Doppelganger:
The episode began late one summer afternoon in the formerly patterned garden of a Kentish country house. Most of the family was away visiting a neighbour, but a daughter of the house lingered there, walking on gravelled paths among the sculptured boxwood, past fragrant flowerbeds carefully planted to make ornamental carpets in the lawn. She walked slowly because of the heat and because her movement was restricted by the fashions of the time - lace, ribbons, ruffles and thick falls of skirt.
She glanced at the brick facade of the house, glowing in the late light. A movement caught her eye. In the dark square of a window she could see the pale oval of a face, indistinct at this distance, yet seeming to regard her steadily. It was, no doubt, a servant, idling about upstairs.
The young woman took another turn around the garden, but the afternoon was fast dimming into dusk, and from the river that coursed nearby, mist began to rise and curl gently across the lawns, bringing a chill with it. The woman went indoors.
The house seemed unnaturally quiet. In the hall, she paused, overcome by the sensation - not, of course, uncommon in an empty house - that she was being watched. Nothing was in the hall, however, save for ancestral portraits, the unusual collection of bewigged gentlemen and white - haired ladies swathed in folds of gleaming fabric and attended by solemn children and arrays of lap dogs.
In the centre of the hall, a great stair wound up to the second floor of the house. As the woman set her foot on the first tread, she heard a rustling high above, she looked up and saw what might have been the hem of a petticoat in the shadows of the landing. This disappeared instantly; her eyes had deceived her.
She went to her own bedchamber. It was still warm from the sunlit day, and the air that drifted from the open windows was laden with the scents of water and earth. In the perfect stillness, she heard a rook cry harshly as it flew to it's roost in the home wood.
She went to a mirror and inspected the oval of her face. A curl had tumbled from it's ribbon onto her cheek, and she raised her hand to tie it back.
Hands still in midair, she froze, watching the mirror intently. A woman had come in the door behind her. The image grew clearer as the figure approached, petticoats rustling. The intruder stopped just behind the young woman and stared into the glass. Then the newcomer shifted her gaze to the woman and moved her lips in a mechanical parody of a smile. The young woman pressed her hand to the glass: It was herself that stood beside her, exact in every physical detail. But the breast of her twin did not rise and fall with breathing and no voice came from the pallid lips.
When the family came home later in the evening, they found the daughter on her bed, feverish, racked with pain, and clearly dying. With her last strength, the young woman whispered of the encounter, repeating the tale again and again in tones of terror. Her eyes where still bright with fear when she died.
The woman had seen one of the most frightening of apparitions - in Britain variously known as the double or fetch or co-worker, and in Germany called the Doppelganger, or "double goer." These were spirits who could assume the physical form of those about to die. Sometimes they appeared to relatives or friends of he dying - and their mimickry was so convincing that, if they were met casually walking along the street, they might be taken for the person involved. More often, however, they delivered their silent message to that person alone. And after death occurred, it was said, the double shed the mortal image and fled to whatever world had spawned it.
Emilie Sagée
One of the most fascinating reports of a double comes from American
writer Robert Dale Owen in 1853, who was told the story by Julie von Güldenstubbe,
the second daughter of the Baron von Güldenstubbe, that was to become a classic of its kind.
In 1845, when von Güldenstubbe was 13, she attended Pensionat von Neuwelcke, an exclusive girl's school near Wolmar in what is now Latvia (now part of Russia). One of her teachers was a 32-year-old French woman named Emilie Sagée. Although the school's administration was quite pleased with Sagée's performance and the pupils describing her as having a sweet and lovable nature, she soon became the object of rumor and odd speculation. Sagée, it seemed, had a double that
would appear and disappear in full view of the students.
In the middle of class one day, Sagée was writing on the blackboard and
her exact double appeared beside her. The double copied precisely the
teacher's every move as she wrote, except that it did not hold any chalk.
The event was witnessed and verified by 13 students in the classroom. A similar incident was reported at dinner one evening when Sagée's double was seen
standing behind her, mimicking the movements of her eating, although it held
no utensils.
The double did not always echo her movements, however. On several
occasions, Sagée would be seen in one part of the school when it was known
that she was in another at that time. The most astonishing instance of this
took place in full view of the entire student body of 42 students on a
summer day in 1846. The girls were all assembled in the school hall for
their sewing and embroidery lessons. As they sat at the long tables working,
they could clearly see Sagée in the school's garden gathering flowers.
Another teacher was supervising the children. When this teacher left the
room to talk to the headmistress, Sagée's double appeared in her
chair - while the real Sagée could still be seen in the garden. The students
noted that Sagée's movements in the garden looked tired while the
double sat motionless. Two brave girls approached the apparition and
tried to touch it, but felt an odd resistance in the air surrounding it. One
girl actually stepped between the teacher's chair and the table, passing
right through the apparition, which remained motionless. It then slowly
vanished.
Sagée claimed never to have seen the double herself, but said that
whenever it was said to appear, she felt drained and fatigued. Her physical
color even seemed to pale at those times. But eventualy recognixed when it returned for then her energy and color would return.
The school eventually reacted to the phenomenon All he pupils had seen the double at some time or other; so Emilie naturally caused quite a commotion at Neuwelcke. Although she was very popular among teachers and pupils, the more timid gradually became disturbed by her presence and told their parents. The school directors noted with concern that the attendance figures were dropping with the start of each new term.
Julie von Guldenstubbe told that the schools hopes for normality were in vain, and
that after 18 months from when Emilie joined the staff, the roll call of 42 had dwindled to12.
Famous Doppelgangers
There have been many cases of doppelgangers appearing to well-known figures:
-Guy de Maupassant, the French novelist and short story writer, claimed to
have been haunted by his doppelganger near the end of his life. On one
occasion, he said, this double entered his room, took a seat opposite him
and began to dictate what de Maupassant was writing. He wrote about this
experience in his short story "Lui."
-John Donne, the 16th century English poet whose work often touched on the
metaphysical, was visited by a doppelganger of his wife while he was in Paris. She appeared to him holding a newborn baby. Donne's wife was pregnant at the time, but the apparition was a portent of great sadness. At the same moment that the doppelganger appeared, his wife had given birth to
a stillborn child.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, still considered one of the greatest poets of the
English language, encountered his doppelganger in Italy as the phantom
silently pointed toward the Mediterranean Sea. Not long after, and shortly
before his 30th birthday in 1822, Shelley died in a sailing accident -
drowned 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 a case that suggests that doppelgangers might have something to do with
time or dimensional shifts, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th century
German poet, confronted his doppelganger while riding on the road to
Drusenheim. Riding toward him was his exact double, but wearing a gray suit
trimmed in gold. Eight years later, von Goethe was again traveling on the
same road, but in the opposite direction. He then realized he was wearing
the very gray suit trimmed in gold that he had seen on his double eight
years earlier! Had von Goethe seen his future self?
Source: 'The Enchanted world of Ghosts'
Arrival Cases:
The appearance of a person in advance of his actual arrival. The arriving phantom appears in the same clothing worn by the person at the time. Observers, believing the individual to be physically present, may speak to the phantom, and it may respond. The projecting individual usually is not aware of appearing in a distant location until he or she is told about it.
There are various explanations made for arrival cases. The most likely is that the individual somehow projects a double, which is perceived as his solid, real self. Another is that the individual projects himself out-of-body. Still another suggests that arrival cases occur in a quirk of time -- a duplication of an event in time.
American author Mark Twain described his own arrival case experience. At a large reception, he spotted a woman he knew and liked. She was dressed in the same clothes she had worn to the reception. However, the real woman was on board a train en route to the town where the party was being held -- she hadn't yet physically arrived. Twain apparently had seen her double or a phantom duplicate of her.
Arrival cases were collected and studied by the early psychical researchers, the founders of the Society For Psychical Research (SPR) in London, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The key researchers - Edmund Gurney, Fredric W.H. Myers and Frank Podmore - chronicled arrival cases in their exhaustive survey 'Phantasms of the Living' (1918). In some cases, intent and state of mind seem to be relevant factors - for example, a person is expected to arrive, and in transit is intent on getting there. Or, a person contemplates an activity in another location. Phantasms cites the case of a young girl whose arrival apparition was seen in a grove shortly before she actually arrived to commit suicide by hanging herself. The girl's intense emotional state may have contributed to the projection of her double in advance of her act.
In the Highlands of Scotland, the term for arrival cases is 'spirits of the living.' Highlanders believe arrival apparitions are visible only to those with second sight, (Clairvoyance).
In Norway, the arrival case phenomenon is called Vardoger, which means 'forerunner.' One unusual Vardoger case occurred in Oslo to Erikson Gorique, an American importer, in 1955. For years, Gorique had wanted to go to Norway, a country he had never before visited, but was forced to keep postponing the trip. In July 1955, he was at last able to make the trip, to look for china and glassware.
He did not decide on his hotel accommodations until he arrived in Oslo, and inquired which hotel was the best. Much to his astonishment, he was greeted by name by the hotel clerk upon his arrival to check in. The clerk told him it was nice to have him return. When Gorique protested that he had never before been at the hotel or in Norway, the puzzled clerk insisted that he could not mistake Gorique's unusual name and American appearance. He said Gorique stayed at the hotel several month's earlier, and had made reservations to return in July.
Gorique was more astonished when he visited a wholesale dealer, who also greeted him familiarly, saying it was a pleasure to have him back to conclude business that had been initiated on his previous trip. Gorique expressed his confusion, whereupon the dealer nodded knowingly and explained the Vardoger phenomenon: it is not uncommon in Norway, he said.
To conclude, Arrivals have been claimed to eat, sleep, and seem so real that anyone could confuse for the real person duplicated. If this occurrence, ( or any of the subjects included here ), has happened to you, or you know of a story on these subjects, you can share the experience by submitting the story to us here.
Fetch:
In Irish and English Folklore, the term for one's double, an apparition of a living person. The fetch is also called a "co-walker" in England. Seeing a fetch is a sign of ill-boding, although in Irish lore, to see a fetch in the morning means one will have long life. When seen at night, however, the fetch is believed to fortell a persons death.
Fetches are seen by persons with clairvoyant ability, or by friends or family of the living person just prior to, or at the moment of, that person's death. As such, the fetch is the equivalent of certain crisis apparitions, a term applied in psychical research and parapsychology. Sometimes the fetch is witnessed by the person who is to die several days or weeks prior to his or her death. A case (undated) cited in Haunted England (1940) by folklorist Christina Hole is that of Sir William Napier, who stopped at an inn while traveling from Bedfordshire to Berkshire. When he was shown his room, he saw a corspe lying on the bed. Upon closer inspection, he was astonished to see that the corspe was himself. Shortly after arriving in Berkshire, he died.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits
Bi-Location:
"Bi-location," which involves the ability of an individual to appear in two places at once, sometimes thousands of miles apart. In each case, the individual appears to be real to the people who see him or her.
*6/6/09
Then there may be one or two other philosophical ideas that might apply.
First is Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Two Point Law" that says that *everyone* has one exact duplicate somewhere. An intriguing idea that's possible when you consider that there are only about a hundred facial feature combinations- - maybe even less, but with DNA, the only identical duplicates are twins (and even triplicates) ; even clones aren't _exact_ duplicates of the original.
As for time travel, then we get really esoteric but still theoretical with the "Blinovitch Limitation" that implies that if a person should cross his/her own time-stream, the closer they are in time, the more dangerous it is for both parties as there's an energy buildup that can be shorted out with terrible consequences.
Old man can meet himself as a boy with minimal consequences; meet yourself five minutes ago and the buildup is much more intensive-- or so the theory goes.
And maybe this is where the old legends about meeting your doppelganger come from.... :-)
Ron
