The Doppelgänger Phenomenon
A doppelgänger is a living person's double. Goethe, Shelley, Lincoln and Donne reported one, and neurology now links it to heautoscopy. The cases checked.
A doppelgänger is the double of a living person. The German word means “double-goer”. It was coined by the novelist Jean Paul in Siebenkäs in 1796, where a footnote defines it as the name for people who see themselves. In folklore the double is often an omen of illness or death. In medicine the experience of seeing yourself has a name, heautoscopy, and it is linked to epilepsy, migraine and damage to certain parts of the brain.
What people report
Accounts fall into three rough groups. In the first, a person sees their own double. In the second, other people see someone in a place where that person is not. In the third, a person’s figure appears to family or friends at the moment of their death or danger. That last group is usually called a crisis apparition and is often treated as a separate thing. Older folk traditions, such as the Irish and Scottish fetch, treat the double as a warning that death is near.
Famous accounts
Goethe and the grey suit
In his memoir Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe describes riding away from Friederike Brion at Sesenheim, on the road towards Drusenheim, around 1771. He saw his own figure on horseback coming towards him. He said he saw it “not with the eyes of the body, but with those of the mind”. The figure wore a pike-grey suit with some gold on it. Eight years later he rode the same road the other way, wearing that same suit by chance. Goethe took the vision as reassuring rather than as an omen.
Shelley at Lerici, 1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia on 8 July 1822. On 15 August Mary Shelley wrote to their friend Maria Gisborne about his last weeks. She said Shelley had told her that his own figure met him on the terrace of their house and asked him, “How long do you mean to be content?” She also wrote that their friend Jane Williams saw Shelley pass a window twice when he was far away. Earlier versions of this page said the figure pointed to the sea. That detail is not in Mary’s letter.
John Donne in Paris, 1612
Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne says that in 1612, while Donne was in Paris with Sir Robert Drury, he saw his wife pass twice through the room carrying a dead child. She had given birth to a stillborn child at about that time. The story was added to the 1675 edition of Walton’s book and credited to “a Person of Honour”. Donne’s biographer R. C. Bald doubted it.
Lincoln’s double reflection, 1860
After his election in November 1860, Abraham Lincoln lay down on a lounge in his room in Springfield. In the swinging glass of a bureau opposite he saw two images of his face, one paler than the other. The double faded when he got up and came back when he lay down. He told the story to the journalist Noah Brooks, who printed it in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in July 1865, three months after the assassination. In Brooks’s account Mary Lincoln read it as a sign. Lincoln would be elected to a second term, and the pale face meant he would not live to finish it. Brooks wrote after the event, so the omen reading comes to us with hindsight built in. The likeliest cause is an ordinary double reflection from old mirror glass.
Elizabeth I
A story says Queen Elizabeth I saw her own double, pale and still, lying on her bed shortly before she died in March 1603. We have found no contemporary source for it. Treat it as a later legend.
Émilie Sagée, 1845 to 1846
The most detailed case concerns a French teacher named Émilie Sagée at the girls’ school of Neuwelcke in Livonia, in present-day Latvia. It comes from one witness, Julie von Güldenstubbe, who was thirteen at the time. Her account was published by Robert Dale Owen in Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World in 1860, some fifteen years later. Julie said that pupils often saw two Émilies at once. In the best known scene, the school’s 42 pupils saw her double sitting in a chair while the real teacher was picking flowers in the garden. Two girls said they touched it and it felt like muslin. Parents removed their daughters. Julie said only 12 of the 42 remained when Sagée was asked to leave after about eighteen months. She is said to have remarked that it was the nineteenth post she had lost this way. No school records or second witness have been found. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion later found a Dijon birth record for an “Octavie Saget”, born 3 January 1813, who may have been her.
Saints and bilocation
Catholic tradition tells of saints seen in two places at once, among them Padre Pio, Alphonsus Liguori and Anthony of Padua. The Church treats these as miracles, not as doubles in the folk sense.
What science says
Heautoscopy is the medical term for seeing a double of your own body out in the world. It is one of a family of autoscopic experiences that also includes out-of-body experiences and the feeling of a presence. They are reported in epilepsy, migraine, schizophrenia and after brain injury.
In 2006 Shahar Arzy, Olaf Blanke and colleagues in Geneva published a case in Nature. They were mapping the brain of a 22-year-old woman with epilepsy before surgery. When they stimulated her left temporoparietal junction, she felt a shadowy person standing behind her. The figure copied her posture. When she sat and hugged her knees, she felt it wrap its arms around her. The researchers suggested that the brain had misplaced its own sense of the body and projected it outside. That finding does not explain cases where other people see the double. Those rest on mistaken identity, look-alikes, memory errors and the way a good story grows in the retelling.
In culture
The double runs through literature. Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), Poe’s William Wilson and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde all use it. In film, Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) turned it into a horror story about a whole hidden population of doubles. For a broader look at the folklore, see our doppelgängers overview.