How would you feel if a friend or relative came up to you and said, “I just saw you in line at Target five minutes ago! How did you get here so fast?”

Imagine the confused look on their face and the adbject surprise in their tone as they continue to do a double-take. You know that you weren’t anywhere near Target, but they insist that they saw you talking with a fellow customer as they left the store to go to your house. Did they see your double or someone who looked and acted remarkably like you?

Let’s try this scenario. Suppose you were the one who saw yourself sitting several rows away in a dimly lit movie theater. How would you react? Would you sit there in numb shock, walk up to the person and introduce yourself, or run out of the theater?

What you or your friends may have seen is a Doppelganger, a shadow (or wraith) of yourself that is walking around and interacting with people just as you normally would. Superstition has it that if you see your doppleganger, you may die soon.

Famous Dopplegangers

• Guy de Maupassant claimed to have been haunted by his doppelganger near the end of his life.
• John Donne was visited by his wife’s doppelganger while he was in Paris. She held a newborn baby in her arms and was very sad. At the same moment that the doppelganger appeared, his wife had given birth to a stillborn child.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley encountered his doppelganger in Italy in 1822, shortly before his 30th birthday. The phantom silently pointed toward the Mediterranean Sea. Shelley died in a sailing accident in the Mediterranean Sea.
• Queen Elizabeth I of England was shocked to see her doppelganger laid out on her bed. The queen died shortly thereafter.

In some cases, doppelgangers may appear as a result of a time or dimensional shift. One such case involved the 18th century German poet, Johann Wolgang von Goethe, who confronted his doppelganger while riding on the road to Drusenheim. Suddenly, he saw his exact double riding in the opposite direction, wearing a gray suit trimmed in gold.

Eight years later, von Goethe found himself traveling on the same road, this time coming from Drusenheim and wearing the exact same suit his doppelganger had been wearing.