported seeing two of her at once – one writing at the blackboard, one standing beside it, or one sitting motionless in a chair while the other picked flowers in the garden. The story rests entirely on one witness, Julie von Güldenstubbe, who was about 13 at the time, as retold by Robert Dale Owen in his 1860 book Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World; no school records have confirmed it.

Neurologists recognise real experiences behind some of these tales. In autoscopy a person sees a mirror-image of themselves; in heautoscopy the double seems to be another self, who may move independently, and the person may even feel located in both bodies. These rare experiences are linked to epilepsy (especially seizures in the temporal and parietal lobes), migraine, brain lesions and some psychiatric conditions, and research led by Olaf Blanke ties them to a failure to integrate body signals at the temporoparietal junction. Ordinary lookalikes, misremembered encounters and the power of an omen story after a death account for many of the rest.

An exact double of a living person seen by friends in another place; a person seeing their own double, sometimes mimicking their movements and sometimes acting independently; doubles that are pale, foggy or see-through; a ‘forerunner’ heard or seen arriving shortly before the real person does.

Anywhere – roads, homes, classrooms, mirrors – but folklore pays special attention to doubles seen at dusk, at a doorway, or shortly before a death in the family.

The double is one of literature’s great themes: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs (1815), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, studied by the psychoanalyst Otto Rank and by Freud in his essay “The Uncanny” (1919). Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting How They Met Themselves shows two lovers meeting their own doubles in a wood, and films from The Student of Prague (1913) to Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) carry the idea on.