Doppelganger - Does Everyone Have a Ghostly Double?

Are you Sophie Robehmed's doppelganger? She wants to find you!

DOPPELGÄNGER

Noun. Also doppelganger. Mid-19th century.

[German, literally 'double-goer'.]

A supposed spectral likeness or double of a living person.

Historically, meeting your doppelganger has never been a good thing. Depending on which mythological tale you believe, meeting your spectral double has pretty much always been a portent of impending death. And that's not good. There are those, however, who are not just curious about meeting their ghostly double, but are actively engaged in a quest to do so.

One such doppelganger-hunter is Sophie Robehmed, who in 2011 started a campaign through social media to find hers, a search that attracted the attention of a number of major news outlets. It's easy to understand why her quest attracts such interest - the idea of a ghostly, malevolent or demonic version of oneself prowling the earth has been a staple of myth and legend for millennia, and remains to this day a recurring motif in horror movies. And, yes, the notion is decidedly unsettling.

Of course, maybe we shouldn't give too much heed to all the scary stories. Perhaps meeting your doppelganger would be an enriching (and markedly unsupernatural) experience, as it no doubt was for Neil Richardson and John Jemison, two men from the UK who you would swear were twins, had led bizarrely identical lives, but were completely unrelated (and neither of whom has died in mysterious circumstances since meeting). Nah! All this ghostly pish-posh is just waffle. With 7 billion of us swirling around the planet, some of are going to be creepily identical, right?

So, if you think you can help Sophie Robehmed in her rather cool mission to find her double, you can contact her by clicking here. And it'll be completely safe for all concerned to do so. Well ... I think it will ... umm ... although now that I think about it, how do I know that she's not the doppelganger, and this is just the forces of unearthly evil utilising social media to hunt their mortal prey? Wow. OK ... you decide ... I'm just saying that Lexicolatry bears no responsibility for omens of imminent death, bleeding walls, or other supernatural phenomena on account of doppelgangers. Phew.

Have you met your doppelganger?

Did you survive?

Do please leave your most duplicitous comments in the box below.