Saturday, May 14, 2011

DOPPELGANGER


Ever heard of a story of a doppelganger? A case wherein a person was seen with his body double mimicking the person's actions or simply copying the subjects appearance.
DOPPELGANGER is a German word which means an apparition of a living person, a double walker or a Phantom double. It is considered  to be a harbinger of death and misfortune..

There were reported cases of doppelgangers some of the were famous personalities such as;

Abraham Lincoln - elected as the 16th president of the United States of America. Lincoln was haunted by his doppelganger on the night of his election on November 1860. Lincoln saw his two faced doppelganger in full length in a mirror while he was sitting on his chair. When he got up to check on it, his double disappeared. When he lie down on his bed,  he then again saw on the glass his doppelganger, he saw that one of its face was 5 times paler than the other. It is said that the two different reactions on the face means two different things. One is that he would win the election and the paler one was an omen that he would no longer live on his second term.
Guy de Maupassant - A French novelist who said he had seen his doppelganger face to face while he was writing one of his work entitled " The Horla". It is said that his double walker discreetly entered his room and sit then begin to dictate the freshly written page of his novel. 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - a German writer and polymath. Goethe was horseback riding when he saw his doppelganger, it is wearing a Gold suit approaching from the opposite direction of the road, after Eight years, he saw himself traveling exactly the same path and direction where he saw his double and this time he realized that he was wearing the exact gold trimmed suit that the doppelganger was wearing.  
John Donne - 16th Century metaphysics writer who saw the doppelganger of his wife carrying a newborn dead baby two days after his arrival in Paris in 1612, exactly the same night of the stillbirth of their daughter.
Queen Elizabeth I of England - saw her doppelganger lying on her bed before her death.
Catherine the Great of Russia - saw her phantom double sitting on her throne. She ordered her guards to shoot at it. Shortly after that incident, Catherine died of natural cause.


I could not confirm whether doppelgangers are true or just simply a result of imagination but since I was a kid, I was already familiar with this kind of story. According to my grandparents, one of my great grandfather named Canor was seen several times on different locations, he was said to be seen in their province chatting with some of our relatives while at the same time with his family at home doing his daily chores.

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