This episode was suggested by listener Kelsey, if you'd like to make a suggestion or just say hi, you can do so on Facebook and Instagram at morbidcuriositypodcast on Twitter, at morbidpodcast, and on our website, www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com. Also, a huge thank you to Dr. Andrea Keita for helping me source some excellent scholarly articles on this topic, and hello to the whole creepy community at East Carolina University. You folks are a great bunch.
Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbidcuriosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Hallie, and this is the morbidcuriosity podcast. How many TV shows, films, comics, and books can you name where a double, clone, or shadow version of a main character somehow appears, either to torment them or force them to examine their own lives?
This motif is so prevalent in modern storytelling that we've come to accept it as a trope or literary device. These doubles are called evil twins, clones, alter egos, and most often in the fantasy genre, doppelgangers. Doppelganger is also used today to describe someone who looks just like you. There are many websites dedicated to finding people who look almost identical but are not related.
The word is also used to describe fantasy or sci-fi creatures that can shift form to look like anyone. The first example that comes to mind at the moment is the Doppler in the New Witcher television series. However, there are many examples in the Witcher franchise, as well as other games, films, TV shows, books, and comics. I'll go into all of these after the ad break.
The word doppelganger is actually fairly recent. It was first used by German romantic writer Jean Paul Richter in 1796 or 1797. Romantic in this case means an intellectual movement that combined philosophy, science, and art, and especially in German romanticism, wit, humor, and beauty. The movement emphasized intense emotion, such as apprehension, horror, terror, and awe.
Jean Paul Richter's definition was that a doppelganger was an individual who experiences a self-reflecting encounter, or as a direct translation, people who see themselves. The word he used was actually doppelganger, which meant double goer, and it referred to the people who saw them, not the double itself. Doppelganger was used later in his text to describe a meal in which the first and second courses are served at the same time. The concept of a supernatural exact double became hugely popular in literature, especially German romantic literature in the 19th century.
Many versions of the supernatural double began to appear. Most were thought to precede some sort of disaster or death, but other times they could bring good luck. In 1815, E.T.A. Hoffman published a novel called The Devil's Elicsers, which features a doppelganger who is out to kill the main character or protagonist and ends up driving him mad.
This is the version of the doppelganger that most modern sci-fi and fantasy literature draws on. Katherine Crow's 1848 book Night Side of Nature brought the word to English-speaking populations, and the doppelganger became well known as a supernatural double or ghost of a living person that often served as an omen of death or harbinger of bad luck. Since then, the doppelganger has become a literary motif in almost every genre, from romance to science fiction, but it's especially popular in horror. In western and Russian folklore and literature in the 19th and 20th century, doppelgangers became lookalikes, ghostly counterparts of living people.
Seeing a friend or relative's doppelganger was a warning of impending illness or danger for that person, while seeing your own doppelganger was an omen of death. While the doppelganger became popular during this time, the concept of a supernatural double is ancient and appears in the mythology and folklore of cultures all over the world. Versions of the double include divine twins, dualistic siblings, good and evil counterpart gods, and many more. The concept of good and evil twins is noted as far back as the 5th century BCE in an ancient Iranian religion called Zoroastrianism.
Angra Manu, or Aryman, represented evil thought and destruction and was the adversary to Ahura Mazda, who represented wisdom, good and creation. This type of dualism is common in more ancient versions of the double. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Akkadian in the 2nd century BCE, features Enkidu, a sort of alter ego to Gilgamesh, a double that looks just like him but has the exact opposite personality. I'll get into alter egos and a psychoanalytic approach to doppelgangers in a moment.
Enkidu was created by the gods to challenge Gilgamesh's aggressive behavior, but instead, the two became good friends. Instead of killing him, Enkidu tempered Gilgamesh's behavior. During the Old Kingdom period in ancient Egypt, which began in the 3rd century BCE, the concept of the Ka, or Spirit Double, was described in the pyramid texts, burial and ritual guides for the Varos. The ancient Egyptians believed that the human personality had many facets.
In life, the person was a single complete entity, but if they led a virtuous life, they could access a multiplicity of forms such as the Ka in the afterlife. This spirit twin was believed to have the same memories as the original individual. In some cases, these forms could be employed to help or hinder the living. For example, in the Egyptian version of the story of the Trojan War, instead of Helen, her Ka was sent.
The Ka was such a perfect replication of Helen that it fooled everyone, and the war was averted. A similar spirit, called Afilja, is known in Old Norse mythology from around the 9th century CE. Afilja was an exact supernatural double or apparition of a living person. Seeing one was thought to be an omen of death for the person it represented.
However, they were most often seen not by the person they looked like, but that person's family or friends. Afilja were more like an alter-ego figure than an exact duplicate, and were usually also in animal form. They were also almost always female. Originally one of the Afilja, the Vardaga, or Spirit predecessor, emerged in Norse mythology sometime between the 5th and 15th century.
Tales of this creature typically include Deja vu-like instances, but in reverse, where the spirit double, which mimics the real person's appearance, voice, scent, and even their footsteps, precedes them in a location or activity. Witnesses of Vardagas believe they have seen or heard the person arrive before they actually do. This is a little different from a doppelganger, and is much less sinister in nature. It has been likened by some folklorists to a phantom double, or form of by location.
In Finnish folklore, the spirit double is known as an Ett-to-Einen, and Ett-to-Einen is a type of Hultia, or guardian spirit. Everyone has a Hultia, but Ett-to-Einen's are impressions of a person that go ahead of them and do things that they will do later in life, or later in time. Stories usually involve someone waiting at home, hearing a door open or seeing a shadow pass a window, and thinking that their loved one has arrived, but then they find that no one is there. This experience can also come with a feeling of foreboding, but not always.
Today, Ett-to-Einen means a random premonition in Finnish. The closest mythological creature to a doppelganger is the Fetch from Irish mythology. Fetchs were noted just before the doppelganger made its appearance in German romantic literature. In 1781, Francis Gross, an English lexicographer or dictionary writer, used the term Fetch in his provincial glossary, saying it meant an apparition of a living person.
It was associated with Northern England and Ireland. The term Fetch possibly derives from the compound word Fetch life, which refers to a psychopomp, or guide for the souls of the dead to the afterlife. The term may also have sprung from an even earlier Irish term, Foy, which meant seer. This tracks well as seers in mythology and folklore often deal in prophecy and omens.
Like the earliest form of a doppelganger, seeing a Fetch wasn't always bad. In some tales, seeing a Fetch in the morning was good luck, while seeing them after dark was a bad omen. Around the same time but in England and Scotland, the word Wraith was used to describe the same type of creature, an apparition of a living person. There were many other names for it as well, such as Swarth, Task, Foy, and Illidrith.
Again, these were most often seen by friends and family members of the person the apparition represented. The stories usually go like this. Someone sees a transparent version of their friend or family member. It usually fades away before interacting with them, but gives them such an ominous feeling that they go in search of the real person, only to find that that person is in danger or very ill.
After Jean-Paul Richter used the term in 1797, doppelganger went into use all over Europe, not as a folkloric concept but a literary one. Doppelgangers were used as representations of a divided mind, a self that was separated between worlds, such as nature and society. It represented subconscious feelings and desires that humans sometimes struggle with, especially if those desires are outside social norms. The doppelganger was also used as an omen of death or destruction, as giving in to repressed desires had consequences in most literary works.
This motif of the doppelganger as a representative of the subconscious likely became popular due to the scientific elements of the romantic intellectual movement. Part of this was the rise of the moral treatment movement and psychoanalysis, which explores the first scientific ideas about consciousness and the self. Psychoanalysis was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud and the clinical work of Joseph Brewer, a neurophysicist. In the early 1910s, Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, elaborated on the concept of the self and proposed that the central concept of analytical psychology was individuation, the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements.
Jung also created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the idea of archetypes, collective unconscious, and extraversion and introversion. Using these new tools, Otto Rank, a German psychoanalyst, wrote the first in-depth study of the doppelganger in literature in 1925. He used psychoanalysis as a basis for understanding it. Most researchers who study the double or doppelganger also use this method.
We will look at the psychoanalytical version of doppelgangers as well as how they are used in literature and modern media. But first, let's pause for a word from our sponsors. Our regular sponsor is audible.com. Audible can provide you with interesting and engaging audiobooks.
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That's b-i-t dot l-y slash morbidpatron to choose your rewards and support the MCP. You'll have my eternal gratitude. And now back to the podcast. While seeing a doppelganger isn't always bad luck or an omen of death, most experiences described in German romantic literature where they first became popular or negative and supernatural.
Aside from the emphasis on intense emotions, the romantic movement also focused on the conscious and unconscious mind. Consciousness was a new concept at the time, and the role of the unconscious mind and its operations in life and art were becoming widely recognized. A subset of romantic writers and artists were fascinated with the struggle between conscious and unconscious, known as the dark romantics. These writers and artists explored the minds so-called night side and asked questions about their own self-gained significance.
In many literary works from this sub-genre, a character's preoccupation with the self triggered an identity crisis of the individual, which often led to a separation of the self. According to Claudia Schwab in her 2019 book Craving Supernatural Creatures, the concept of the two souls or the human struggle between good and evil quickly became manifested in the figure of a doppelganger. It became a visual and literary expression of the separated self, its disruption and desperation, and this was a central theme in German romantic literature. Doppelgangers were depicted as shadows, mirror images, statues, dolls, and golems which acted on the darkest thoughts of those they doubled.
In most cases, the doppelganger remained ominous, threatening, and negative. In literature written at this time when characters encountered their doppelgangers in whatever form they took, the story often culminated in self-destruction, either mentally or physically, and sometimes both. The protagonists' repressed feelings, unfulfilled desires, and secret fears were often personified in the doppelganger, making it a sort of alter-ego, fear-spirit, or expression of internal desires. The alter-ego version usually involves a doppelganger that looks exactly like the protagonist, but acts in the exact opposite way.
In the literature, the doppelganger usually tries to disrupt the life of the protagonist, doing things too or with their family and friends that get them into trouble. The fear-spirit version is usually a shadow or ghostly version of the protagonist who manifests as a dark double that personifies those fears. Sometimes the appearance of the dark double removes the fear from the protagonist and must be killed for the protagonist to get over that fear. The last version of the doppelganger is the manifestation of repressed desires.
This one is most often used in more modern media. The double does and is all the things the protagonist has tried to suppress in themselves, such as engaging in sexual encounters or violent acts. The doppelganger becomes, both with the protagonist secretly desires to be, and the corrupted version of themselves, that those desires might cause in the protagonist. Otto Rank wrote the first analysis of the use of the doppelganger motif in literature and folklore in 1925.
He noted that in many cultures, the doppelganger seems to signify both a defense against death and a harbinger of death. He suggests that in folklore, the reason that the protagonist will die if its doppelganger appears has to do with the idea of an eternal soul that can separate from a body that is doomed to die. In this way, the soul is saved, but the body dies. Rank was also the first to suggest that the doppelganger in contemporary literature represents a desire to avoid responsibility for one's darker wishes or acts.
The self becomes divided over these desires, which brings questions of ownership and reality. The doppelganger then acts out those desires while also negating the protagonist's desire to repress them. Sigmund Freud built on Rank's work, stating that the doppelganger was an example of the uncanny, which he defines as everything that was intended to remain secret and has come into the open. He also suggested that the uncanniness came from two beings sharing one mind, co-owning knowledge, emotion, and experience.
This makes the protagonist unsure if they or the doppelganger is the true person, the true self. Freud also stated that at first the double is a representation of the belief in the immortal soul, which denies the power of death. It was initially a positive coping mechanism for dealing with the fear of mortality and the doubles served as preservation against extinction. But later, when the childlike mind is superseded, it becomes a harbinger of death because it means the death of a physical body, which, with the advances in science at the time, could mean the death of consciousness and the self as well.
In summary, according to Rank and most psychoanalytic researchers of literature, doppelgangers often represent that which is innate in a person, but has been concealed. Plots which involve the doppelganger usually end in the murder of a doppelganger, but sometimes the protagonist dies instead. There is usually some amount of mental trauma along the way. This is not the only opinion on doppelgangers, however.
The idea that doppelgangers can represent positive self-struggle still exists. Some literary works encourage sympathy for the doppelganger instead of the protagonist. They are painted not as monsters, but as products of our own monstrosity. They have also been utilized in stories in which barriers between humans are broken down, showing that having certain feelings or other differences does not equal monstrosity.
Carl Jung saw the self as, quote, complexio-oppositorum, unquote, where good and evil are simply complementary opposites, each a necessary condition for the existence of the other. He defines the double or doppelganger as neither good nor bad, but as, quote, a replica of one's own unknown fate, unquote. The doppelganger only acquires a demonic aspect because that side of the personality is repressed. In his concept of archetypes or universal archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious, the shadow represents the personal unconscious as a whole, and embodies the values which are opposite those held by the conscious personality.
In this way, the shadow often represents one's dark side. Those aspects of oneself that exist, but which we don't acknowledge, or aspects with which we don't identify. Professor Veronica Shano argues that the doppelganger motif in literature represents a fantasy illusion of another world, identical yet opposite. This creates a space to express the lived experience of women and envision the feminist change necessary to improve those experiences.
For example, the female doppelganger may step out of the protagonist's assigned traditional role, refusing to be hidden away, which is empowering for many women. This can also be applied to other oppressed and minority populations. For more on her theories, check out her book Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory, Feminism and Retailing the Tale. Today, over 200 years after the German romantic authors wrote of the doppelganger, the motif can still be found in almost every genre of western media production.
Doppelgangers are most heavily used in the science fiction and fantasy genres, from film to role-playing games, as creatures, clones, magical illusions, and shadow copies. Most times, the negative self-struggle version of a doppelganger is used, but the less negative sympathetic character is also still present. Doppelgangers, or some version of the double, have featured prominently in television shows like The Vampire Diaries, Twin Peaks, Supernatural, and Grim. They also feature in films like Us, Vertigo, and The Prestige.
Clones, evil twins, or fantasy creatures are often employed instead of the doppelganger, but the theme of negativity and struggles with identity is consistent with the motif. Shadow doubles appear in many video games, such as The Legend of Zelda, the original Tomb Raider game, and its remake Tomb Raider Anniversary, Super Mario, Metroid Prime, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Kingdom Hearts. The Dark doubles are usually referred to as Dark, or Anti, for example Dark Link in Legend of Zelda, and Anti-Sora in Kingdom Hearts. Comic books are full of Dark doubles, clones, and doppelgangers.
Some examples are Bizarro, the dark and twisted clone of Superman, Devastation, the Dark version of Wonder Woman created by Cronus, and Onslaught, who was created when the consciousness of Professor Xavier and Magneto combined accidentally when Xavier tried to shut down Magneto's mind in the X-Men. Doppelgangers frequently appear in fantasy books and tabletop RPGs, or role-playing games as distinct creatures that can mimic any person exactly, including their voice and sometimes their memories. In the Witcher series, doppelgangers are gentle creatures that use their shape-shifting abilities as camouflage so that they can live peacefully amongst humans instead of being hunted by them. However, this power is sometimes misused as represented in the Witcher television series.
In Dungeons and Dragons, doppelgangers are described as devious shapeshifters that take on the appearance of other humanoids and lure victims to their doom with misdirection and disguise in order to steal their identities. However, there are also playable characters, giving the player a chance to fight back against the human stereotype that doppelgangers are all malicious and greedy killers. While there are many forms of fictional doppelgangers, they originate in folklore, and therefore there are several accounts of real people seeing their doppelgangers. Some of these people are famous, while others are ordinary people who had extraordinary experiences.
One of the more famous stories of multiple people seeing a doppelganger of someone known to them occurred during the reign of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia between 1762 and 1796. The story goes that several of her servants reported seeing the Empress seated on her throne one evening when Catherine herself was actually in bed. When they woke her to tell her about the imposter, she went to see for herself and ordered her servants to shoot the double. There's no mention of what happened when they fired on the double, but Catherine died of a stroke several weeks later.
Writer and poet Johann Wolfgang Van Goethe wrote in his autobiography that he encountered his doppelganger during his life between 1749 and 1832. He alleged that he was headed by horse to Drusenheim and came across an exact double of himself, also on horseback, but heading in the opposite direction. The only difference between them was that the doppelganger had on a gray suit trimmed with gold. Eight years later, Van Goethe happened to be traveling the same road, again on horseback.
He suddenly realized he was wearing the exact same gray suit with gold trim that his ghostly double had been wearing all those years before. One of the most commonly cited encounters comes from American writer Robert Dale Owen, an American social reformer and spiritualist who recorded a story told to him by Julie Van Goethe the second daughter of the Baron Van Goethe. A prominent 19th century spiritualist. The spiritualist movement was a religious movement based on the belief that the spirits of the dead exist, contacting them is possible and that the spirits are more advanced than humans, so take that into consideration when listening to the story.
According to Owen, in 1845, when Julie was 13, she attended an exclusive girls school near Vollmer in what is now Latvia. One of her French teachers was 32-year-old Emilia Sege. Sege soon became the object of rumor and odd speculation, as it seemed she had a double that would appear and disappear in full view of the students. Her students first spotted the shadowy double when Sege was teaching class.
The double appeared next to her as she wrote on the board, imitating her movements. On another occasion, while the teacher was working in the school garden, the double appeared in the classroom and seemed to stare out at all the students. Some students tried to touch the ghost-like figure, but their hands passed through it instead. Allegedly, they reported feeling a sort of thick material when they touched the double.
The teacher was said to feel drained and helpless at the time of these sightings. In his 1926 book, Abraham Lincoln at the Prairie Years, Carl Sandberg recorded that sometime in 1860, shortly after Abraham Lincoln was elected as president of the United States, he claimed to see a duplicate of himself in a mirror. He said the duplicate looked remarkably weaker and paler. This incident occurred twice.
Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, supposedly interpreted it as a bad omen, suggesting Lincoln would serve two terms as president but not make it to the end of his second. This story was found to be adapted from another book, Washington in Lincoln's time, published in 1895 by Noah Brooks. Brooks claimed that he had heard the tale from Lincoln himself on the 9th of November 1864 at the time of his re-election. Brooks also claimed that the story was confirmed by Mary Todd.
This is likely an apocryphal story told after Lincoln was assassinated at the start of his second term. Mary Todd was a believer in the supernatural and a spiritualist. Lincoln himself was also possibly quite superstitious. On top of this, older mirrors can occasionally produce double images, so the story should be taken with a grain of salt.
Modern psychologists have identified several neurological conditions which can cause hallucinations of seeing yourself from a distance. These are called autoscopic hallucinations. One type in particular, Hey, Autoscopy, is when a person hallucinates their own image at a distance. This type of hallucination can occur due to drug use, sleep disturbances, schizophrenia, epilepsy, and sometimes general anesthesia.
The most uncanny part of these hallucinations is that most patients see themselves, but the image is not mirrored, which is the only way people can see themselves in reality outside of photographs or videos. The double also seems to have a presence and often has a strong emotional impact on the person experiencing the hallucination. The theory for these hallucinations is that there is some type of disruption in the area of the brain that integrates sensory signals like touch, vision, and where the body is in space. This location is called the temporal parietal junction, and it also processes signals from inside the body.
Issues with this area can also cause other autoscopic hallucinations, such as out-of-body experiences. Several experiments have been done in which neurologist Olaf Blank was able to induce out-of-body experiences in volunteers. Psychologists believe this phenomenon may account for some of the many recorded doppelganger experiences, but it does not account for those doppelgangers that were seen by multiple witnesses. Despite its prevalence, the doppelganger remains a mysterious figure in folklore, literature, art, media, and psychology.
Is it a creature? Is it part of us that manifests in spirit form? Is it a death omen or an allegory for self-struggle? The fact that we still haven't quite been able to pin down the often ominous doppelganger is why it brings out the curiosity in us.
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