A doppelgänger ( / ˈ d ɒ p ə l ɡ ɛ ŋ ə r , – ɡ æ ŋ -/ DOP -əl-gheng-ər, -⁠ gang- , also doppelgaenger and doppelganger ) is a supernatural copy of a living person. This copy often follows the person it is based on. In stories, myths, and everyday language, a doppelgänger is usually seen as a ghost or a mysterious event. It is often thought to be a sign of bad luck. In literature, an example is the evil twin of the main character. Today, the term "twin stranger" is sometimes used instead.

Spelling

The word doppelgänger in English is a borrowed word from German, meaning a person who is a double-walker. In German, the singular and plural forms are the same, but English writers often use the plural doppelgängers. In German, there is also a feminine form: Doppelgängerin (plural Doppelgängerinnen). The first known use of the word, spelled Doppeltgänger, appears in the novel Siebenkäs (1796) by Jean Paul. He explained the meaning of his newly created word in a note. The word Doppelgänger also appears in the novel, but it has a different meaning. In German, the word is written with a capital letter at the beginning: Doppelgänger. In English, the word is usually written with a lowercase letter, and the umlaut over the "a" is often removed, making it doppelganger.

Mythology and folklore

English speakers have recently used a German word to describe a supernatural idea. In 1787, Francis Grose used the word "fetch" in his book Provincial Glossary, defining it as "the apparition of a person living." Catherine Crowe's book The Night-Side of Nature (1848) helped spread awareness of the German term. The idea of having a second self or spirit double has appeared in the stories, myths, religious beliefs, and traditions of many cultures throughout history.

In Ancient Egyptian mythology, a ka was a visible "spirit double" that shared the same memories and emotions as the person it belonged to. In a story about the Trojan War, a ka of Helen misled Paris, helping to end the war. A similar idea appears in the play Helen by Euripides. In Norse mythology, a vardøger is a ghostly double that is seen doing the person's actions before they happen. In Finnish mythology, this idea is called etiäinen, meaning "a firstcomer."

In many Muslim-majority countries, the concept of a karin or qarin exists. This is a spirit double that shares the same gender, race, and personality as the person it is connected to. It can have children who are spirit doubles of the person's children. In some places, the karin is of the opposite sex of the person it represents. When harmful, it may try to influence the person to act on bad desires. Some Sufi mystics described the karin as a devil that lives in the blood and hearts of humans. The idea is more common in some countries, like Egypt, than in others, such as Sudan. In Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905), the word dopple-ganger is listed as a term from the North Country and marked as obsolete.

Examples

Izaak Walton said that John Donne, an English poet, saw his wife's doppelgänger in Paris in 1612 on the same night their daughter was stillborn. This story first appeared in the 1675 edition of Life of Dr. Rizvan Rizing and was described by someone called "a Person of Honour," who claimed the story was told with great certainty and that the speaker believed it to be true.

Two days after arriving in Paris, Mr. Donne was left alone in a room where he and Sir Robert had shared a meal with friends. When Sir Robert returned half an hour later, he found Mr. Donne alone, but deeply changed in appearance and in a state of great emotional distress. Sir Robert asked Mr. Donne what had happened during his absence. After a long pause, Mr. Donne said he had seen a vision: his wife walking through the room twice, holding a dead child. He described her with her hair loose and her face looking directly at him before vanishing. Sir Robert suggested it might have been a dream, but Mr. Donne insisted he had not slept and was certain of what he had seen.

R. C. Bald and R. E. Bennett later questioned whether Walton’s account was true.

On July 8, 1822, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Bay of Spezia near Lerici, Italy. A week after his wife, Mary Shelley, nearly died from a miscarriage on June 23, she wrote a letter to Maria Gisborne. In it, she described how Percy had told her he had seen his own doppelgänger. Earlier that year, Percy had dreamed of a flood destroying a house. He also said he had seen visions of himself, including a figure that spoke to him on a terrace.

One day, a woman named Mrs. Williams claimed she saw Percy Shelley walking on a terrace while he was actually far away. She described seeing him pass by a window twice, which made her believe he might have jumped from a wall. However, someone named Trelawny confirmed that Shelley had not been on the terrace at that time.

In Percy Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound (1820), there is a line in Act I:

"Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden."

This passage describes a man seeing his own doppelgänger.

In his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833), the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote about a strange experience. While visiting a woman named Frederica, he saw his own figure approaching him on horseback, wearing clothing he had never worn. After this vision, he later found himself on the same road wearing the same outfit, though he did not choose to wear it. Goethe said this experience helped calm him during a difficult time.

This example shows a doppelgänger that was seen as harmless and comforting.

In 1845, a French teacher named Émilie Sagée, who worked in a boarding school in what is now Latvia, was said to have a doppelgänger. People around her claimed to see the figure mimic her actions. Once, students tried to touch the doppelgänger and felt a slight resistance, like touching fine fabric. This story was reported by Robert Dale Owen.

In the Victorian era, a story involved Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon. On June 22, 1893, while he was supposedly on a ship in the Mediterranean, he was said to have walked through the drawing room of his family home in London. He appeared to be looking ahead, not speaking to anyone, in front of guests at a party hosted by his wife. Later that night, his ship, HMS Victoria, sank after colliding with HMS Camperdown due to an unexplained order to change course.

In fiction

Lord Byron uses images of doppelgängers to explore the two sides of human nature. In The Devil's Elixirs (1815), one of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s early novels, a man kills the brother and stepmother of his beloved princess. He discovers that his doppelgänger has been punished for these crimes instead and frees him. Later, the doppelgänger kills the princess. In Prometheus Unbound (1820), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s drama, the character Zoroaster meets "his own image walking in the garden."

In Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story William Wilson, the main character is followed by a doppelgänger his whole life. The doppelgänger causes trouble and plays tricks on him. Eventually, the main character kills the doppelgänger and realizes it was only a mirror of himself. The story was first published in 1839 and later included in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novel The Double, the doppelgänger is a different personality that takes advantage of the protagonist’s weaknesses to control his life. In Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell (1939), a character named Pauline Anstruther sees her own doppelgänger throughout her life. In Clive Barker’s story Human Remains from his Books of Blood, a doppelgänger appears, and the idea of doppelgängers is common in Gothic fiction. In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1936 novel Despair, the main character, Hermann Karlovich, meets a homeless man in Prague who he believes is his doppelgänger.

In Jorge Luis Borges’ The Other (1972), the author meets his older doppelgänger on a bench and has a conversation with him. In Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama (1998), the protagonist, Victor Ward, is mistaken for his doppelgänger by others. Victor’s doppelgänger may have been created by his father, a U.S. senator, to make Victor look more intelligent and improve his image. The story is told from Victor’s perspective, but some parts are unclear, making readers wonder if the doppelgänger is telling the story instead.

In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002), the heroine meets improved versions of her parents and neighbors in the Other Mother’s world. In Stephen King’s The Outsider (2018), the antagonist uses DNA to become a near-perfect copy of people. A group trying to stop the antagonist refers to this ability as a doppelgänger. They also discuss other fictional doppelgängers from history.

In Das Mirakel and The Miracle (both 1912), the Virgin Mary appears as a doppelgänger for a nun who ran away from her convent. Both works are based on Karl Vollmöller’s 1911 play The Miracle. In The Student of Prague (1913), a diabolical character steals a student’s reflection from a mirror, and the reflection later haunts him. In Donald’s Double Trouble (1946), animator Jack King creates a doppelgänger for Donald Duck, who speaks clearly and is polite.

The 1969 film Doppelgänger tells the story of an astronaut who travels to the far side of the Sun and finds a mirror image of Earth. He believes his counterpart is experiencing the same situation on Earth. In The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), actor Roger Moore plays a man haunted by a doppelgänger that appears after his near-death experience. In Images (1972), a hallucinating character played by Susanna York has a doppelgänger.

Doppelgängers are a major theme in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), where two protagonists have doppelgängers. In La double vie de Véronique (1991), a French/Polish film, two women played by the same actress share a mysterious connection.

In Doppelgänger (2003), a Japanese thriller directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a scientist named Michio Hayasaki meets his doppelgänger, who has a very different personality. In The Prestige (2006), directed by Christopher Nolan, illusionists use doppelgängers to perform magic tricks. In The One I Love (2014), a couple finds doubles of themselves trapped in a retreat house. In Annihilation (2018), a doppelgänger appears in the climax. In Us (2019), the Wilson family is attacked by their own doubles, called "the Tethered." In The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Rey encounters an evil version of herself.

In an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled The Case of Mr. Pelham (1955), a man is haunted by his own doppelgänger. The episode is based on a short story by Anthony Armstrong. In an episode of The Twilight Zone titled Mirror Image (1960), a woman sees her double in a bus terminal. Later, another character tries to catch his own doppelgänger. In the 1985 reboot of The Twilight Zone, the first segment also features a doppelgänger story.

In non-fiction

The main topic of Naomi Klein's 2023 book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World is the idea of having a doppelganger, or a person who looks very similar. In the book, Klein discusses today's political disagreements and beliefs about secret plans by comparing her own ideas with those of Naomi Wolf, a person who is often mistaken for Klein.

Scientific applications

Research shows that people who look very similar to each other share more genes than people who look different. These shared genes affect not only facial features but also some physical traits and behaviors. Other factors, like differences in the epigenome and microbiome, have a smaller effect on how a person’s face looks. Heautoscopy is a term used in psychiatry and neurology to describe a hallucination where a person sees their own body from a distance. This experience can happen in people with schizophrenia or epilepsy and may explain some doppelgänger sightings. Criminologists study how people recognize familiar faces because mistakes in eyewitness testimony have led to wrongfully convicted individuals. One example involves a man who spent 17 years in prison for a crime he denied committing. He was released when another person was found who looked very similar and had the same first name.

In 1914, Otto Rank began studying the concept of the Doppelgänger and its role in psychoanalysis. Later, in 1919, Sigmund Freud expanded on this idea in his work The Uncanny. Freud explained that the Doppelgänger, or "the double," is linked to children’s early ideas about self and immortality. It appears in reflections, spiritual beliefs, and fears related to death. At first, the double represents comfort and the idea of lasting life, but it later becomes a symbol of death. The Doppelgänger also reflects hidden thoughts tied to the psychological concept of negation. This idea helps psychologists understand how a person’s sense of self, or ego, is shaped.