HALLOWEEK-END SPECIAL: The Other Me

doppelganger  ˈdɒp(ə)lˌɡaŋə "an apparition or double of a living person."

Throughout time, communities globally have documented eerily similar encounters with doubles of themselves and people they know. From Appalachian mountain folklore to doppleganger death premonition stories and glitch in the matrix theories - we're covering lore from all over the world that assert their own versions of dopplegangers, mimics and other creepy phenomena. 

Happy Halloween from Unpacking the Eerie! 

Sources for this episode

Learn more about our Ghosty Giver Beneficiary and related orgs here

Theme Song Title: Creepy Mood | Artist Name: Oleg Fedak

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 1:55

Hello.

SPEAKER_00: 1:56

Hi. Happy Halloween.

SPEAKER_01: 2:00

Happy Halloween. It's been five years since we started unpacking the eerie. Technically in August, but yeah. We're in our fifth year. From the depths of the social work building. That's true. Many different places.

SPEAKER_00: 2:18

So yeah, for five years, I guess. So there's this Halloween rewind. We're re-releasing Hotel Cecil series. And then the psychedelic nightmare series is a five-year re-release. And we also want to share some stats that we've got over the years. In the last five years, we've got over 13,000 downloads on our episodes, which is like wow. It's kind of odd to think that we're just like any people's ears. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:48

Totally.

SPEAKER_00: 2:48

You don't even know me.

SPEAKER_01: 2:50

And also maybe like people who know us, but we don't talk to anymore. They're still listening to us talk.

SPEAKER_00: 2:55

Oh, that's true. Hello. Hello. Why don't we talk anymore? Like, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_01: 3:06

What's up?

SPEAKER_00: 3:07

Like, I'm right here. Unless you're hate listening, because then I don't want to fucking talk to you.

SPEAKER_01: 3:13

Or unless you know that we don't want to talk to you, then don't reach out.

SPEAKER_00: 3:18

I don't know who would do that, but on Buzzprout, we can see where people are downloading from. And we've been listened to in 78 countries, the top being the US, obviously, because we're here. But also Germany, the number two, Canada, number three, the UK, number four, Singapore, number five. So amazing. Hi. Hello. And then we've also been listened to in 1,338 cities. And the top cities are Seattle, Washington, obviously, because that's where we were based. Los Angeles, number two, San Francisco, number three, Frankfurt, MN Hess, Germany. Which who are you? Frankfurt. How did you find us? I really want to know. That is so random to me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 4:09

Who the fuck? I mean, don't be mysterious and shy. Just say hello. I'm a Frankfurt listener.

SPEAKER_00: 4:21

And then number five is Portland, Oregon. Cool.

SPEAKER_01: 4:25

Hello. In the background, we lived in eight different apartments. We got two master's degrees. We parented two fur babies. Had six different jobs.

SPEAKER_00: 4:40

Really wild.

SPEAKER_01: 4:43

And yes, countless hours of research, gabbing, and guffawing, amongst everything else that's been happening in the world. We made this also. If you go to our Instagram, there's this episode story map, which has a map that pins all the different locations of where the stories take place. And we have stories also from across the world, which is very cool to see.

SPEAKER_00: 5:10

On Patreon, as we mentioned, a portion of all of the money that we bring in goes to causes and mutual aid efforts that are related to the episodes that we're covering, the topics that we're covering. And here's all the places that we've given to over the last years. We got the People of Color Sex Workers Outreach Project, Families Impacted by the Massage Parlor Shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, GoFundMe, Creative Justice, People's Harm Reduction Alliance, Seattle, Woman Inc. in San Francisco, Project South in Georgia, Sister Song, Georgia, The Fire Week Collective, which is a national organization, In Loving Memory of Keenan Anderson, which was a GoFundMe, A Place for Marsha, Anera International. We also recently donated to Liberate MKE, a beneficiary that was related to our last series on Jeffrey Dahmer. It took place in the Midwest and was contextually situated at the intersections of police negligence and brutality, racism and homophobia. And so with that in mind, we chose to donate to Liberate MKE. It's a Milwaukee-based Black-led organization that fights for the redistribution of funds from policing to direct investment in neighborhoods that have been systematically minoritized. In partnership with organizing bodies and social support organizations, their campaigns have led to the successful reallocation of millions of city dollars from policing back into the community. Programs include but are not limited to youth empowerment, violence prevention, affordable housing, and education access. We chose Liberate MKE, which is a sub-project of the African-American Roundtable because of their robust partnerships and fiscal support of important work, which include but are not limited to other organizations we found doing similar work. And we wanted to uplift them as well. It's Black Pride Milwaukee, We Are Here, and Campaign Zero. So check that out. We'll leave all the relevant links for you to click through. Yeah, those are all the spots. So thank you for allowing us to do that. And as always, thank you for supporting and listening. And resources to help us continue this little passion project. You know, we started as a pandemic project, and now we're here.

SPEAKER_01: 7:26

It continues as a passion project. Yes. Five years later. Well, today, unlike last time, it's the morning times for me and it's the night times for Shayna.

SPEAKER_00: 7:38

Yes, nighttime for me.

SPEAKER_01: 7:40

Okay. So we both have things today where it's not like one story, but it's like a phenomenon. And then we have like a bunch of stories, maybe things and things connected to each other. There's something just very creepy and eerie about doppelgangers, and I don't really know why.

SPEAKER_00: 7:58

It's a little uncanny valley, but yeah, yeah. That's what I was thinking too.

SPEAKER_01: 8:02

Yeah. But I read a lot of stories for this episode and also just like in general. I think they range from like being very mundane. There is this example of this person on Reddit, E.G. Llama, who saw like a Volkswagen van driving behind her. Her partner who had passed away used to have the same van with a lot of stickers on it. And she was like, Oh, like maybe it's like the people that we sold the van to. But then so she slowed down. And then as it drove by her, the person in the driver's seat looked just like her partner. And then even weirder, the person in the passenger seat looked just like her. And she had to stop the car because she got so weirded out. There are really just like so many stories of people either seeing doppelgangers of themselves or of their loved ones, or also hearing their voices from places that they know that they shouldn't be. So a doppelganger is basically a double or a lookalike of a living person. Sometimes it's referred to as a mimic, but I kind of see the difference between them in that maybe doppelganger is like more like an umbrella term, and mimic tends to be more like a specific kind of doppelganger where it's pretending to be something that it's not. Like when you're like mimicking someone's voice, you're pretending to be someone else. While doppelganger could be that, it also could be some other things, as we'll get into there's types of them. The origin of the word doppelganger comes from German, and it's a word that means double goer or double walker. And it first appeared in a book in 1790, in a book called Sei Benkas by Jean Paul, where he was talking about people who could see themselves. But even before this, it's like a very old phenomenon. Like for a very long time, people have been talking about being able to see people that are either themselves or someone they knew when they knew that it wasn't actually that person. So I'm gonna go into different folklore where this is present, and then I'm gonna go into some theories, and I'll just be like sprinkling some stories in between. One of the folklores in which this is present is Appalachian folklore. And we know the Appalachian area is it's super weird.

SPEAKER_00: 10:20

Appalachian folklore scares me.

SPEAKER_01: 10:23

Do you know that there's these like rules that you should follow when you're in the woods in Appalachia? Have you heard of that?

SPEAKER_00: 10:29

If you heard your name, no, you didn't.

SPEAKER_01: 10:33

Yeah, the rules are never stray from marked trails. Okay, avoid the woods from dusk to dawn. And if you hear someone calling your name, no, you didn't. Okay, okay. That's where sort of the third one is where the mimic comes in. But yeah, basically, these rules have been passed down through the generations, and it's rooted in like the numerous strange happenings that happen in the Appalachian area. And one of the common experiences that people have is that voices call out from the woods, voices that sound familiar, like someone that they know. And most notoriously, these calls are heard in the Rowan Mountain in North Carolina and Cheat Mountain in West Virginia. The theories are that these are lost souls, mischievous spirits, and also just like folklore that's been passed down as a way to instill respect and understanding of the natural world's power. Hashtag respect nature. Yeah. There's also a scientific explanation which they've theorized, which is like there's like these unique acoustic properties in the mountain forests where because sound travels in unusual ways, our brains might misinterpret the sounds as not natural sounds as human voices. It's called periodelia, tendency to perceive meaningful patterns and random stimuli. I'm gonna read a weird story from from Reddit from someone that he lives in the heart of Appalachia. This person lives in southern West Virginia and has lived there their whole life, basically lives in an area where there's just woods everywhere. There was one night where them and their friend were playing like Xbox at their house and watching TV. Very late at night, they decide to do one of the things that you're not supposed to do, which is enter the woods late at night. So they decide, oh, let's go on a walk on a nearby trail to smoke a joint. Yeah, for sure. Of course. This does not sound like a thing that girls would do.

SPEAKER_00: 12:43

I see dudes wandering at night and I get mad.

SPEAKER_01: 12:46

I get mad too. I'm like, I would love to do that without you know the fear. Fear I have every time of the dudes, you know, right? It's not even of the supernatural.

SPEAKER_00: 12:58

Yeah, sometimes I see dudes just running at night, and I'm like, such a fucking dude thing to do.

SPEAKER_01: 13:05

Yes, yeah, like feeling really safe. Anyway, so the trail that they're on, it's not like a very long trail, but it is in an area where the woods around it are super dense. So they're about 30 minutes into the trail where they stop, and then they are just like smoking and talking. It's not usually that active at this time of night. It was like past 1 a.m., but they were hearing a lot of animals, I guess, when they found it kind of unsettling. They finish smoking their joint and then they're continuing walking when suddenly like it just falls completely silent. And as soon as it goes silent, they hear a voice, and he says, it sounds almost like a mocking, humanoid voice, shaky and uncertain, almost like an old children's toy, like the one with crackly speakers and a robot, robotic voice. So then they're super freaked out at this point. So they start running. As they're running, like it sounds like no matter how far they run, the voice and the sound is still at the same distance. It doesn't seem like it's getting closer, but it doesn't seem like it's getting further away. It's like the same volume. I mean, they just smoked also, so I'm sure the combination of these things are not a combination of bad events.

SPEAKER_00: 14:32

Yes, it's a cocktail for disaster, honestly.

SPEAKER_01: 14:36

Don't go into the woods in Appalachia after 1 a.m. and smoke weed. We're just a bad idea. Anyways, they're almost at the end of the trail, and they've just been running this whole way, and they're very, very scared. They're like almost crying. As they're beginning to exit this trail, he says, There is a bone-shaking, heartstopping, murderous scream from directly behind us.

SPEAKER_02: 15:04

Mm-mm.

unknown: 15:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 15:05

And he goes, I know what a mountain lion sounds like, and it was not an animal, and it was not someone playing or watching a movie. The scream sent birds flying from their nests and made my heart drop to my stomach. It was the most genuinely depraved and violent scream that I have ever heard. That's a creepy story of something that happened in the Appalachian woods to you, doobie doobie. User doobie.

SPEAKER_00: 15:34

Doobie doobie with smoke and a doobie, huh?

SPEAKER_01: 15:39

Yeah, smoking a doobie, and something very, very scary happened. So that's the that's the first. Second, I'm gonna go into Algonquin Anishnaabe Cree folklore, and this is the Wendigo, which is a cold weather creature that is said to have originated during the times of winter when there's a lot of scarcity of food. The Wendigo is associated with violence, greed, selfishness, and even cannibalism. And is yeah, it's said to be 15 feet tall, emaciated. No matter how much it eats, it's insatiable, it's like always hungry. And then there are stories from this folklore about people being possessed and cannibalizing other people in their community or family.

SPEAKER_00: 16:25

Um my god, this is gnarly. You haven't heard about the wendigo before? No, but it sounds like no face from Spirited Away. Whoa, it's like a greedy, yeah, entity, and then also like shape shifts and becomes other things and then eats them.

SPEAKER_01: 16:45

Yeah, that actually sounds exactly like this. Yeah, because Wendigo does do some shape shifting too. A rough translation of it is an evil spirit that devours mankind, it connects to doppelgangers and mimics because one of the traits they're said to have is that they can mimic human voices, which they use to like lure people away from their community, isolate them, and feast on them. The Algonquin people say that during the turn of the 20th century, a large number of their people went missing, and the tribes attributed many of those mysterious disappearances to the Wendigo, thus calling him the spirit of lonely places. One cool parallel, though, is in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer, who is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation and a botanist. She makes parallels to the Wendigo and the dangers of individualistic thinking and capitalism. Quote, that within us which cares more for its own survival than anything else, because of how it's never satiated, always wanting more constant consumption that is required of us under capitalism. There's this quote from chapter 20 Sykes that goes, cautionary Wendigo tales arose in a common-based society where sharing was essential to survival, and greed made any individual a danger to the whole. In the old times, individuals who endangered the community by taking too much for themselves were first counseled, then ostracized. And if the greed continued, they were eventually banished. The Wendigo myth may have arisen from the remembrance of the banished, doomed to wander hungry and alone, wreaking vengeance on the ones who spurned them. It's a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity with no one to share with you and no one to care for you. Side note, when I was in grad school and I was on my internship, there was this one intake I was supposed to sit in on that my supervisor was like, Oh, actually, they don't want anyone to sit in on it. And then after it was over, he told me that this person had said that they had been followed around by a Wendigo like their whole life, and they were native, and they said that it was in the room when they were doing the intake. So there's this person on Reddit who shared their encounter with a Wendigo, someone that lives in northern Canada. They were just out in the woods on a on a on a vacation, and it was nighttime, and he had gone outside to grab firewood and also to pee. Out from the tree line, he could hear rustling in the bushes, and he was sort of like watching. And then he started to feel kind of funny, like dizzy, lightheaded, and then could smell something that's he said smelled like putrid stink, like old milk or rotten food. Then he saw the trees start to morph and move ever so slightly and begin to take the shape of a head and slight facial features. He says his eyes began to adjust and he could hear this voice coming from there, and he recognized it. Voice sounded like one of his relatives who had recently passed away. And the face also took a shape of a relative. And this being said, Hello, I've missed you. Come see me. Smiled and stepped forward, and then the being stopped smiling and became emotionless. And then the skin began to turn pale and peel away, and chunks of flesh from their cheeks began to fall away. And this person felt shock and overwhelmed in their body, didn't know what was happening, so started to like go back towards the cam, but then didn't realize that actually they were walking towards a voice, not away from it. And then they said that the voice became angry and began shouting to come here. So then as he was about to run away, he turned and looked back and saw something that basically was like rotting flesh on a gnawed bone, caved in eyes, a hollow chest cavity, a humanoid creature that was like tall and super thin. This thing was chasing him. He said he could hear heavy breaths and stomping feet from right behind him. And at one point it grabbed a hold of his leg. But by this time, he was quite close to camp. So then his brother woke up and ran over. He tried to explain what he saw and was trying to convince me like I wasn't seeing stuff. But then the brother also said, I also saw it. So I know this poor person said that they had nightmares and couldn't sleep for months afterwards. He could see dark figures and things looking into the window or hear whispers when he was walking home at night. Eventually, when he was seeing this dark figure daily, he finally went to a shaman, a medicine man to ask for help. Yeah. Oh my God. But he also heard that ceremonies only relieve it temporarily. So they have like protection pouches that they carry around with him. And then he said, like, I found out there's a strong possibility that I encountered a Wendigo. I learned that if you encounter one and survives, it attaches itself to you like a parasite. I learned that it could only do this if it touches you, which it did. Ever since that night, I've been on edge when I enter any forest or wooded area, which sucks because I love being outdoors. Now I always feel like a need to keep my back against something when I'm out in the wild. Anyways, make your own conclusions. I've paid a price for being an ignorant child to the stories of old. They are real. I can attest to that. Stay safe, everyone. You know, stories are passed down for a reason. So next one is also something that you're probably already familiar with from Navajo folklore. It's skinwalkers.

SPEAKER_00: 22:39

Oh that shit creeps me the fuck out of the bridge. Yeah. Yeah. I used to get on TikTok late at night, and then randomly I would see these videos, and they were always these skinwalker videos. I saw this video of this dog that scared the shit out of me. And I granted, you know, I was tired and I had eaten a weed gummy, so it was extra like, oh my god, the dog was standing up on his feet and it looked not right. And the lady was screaming in the video, and either it was like a really well-done home video that was scary, or just or her dog was being scary. But that really freaks me out for some reason. I think it's the Uncanny Valley thing, like when animals are really not like animals.

SPEAKER_01: 23:25

When I share more, you might understand maybe why that's freaking you out a lot. But I agree. I know there's like a lot out there about skinwalkers, but I wanted to like hear about it from someone who is Navajo. So I watched this video from YouTube of this guy who makes just a lot of creepy videos. A lot of them are about skinwalkers, but the channel is Sean Clen Shadow Productions. The word for skinwalkers in Navajo is Yana Gloshi, and that's how they refer to it. And basically, what they say is the origins of this is that a long time ago, the medicine people of their community would go to these four mountains in order to do ceremonies, and they would have to reach each of the mountains like within a period of a day. And so they were given powers to shape shift into animals so that they could traverse the land. And this is supposed to be for good. But learning how to shape shift was very, very hard, and they had to spend a lot of years learning how to do this. And some people felt like this is taking too long. And quote unquote, evil and darkness heard their prayers and told them how it can be done more easily and quickly. He says that the first thing that you have to do to become a Yana Gloshi is sacrifice someone close to you. So someone in your family or your loved one, spouse, a friend. Oh no, it's dark as fuck. It gets darker. Just wait. So he doesn't go into the other steps because they're quite gruesome. Yana Gloshis can shape shift into anything, but they have to kill whatever it is that they want to shape shift into first, skin it, prep it, do a ceremony, and only then can they use it. Oh no. Yeah. So they can't shape it.

SPEAKER_00: 25:16

They're Ed gaining the fucking animal, bro. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 25:22

They are. So that's why most commonly it's like you see coyotes, wolves, or bucks. They run really, really fast. How they connect to mimics again is very similar to Wendigo, is that they can mimic voices. And he said in this video, yes, this does actually happen. They will copy family members' voices. And he said he's experienced this before. And he says, like majority of people who live on Navajo Nation have experienced at least one kind of skinwalker thing. They have these whistles made out of bone that when they blow into them, the dogs will quiet down and put your animals and protectors to sleep, is what he says. So people hear footsteps, rattles, growls. Take note of this for later. Again, he says like fear is their biggest tool. So that's like what they get their energy out of. And also he says that like skinwalkers they gain their power specifically from the land that is like in the Navajo Nation area.

SPEAKER_00: 26:24

You were saying something earlier about how something that was sacred was kind of turned sinister as like a promise, like of like efficiency almost. Like you can, I have a way for you to get it quicker and easier if you only do these things. And that also feels to me like a tie to the capitalism conversation. There's something exceptionally cruel that emerged out of humanity when we decided we needed to have everything automated to have everything immediately and widely available and really cheap right now for people who deserved it. That feels tied to it.

SPEAKER_01: 27:10

So, anyway, anyways, those are skinwalkers. Now gonna move move on to a different part of the world. We're gonna talk about Irish folklore.

SPEAKER_00: 27:20

Okay. What they got going on?

SPEAKER_01: 27:22

So we got two different beings from Irish folklore that are connected to doblgang or mimics. First one being fetches. Fetches are believed to be a manifestation of a person's spirit that appears before your death. So it's not malicious, but it's more so like a premonition.

SPEAKER_00: 27:43

I see.

SPEAKER_01: 27:44

There's like a saying that's if you see your fetch in the shadows, you will only last as long as the flames in the fireplace, which sort of means like seeing your dowelganger or seeing your fetch is a premonition that you are going to die soon, basically. And then the second one, which you probably have heard of before, is changelings. I have heard about that. Yeah. Yeah. These are stories about basically the Fey stealing human children and replacing them with an ill or aged fairy that looks like a human child. But it's a focal story that came about during a time in which sudden infant death was very common and inexplicable changes in children due to disease and lack of understanding of neurodivergence. And it offered sort of an explanation for when things changed unexpectedly in kids. So usually changelings will have physical changes. So they'll be sick, they'll be deformed, is what it says. They will age rapidly, they might appear weak or frail, they might have behavioral changes like unusual intelligence, faster development of some skills. They might be very destructive or mischievous, or they might eat a lot. The kids that were labeled as changelings were disabled either physically or neurodevelopmentally, like it was kids that had autism, Down syndrome, and other kinds of developmental disabilities, which is very sad because one of the quote-unquote queer queers, one of the quote unquote cures is to expose a changeling to extreme heat. And there are so there's many documented cases of like basically child abuse and death that occurred because they thought that the child was a changeling.

SPEAKER_00: 29:36

So where'd they come up with this shit? With the heat, like what's going on?

SPEAKER_01: 29:39

I don't know. I mean, it kind of reminds me of like, oh, like if you're a witch and we put you in the water, if you drown, you're not a witch. If you float, you're like um blood share. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 29:51

Just like I don't know where they come up with this shit, but for people who don't know, bloodletting was a practice in like early, I don't even want to call it psychiatry. It was like people wanted to figure out what was going on with mental health, you know, and they didn't know. And what they found was that if you fucking let someone bleed out, then they chill out, which is just like I these these dudes really thought they were doing something, you know. They were they were smelling their own farts, they were saying, I'm smarty pants. You see this? This guy was wigging out just like 15 minutes ago, and now his energy. Yeah, now he's chill as fuck. This man is dying.

SPEAKER_01: 30:36

That's what I was gonna say. Like, I feel like probably someone who was like in like a position of power in these communities just made some bullshit up, and then everyone was like, Yeah, it must be true. So, a sad true story is one of Bridget Cleary. So she actually wasn't a child, but in 1895, she fell ill with bronchitis and had a pretty severe case of it, that they thought she was gonna die. In response to this, her husband Michael and her father believed she had been replaced by a changeling. And Michael therefore made her engage in many cruel rituals with the hopes of quote unquote driving out the changeling examples where like they used fire, but they also threw urine on her.

SPEAKER_00: 31:25

What's going on? Who said it first? And why did they? I don't understand. This is so random.

SPEAKER_01: 31:33

Cruel rituals for on poor poor Bridget. Then she was reported missing, and the police found her burnt corpse a few days later and charged nine people in her disappearance and murder, including her husband. So they assumed that she they set her body on fire, basically. She just had a bronchitis. Well, this wasn't even like that long ago. This is 1895. You know.

SPEAKER_00: 32:02

This is very odd. But you know what? The Irish are very traumatized, and trauma makes you weird. True, true. Like collectively, just really odd. And also, um, you know, because I'm I'm not connecting the dots here. Like, y'all were being fucked with by the British, and like were horrifically malnutritioned for a long time, and you don't think that that would produce physical ailments to your children? Like, what's missing here?

SPEAKER_01: 32:31

Related to like changelings.

SPEAKER_00: 32:34

Come on, like why why the energy is directed in the wrong place?

SPEAKER_01: 32:38

Yeah. So that's Irish folklore. And then we go to Islamic folklore or sort of like ancient folklore from the Arab world. There's a type of djinn, and jinns are these spirits, basically. There's a group of a bunch of spirits in from Islamic folklore, but there's a specific one called a Kareen. They are the doppelganger djinns in Islam and Akbarian Sufism. And the job of a Kareen is to make people do bad things. Basically, it's also something that everyone has from birth. I'm kind of like what I understood about it is like it's this like shadow part of you that follows you for like most of your life. And it's sort of like if you think about how like we have devil and angel on our shoulders, it's like the part of you that tries to make you do bad things. It translates to constant companion, and it is conceived at the same time as its human counterpart. When a child is born, a Kareen enters its heart. They are mischievous, they are evil, they tempt humans to follow whims, do bad things. For the Sufi mystic, both jinn and karin were not only supernatural entities, but they were also ways of probing theological issues and problems in society. These beings have been, and the concept of jinn specifically predates Islam and has ties to pre-Islamic Arabian folklore. And jinn are neither human nor angels. They exist between the worlds and can influence humans. So those are the different kinds of stories of doppelgangers from folklore. And now I'm gonna go into some famous instances in history where people saw their doppelgangers, and you can tell me which one, which category you think this falls in. So first one is Abraham Lincoln. He saw his reflection doubled in the mirror first, and then he also saw it two more times. His wife thought that the vision meant he would serve two terms but die before the end of a second. So there's this quote from his friend, who is quoting Abraham Lincoln. And looking in that glass, I saw myself reflected nearly at full length, but my face, I noticed, had two separate distinct images, the tip of the nose being three inches from the tip of the other. A little bothered, perhaps startled, I got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again, I saw it a second time, plainer, if possible, than before. And then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler, say five shades, than the other. I got up and the thing melted away, and I went off, and in the excitement of the hour, I forgot all about it. Nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up and give me a little pang, as if something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home again that night, I told my wife about it. And a few days afterwards, I made the experiment again when, with a laugh, sure enough, she thought it was a quote, sign that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term, which is what ended up happening because he was shot three months into his second term. So that kind of connects to like the premonition, you know, like people see their doppelganger before death. So that's like the most famous. Another is Catherine the Great, who was like a queen or something. Her servants said that they saw her double sitting on her throne while she was asleep in her room. And so they went to get her, and she got very angry that somebody was sitting on her throne. So she was like, I order whoever it is to be shot, but obviously there was no one there.

SPEAKER_00: 36:46

To be shot? That's so dramatic, Catherine.

SPEAKER_01: 36:50

Yeah, she's like, someone's sitting on my throne, they need to be shot. She actually died of a stroke three weeks after that, also. It makes sense. She was stressed for no reason all the time. Who is Catherine the Great? Some European bitch. European, former Empress of Russia. Okay, Russia. Reigning Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796.

SPEAKER_00: 37:18

Well, I'm American, so I have an embarrassing lack of knowledge about people around the world.

SPEAKER_01: 37:25

But also, like, we don't even know about European history, like, whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 37:29

That's true. I but I did take AP European history. I don't, I just it was the AP history class that was available. If nothing stayed in there, I don't know. It was boring.

SPEAKER_01: 37:42

Yeah. I used to think history was like super boring, also, and it's because like a lot of what I learned was also just European history.

SPEAKER_00: 37:49

It's like that's so true. Honestly, history, I was bored all the time, and it's because we had to take five times something like that fifth grade, eighth grade, junior year high school, and then again in college, four times. You know why they're making you do that? Because they're brainwashing you. I yeah, I that's propaganda, yeah, exactly. For real, you know, they were saying things like George Washington had wooden teeth. It was not wooden teeth. I was like, I learned that a few years ago. A lot of it was just very incorrect problems, and a lot of it did fall out of my head because I have ADHD. I saw a post online, it was like, you know what, they didn't get me because I have ADHD, and I was not paying attention when they were trying to propagandize me.

SPEAKER_01: 38:37

Same. I was like, this is not interesting to me. This is not interesting enough to stick. So the last person is also a very similar story. Mary Shelley, who's the person that wrote Frankenstein, Percy Shelley, claimed to have seen his doppelganger also before he died. He met this figure multiple times. Once on a terrace, the figure asked him, How long do you mean to be content? And then very soon after that, he died on the coast of the Gulf of Speesia, which is northwest coast of Italy, during a storm. But some suspected that he might have like died by suicide because he was not doing very well. And then he like went into that storm knowing that it was gonna be unsafe, but also that like seeing this doppelganger was seemingly like making him even more unsettled. But put a pin in that just for like something we'll get into later in terms of the theories.

SPEAKER_00: 39:37

How so I'm mean to be content. Yeah, what does that mean, even? I don't I don't know. If he was suicidal, then he was not content.

SPEAKER_01: 39:49

Yeah, yeah, he was clearly not content, clearly not content, yeah, and neither was Mary Shelley.

SPEAKER_00: 39:56

Mary Shelley was clearly disturbed because Frankenstein is sad as hell. That's a tragic book. I wrote a I wrote a little before about it. Oh, it was one of the books that I chose. I was just reading dark shit. I was like in seven.

SPEAKER_01: 40:13

Frankenstein's monster. Let's go.

SPEAKER_00: 40:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 40:17

Um, so now I'm gonna go into the theories and then sprinkle some stories in between, and then end with some stories as well. What I noticed while reading about the folklore and also have going into these theories is that it seems like doppelgangers and mimics fall into three distinct categories. One being demons or malevolent spirits or entities, second being like some kind of multiverse type stuff happening, glitch in the matrix, and then the third being like a part of our soul or a fragmentation of our soul. So, first theory is uh time travel, time travel theory. Oh, time travel theory. Okay, let's hear it. So there's a couple stories that I'll share for this theory. So, you know Goethe, the German writer, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. Some German writer dude that's kind of famous from the 1700s. So he said anything about that, he saw his double on a horseback in the early 1770s. He said he was on his horse, and there was a person on another horse coming towards him in the opposite direction, who was him, his doppelganger, but he was wearing different clothes and passed by without saying a word. Years later, he found himself on the same road traveling, wearing the same clothing that he saw his double wearing. So his theory was that he like, I guess, saw himself in the future as well. Or like, I don't know, there was some kind of glitch that happened where he aligned himself in the future. This is a super weird story I found on Reddit. Like, honestly, could be fake, I guess, but it like I guess it like is a story that is like so strange that it like feels like it could be like a movie or like a plot in a TV show. But this is from user just mel, just melm, just obscene from the Reddit Glitch in the Matrix. Title A Friend, apparently coming from the future gave me an important envelope. It happened on October 23rd, 2015. I have the exact date because I sent an email about this story to my friend that day, and I kept it since then. You'll understand why later. So this person is playing a game on their computer, and suddenly they see through the living room window a blast of light coming from the balcony. They first thought like something had happened with the electricity, like a transformer broke or something. So they get up to go see what happened outside. But then as they're getting up, someone rings a doorbell and they open it and they see, oh my god, my good friend from Canada is standing there. I can't really, I don't really know where this person is, but they're, I think, very far from Canada at this point. They say, her hair is all messed up, she had bruises all over her face and was wearing a pretty damaged leather jacket. She seemed panicked, she gave me an envelope and told me in a hurry that I must read and follow the instructions. I didn't have the time to articulate a single word before she was already running down the stairs. I tried to follow her, but she got out of my sight when she reached the underpart of my balcony. When I hit the last stair, she was already gone. I tried to search for her in a few places, but she was nowhere to be found. So I decided to call her cell phone in case I could hear her ringtone. I heard nothing around, but she picked up. I told her what just happened. She thought I was completely crazy, insisted that it was not a funny joke. This person requested that they video chat so that she could, or so that they could see that she was in Canada and where she was. And so to this person's surprise, she was in her current home in Canada, thousands of miles away, no bruises, and her hair was all nice and well done. In no way could she have arranged that in a mere two minutes that passed while I was searching for her. So this person was like, I was like, okay, then must have been some very weird doppelganger coincidence. And we hung up. So, anyways, they still have this envelope, right, that this person gave them. So they go back into the apartment to see what was inside the envelope. They found a piece of paper on it, on which there was a USB tape to it, and eight pills wrapped in plastic film. There was also a note saying, hi, this will take too long to explain, but can you please send me this through the mail? There are eight doses that need to be taken at fixed times. Thanks. There was also three strange drawings at the bottom of the sheet. That was extremely weird because I could recognize my friend's handwriting. And so I decided to plug the USB in to the computer. The only content was a notepad file saying, look at the date, dude, which I did and noticed that the date of the creation was 23rd October 2025. So it's like the exact date 10 years into the future. So this person then calls their friend back and tells them what is happening. So then the friend is like, I really don't like this joke, like thinks they're kidding. So they took a picture of everything and sent it via email. She recognizes her handwriting immediately, and she also said that the drawing at the bottom was something she used to draw with her best friend. It was an inside joke from elementary school between the two of them that no one else knew about. So, as requested by the instructions, I sent her the package with the pills to Canada. Later, it happened that her best friend became ill. She has something no one was able to identify or cure. They said it was probably due to stress, but she just was getting worse and worse. Her best friend was told about this weird story since the beginning. And in a despair, she asked to try the pills in case it was sent for her. Either it worked or it was a coincidence, but she took the mystery pills and gradually got better in the following weeks. I don't know if in 2025 we will finally have the missing parts of the story, but it creeps me out every time I think about it. And then they I looked at these. There's a screenshot of the email that they sent in the pictures of the stuff. And then there was also a picture of the screen. So this is actually the weirdest part about it, which I think was the person trying to say, like this was real, is they sent her the USB as well. And she has the same USB, and she plugged them both into her computer and took screenshots of the properties, and they were two different USBs, but they had exactly the same properties on the computer. This was from four years ago on Reddit. So theory number two also falls under like Glitch in the Matrix, is about the multiverse, multiple timelines, and the many worlds interpretation from quantum mechanics. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that there are many worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time as our own. And there is like this concept called quantum tunneling, which basically allows individuals and objects to cross between barriers that they technically should not be able to cross, uh, cross. So an example could be like how ghosts and spirits can move through walls. And there's like a theory that like this can happen between dimensions as well, and how like there's some kind of like overlapping of dimensions that's happening when people experience these doppelgangers. And it also could be explained by wormholes, which is also a theory from quantum physics, where it's a wormhole is basically a bridge between two points in space-time. So like one of the doppelgangers is moving through a wormhole from one place to another. And then quantum entanglement, which one website described as one seriously long-distance relationship. Because basically, quantum entanglement happens when two subatomic particles become linked in such a way that their properties remain connected no matter how far apart they are, including like if they're like a billion light years away, they're still connected.

SPEAKER_00: 49:16

A billion?

SPEAKER_01: 49:17

Yeah, it doesn't really matter how far away that they are, like their particles are still connected. This is what the explanation for synchronicities and stuff are through quantum physics. Theoretically, this could also happen across dimensions, so across timelines. So I'll share one story also from Reddit from the user minute till midnight. This is kind of mundane, but basically, this person was over at their friend's house, and their doppelganger was witnessed by their mom and brother. So they were around 16 or 17 at the time, had gone to their friend's house. Sometimes during the night, they started to feel bad and wanted to go home. But since them and their friend had plans the next morning, they decided to just hang out and stay the night. Next afternoon, they made it home, and their mom and brother are acting kind of strange when they came home. And so they're like, Okay, whatever. Like they're acting weird, but I'm just gonna go to my room. After they go to their room, their brother comes up and the mom comes up and they said, Did you come home last night? And they said, No, I stayed at this person's house all night, but I did think about coming home, but decided not to. And then they asked why. Their mom spoke up and said, What happened? She said, Her and my brother were sitting in her room talking when they heard the front door open and close, then sound like it locked. Then they heard me walking up the stairs and saw me walk past the door. They then heard my bedroom door open and close and my TV come on. They heard me laughing, so they decided to come and make sure I was okay because I had been planning on being at my friend's house the whole night. She said when they opened the door, the TV was on, but I was nowhere to be found. My car wasn't in the driveway, and they searched everywhere, even in the basement, and they couldn't find me. She said, What makes it even weirder is before I fell asleep, which was around the same time they saw me, I had this really major urge to go home. So TLDR, I haunted my own mom and brother. Kind of mundane, but very strange and creepy, nonetheless.

SPEAKER_00: 51:23

Honestly, if someone told me that I was somewhere and I wasn't, I'd be like, don't talk to that bitch.

SPEAKER_01: 51:31

Yes. You don't know her, we don't know her. We don't know who that is. I heard one or I read one story of how like this mom was at her work and she got this like really anxious, stressed out, panicked phone call from her kid, who was like very young and was like, You need to come home right away, like something is wrong. Then she like drove home. She like was like, Where's your dad? kind of like the kid was just like, you have to come home now. She goes home, kid and the dad are just like watching TV, and she's like, Did you call me? And he's like, No, I didn't call you. And then, like, in her phone log, there is a call from like an unknown number, but in like their phone and stuff, there's no log that the call ever happened. And it's like her kid is pretty young, so it's like not something that he would like come up to do as like a prank. So super strange.

SPEAKER_00: 52:30

Very strange.

SPEAKER_01: 52:32

Next theory by location/slash astral projection is basically when someone is intentionally or unintentionally projecting themselves into a second location. So I have one story about this that is super fucking weird. There was this nun in the 1600s in Spain, and her name was Venerable Mary of Agrada, and she apparently had these supernatural powers. And in one of her visions, God showed her the people of New Mexico, and basically she got the message that she has to convert the people of New Mexico to Christianity. So between the ages of 19 and 29, she started billocating from Spain to different parts of South and Southwest America, North America, so East Texas, New Mexico, Western Arizona, to teach them about the Catholic faith. And she apparently did this over 500 times over the course of 10 years. And many times, like they would see her and they would try to kill her because they're like, who is this fucking person? But then her spirit would just return to her body and then she would later reappear again to the same Native folks.

SPEAKER_00: 53:54

So apparently in 1628, 50 colonizer astral projecting, and that is just so outrageous. I know. Get a life. Are you serious? Oh my god, what's it to you?

SPEAKER_01: 54:13

This is a well-documented story, actually.

SPEAKER_00: 54:16

So I was like, for some reason, it's reminding me of like people who have a problem with gay marriage. Something about it, something about the vibe, you know. I'm just like, like they want to why do you care? Yeah, it's it's like, yeah, why do you care? Why I what is it to you? What is the problem? When I went to when I was in high school, prop eight, prop eight was the thing. And so in California, there was a prop called Proposition Eight, and it was written funky. So if you said yes on prop eight, it meant that you wanted to ban gay marriage. And if you said no, you were like, No, we're not banning gay marriage in the state of California. And so it was tricky because they, you know, if you weren't paying attention, it looked like you were being sneaky on purpose. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I think I was naive or something because I just didn't realize how many people were so preoccupied with the lives of people that they didn't even know.

SPEAKER_01: 55:23

The current times are a very clear reflection of how much people care about the lives that they never even interact with, probably on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_00: 55:34

You're right. Yeah. It was naive of me. I just didn't understand, you know, and I wasn't someone who went to church, so I think they were getting these messages everywhere. I mean, we live in a homophobic society, so I'm not saying that that wasn't something that I had exposed to.

SPEAKER_01: 55:49

It never made any sense to me, though. I like just didn't compute for me. I'm like, I don't really understand why we're just like demonizing specific people for like their desires. It doesn't make like it never computed for me even when I was young. So again, neurodivergence saves you from propaganda because propaganda usually makes zero sense.

SPEAKER_00: 56:11

I don't understand. I was like, I don't get it. And it was really like an awakening for me in some ways because all these people I otherwise thought were really nice people because they were nice to me, had these views that I thought were so hateful, and I was confused. And when I asked them questions, they would get mad because they didn't actually know how to answer them because it didn't make any sense. Yes, because why do you care? Yeah. No, why do you care? Oh my god, that's what I was losing my goddamn mind. I was learning really every day that everybody cared. There was this dude in my class who made his entire final project on why gay people should not be allowed to marry. He's a pastor now. Ugh. But I'm just like, Yeah, why do you are making this?

SPEAKER_01: 57:05

Yeah, it's like, why are you making this your personality?

SPEAKER_00: 57:07

It's like really like why is it so simple?

SPEAKER_01: 57:09

Are you just closeted? Yeah. Honestly, grinder always has increased usage whenever there's a Republican convention in any city.

SPEAKER_00: 57:21

Just be free, be yourself. I don't understand.

SPEAKER_01: 57:24

You're so repressed. Like, come on.

SPEAKER_00: 57:27

Like, live your life, you know. You're just mad that people are accessing their freedom of expression.

SPEAKER_01: 57:33

Their joy. You're just mad that people are living their authentic lives, and you have decided that you can't when actually you can. You can make that choice, also.

SPEAKER_00: 57:44

I don't understand it's a cage of their own making. I really don't get it.

SPEAKER_01: 57:48

And then they want to cage everyone else because they're in their own cage.

unknown: 57:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 57:54

Get them. Seriously.

SPEAKER_00: 57:59

Oh my gosh. People used to gang up on me. Oh my god. I remember one time I was in a physics class, and this little dude, this Nathan guy, the Nathan guy who did the final project. He asked me what my my final project was on. It was about controversial issues. And I said that my my final was about the human rights violations of the United States. And he said, Oh, that's that is very you and a very good choice. It's very me. It's just been me. Yeah, been me. I also was naive because I didn't realize people would hate that. I thought that we knew. I thought it was just common knowledge that the United States would be doing stuff that's very wrong. Yeah. I didn't know they would be upset. No, they were mad. They were mad. There was a section on police brutality and they were mad. And I'm just like, there are videos right here. Like you can't, what you gonna fight me on? This is evidence.

SPEAKER_01: 59:02

Like, yeah, what are you mad about? It just who are you mad at?

SPEAKER_00: 59:05

I'm not even sharing an opinion, I'm just listing things that they did.

SPEAKER_01: 59:09

It was literally the laundry list. Yeah, I'm just like, I'm just a messenger.

SPEAKER_00: 59:15

Yeah, I'm just letting, I'm just you know, letting us know. I thought that you know, we're on the same page, but we weren't. So people hated that. And he I said, What are you doing your project on? He says, Oh, I'm doing it on gay marriage. I said, Oh, I uh think that might not land well for a lot of people, actually. And he was like, Oh, well, well, how do you feel about that? You you believe in gay marriage? And what the fuck is do you believe in gay marriage? Gay people get married, that's it. Yeah, what do you mean? Do I believe in it's not a mythical situation?

SPEAKER_01: 59:57

That's so stupid. It's like whether or not a legal institution says that it's valid or not, people still commit to each other.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:06

I just didn't understand that question, but I didn't have I didn't have the language for that. So I just said he, yeah, all I said was like, yeah, I think gay people should be allowed to get married. I don't think it's anybody else's fucking business. Like, what is the problem? Yeah, yeah. And he goes, Oh, well, yeah. He was very uncomfortable. He didn't like that. And then another student came in and she was my friend, and she was like, he was like trying to get people to agree with him, and she was on his side. I said, Oh, oh no. And then they started talking about bestiality. I said, That's so crazy. What are you talking about? Bestiality. Someone was like, How come they can't just be okay with civil unions? Marriage is sacred. And I was like, if it's the same, then what's the problem? And they said, Well, you know, it's a sacred thing, and like it's but it is the same, it's like equal under the eyes of the law. You know, you get the same things, and I think I was like, you know, I just don't think that separate but equal philosophies have worked for us in the past, and then this other guy in the back said, You think of married this is a civil rights movement, and I said, Oh my god, not another one. I look back at this guy, he said, Are you really doing that? And I said, I think I am doing that, yeah. It's a different situation, but same same mindset. Yeah, it's not the same for you. Why are you so mad? They were coming for me, and then I don't remember how it ended, but I remember being tired, and I remember being confused because I did not expect. I was always like, Oh my god, out of nowhere.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:46

It was really aggressive.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:47

I'm sorry, it was really aggressive. I made a lot of enemies that year, I think it's all. Homophobic as fuck. I mean, I think people have moved a lot.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:57

Anyways, I'm not gonna stay with this for too long, but basically, like there's evidence that people saw her and they like thought of her as the mysterious lady in blue because she used to wear this like blue robe or whatever. And uh some of the people actually did travel quite a distance to get converted to Catholicism, supposedly because of this woman's um bi-location. Super weird theory number four, we get into the juicy stuff: demons and or malevolent spirits. Okay, let's go. So basically, I think if you've heard stories about demons or poltergeist or spirits, like a lot of times you'll hear of like, oh, I heard someone talking when it sounded like my roommate, but my roommate was not home. So it's like something that they do commonly. They do this to basically get your attention. And it's like basically a tool to like scare you or like feed off of your attention. They can copy voices, copy appearances, and they feed on fear and negative emotional energy. So that and also they use it as a way to like exploit trust, manipulate emotions, and also manipulate relationships within the house. Which I don't know if you ever listened to this podcast, but if you haven't, it's actually really good and connects to stuff about sleep paralysis and the night hag and stuff as well, and has some mimic stuff in it. It's called The Chilling, and it's the story about it's basically about these people that lived in this very haunted house in Ohio. Basically, like they were all really close friends before they lived in that house. And then, like, the house basically like changed a lot of their personalities and like they became not friends. And even though they had lived together before, it was not like the first time they were living together. And one of the common things that used to happen is one of the roommates would like hear someone running up and down the stairs, and she would get really upset because she thought it was the upstairs roommate, and she would think that the upstairs roommate was always making these noises because it sounded like it was her and her boyfriend doing it, but it would happen even when they were not. It's a very, very interesting podcast and very creepy for sure. Another story is one from my my friend who wanted to share a mimic story that she had. She said that she used to live in this house from when she was 13 to 20, and that a lot of weird supernatural stuff used to happen in this house. But one of the things was this like specific instance of a mimic where her aunt and her cousin had come to stay at their house for a period of time. And she said that ever since they came, like there was like a weird, weird vibe in the house. And there was like one day where she was sitting in the living room, and there was like two different there was like a front balcony and a back balcony, and she saw her cousin, sort of who was like six or seven, running through the room and who stopped and talked to her, who was going to the back balcony. She just like was hearing the cousin making like a lot of noise, and she wanted to tell her, like, hey, can you like stop doing that? And so she called her, and she took like a really long time to come over there, and she was like, Oh, like, wait, weren't you just like on the back balcony? And her cousin was like, No, I was on the front balcony this whole time. And she was like, Oh, but I like just saw you walk by and you talk to me. Yeah, so that was like her story, and she was like, Yeah, a lot of other weird things happened, which she didn't tell me about, but she was like, There was just like a weird energy in that in that house. This one is really freaky. It's from Reddit from the user Eclipsed Griffey. So they said she was downstairs, she saw her eldest son come down the stairs looking really, really freaked out because he quote just saw me upstairs in our room, slowly backing away into the darkness, and that my eyes were glowing white, and I was smiling. So it's creepy. I know already that's creepy on his own. But the creepier thing is she was saying, me and my son used to like play these games together where I would like try to scare him, and then he would like come into my room and try to like attack me. So she thought like the spirit was like trying to do something that would lure the son into the room, like it was something that the mom might do, but he was able to know like realize like, oh, that's not my mom, and like ran down the stairs. And she said, right before that happened, there's like a camera in her room, and right before that happened, the camera had like fallen as well. The advice is that if you hear like a voice or something that you know is a mimic and not like actually that person, that you should just ignore it. Don't pay any attention to it, try not to even like talk about it and stuff like that, because it's basically just giving it what it what it wants, which is like speeding off of your energy, whether it's like fear or whatever excitement. Those are sort of the supernaturalslash sci-fi theories. And the last two are the non-supernatural theories. The fifth theory is something called autoscopy, which is actually a psychological condition where you hallucinate your own image at a distance. And there's been actually tons of studies done on this because of how common the doppelganger phenomenon is. Like there's studies from 1950s until now on autoscopy. Yeah. There's actually six different kinds of autoscopic phenomenon. One of them is an autoscopic hallucination, which is you see a hallucination, you see a double of yourself, but you don't identify with the double. Second is an out-of-body experience, which is like, yeah, you see yourself, you feel like you're outside of your body. Then there's hotoscopy, which is when you see your double, but then you also identify, like, oh, that's a version of me, or that's a part of me. Then there's sensation of presence where you feel like there's something near you that is your double, but you can't necessarily see it, you just are sensing it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:32

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:33

Yeah. But it can be associated with a lot of different things like lack of sleep, high fever, neurological injuries, consumption of substances. And then it also has been linked to like if you think back to Percy Shelley, it's been linked to depression and suicidal ideation and impulses, also seizures, epilepsy, anxiety, and schizophrenia. But similar to sleep paralysis, they haven't been able to identify a neurologic one specific neurological reason why this happens, because and the data is very inconsistent. But a lot of different studies have identified a specific region of the brain, which is the temporarietal junction, that is involved usually when this is happening. And this is the area that basically is the overlap between the temporal lobe and the parietal lobe, but it's an area that has a lot of different and complex functions. Like one website described it as sort of like if you think about a traffic intersection in your brain, like that is what this region is where there's just like a lot of different things going on. So you can't really identify what specific neural activity is happening when yeah, people are having experiencing this phenomenon. So there is this paper, there's quite a few papers about autoscopy. If you want to look them up, it's very interesting. I'll share some examples. So there's this one paper called Autoscopic Phenomenon by T. R. Denning and G. E. Barios that was written in '94. And it just is like a basically like a study of people who have experienced this. And then at the end, they list three case reports. And I'll just read two of them because they kind of connect to things we've already learned about. First one, a 55-year-old professional man employed at an Oxbridge college was walking across the college quadrangle when he suddenly had an autoscopic experience. He saw himself directly ahead and several yards away. The image was vivid and colored, although it did not speak to him. He stopped and the image persisted for five to ten minutes before disappearing. During this time, he also felt depersonalized and dysphoric. He then proceeded to have a full-blown panic attack. He had two similar episodes over the next few months and, fearing he was losing his sanity, consulted a psychiatrist. It emerged that he'd always been an anxious man who, nevertheless, had a distinguished record as an Air Force pilot before leaving because of anxiety. His present post was stressful, and there were financial problems which concerned him. So he was also experiencing depression and anxiety at the time this happened. Next case is quite different. 75-year-old male physician was afflicted with cancer. He awoke one night feeling like he needed to use the toilet. And as he set up, sat up, he was surprised and disconcerted to see a solid-looking image of himself moving away from the bed and walking silently across the room. The image appeared to use the toilet and then disappeared. Episode lasting two to three minutes. He was left feeling amazed and shaken. After sitting quietly for a few minutes, he used the toilet and went back to bed. There was no evidence of neurological or psychiatric disorder. The episode clearly occurred in a state of altered consciousness upon waking. The autoscopy was not repeated, nor did he have any other hallucinations. He regarded the episode as a harbinger of his death, and he did indeed die a few months later. Oh shit. So this seems like a thing where people do see Wow, interesting. Yeah, very interesting. And this is, yeah, like it's interesting that this is like in a published paper. If you're curious, there's like you just go to Google Scholar and look up autoscopic phenomenon. There's like so much shit, honestly, which I didn't expect to find so much like of scientific research on this, but I guess it just happens really often and has been happening for so long that that's why they've studied it. Also, very similar to sleep paralysis.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:09

Yeah. Which we're gonna get to.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:12

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now we come to the last theory, and then I just have like a couple stories after that. Last theory is just kind of funny, it's interesting and funny. It's a non-genetic double. So basically, there's a one in trillion chance for this to happen. But there was actually this dude, this French-Canadian photographer called Francoise Brunel, who over the last 25 years has traveled the world photographing around 250 pairs of doppelgangers. And he has this project called I'm Not a Look-alike, which is pictures of these people who are not related, but they look alike. And they did a study on these same people. It was published in 2022. They recruited 32 pairs of look-alikes from the photography project. They completed DNA tests, completed questionnaires, and then they also use a facial recognition software to quantify similarities in their faces. And six of the pairs of 50, sorry, 16 of the pairs, so 50% of them had similar overall scores to identical twins that were analyzed by the same facial recognition software. That's really wild. Yeah. But the thing is, those 16 pairs' DNA was then analyzed, and they found that they shared significantly more genes than the other 16 pairs, but that their epigenome was like very different. So like we know that epigenetics comes off of people's like environments and stuff. So like they were sort of saying how even though the doppelganger's genomes were similar, their epigenomes and microbiomes were different. Genetics put them together and epigenetics and microbiomes pull them apart. So definitely a thing. And there's like websites where you like find my twin or something. I guess you can go go look at that. So my personal doppelganger story, which actually links doppelgangers with sleep paralysis, which Shana's gonna get us into next. There was a time when I was younger, it was a summer between my sophomore and junior year of college. And I was at home, and I was spending the entire day reading creepy threads on Reddit. And then I realized, oh my gosh, it's getting dark. I should probably stop reading this. I was also like in this period of time where I think I was trying to learn how to lucid dream, which has connections with sleep paralysis as well. So anyway, I like go to the living room and I fall asleep with the light on and everything. Suddenly I wake up and I realize I can't move, that I'm in the living room, and I was like, oh, I'm dreaming. And so then I was like, oh, like maybe I can make stuff appear, because like that's what lucid dreaming is about. But then I remembered, oh my God, I've been spending the entire day reading really creepy stuff, like what if a ghost shows up? And then I start to get really freaked out. So I'm basically lying on the couch, and then the back of the couch is like to my right side. And I sense, and I can see from the corner of my eye, but I can't really like move my eyes that much either. I can sense that there's somebody there. And I can see from the corner of my eye that this person is like has their hands on top of the couch and is like leaning on it like that. And they're wearing my hoodie. So then I was like, oh, it's me, but it's not me. And I started getting really freaked out, and I was like, I need to wake up, I need to wake up. As soon as I had the thought of like wanting to wake up, this thing just grabs my hand and is like holding onto it super, super tight. And I was trying to scream and I couldn't scream. And then finally I was able to wake up, but I could still feel it's like you know, when someone grabs your hand really hard and they let go, you can still feel where they were holding it. I could still feel that there, and I was so freaked out I couldn't sleep by myself for for a little while after that. That was the first time I met her. Then I met her in a different dream where it was not a sleep paralysis dream, but it was a nap dream where she was being very mean to me and she had tattoos all over her face, but then towards the end of it, we made out. So it was just weird. It was weird. Yeah, she definitely seems like some weird, like yeah, mean version. I wasn't expecting that. It was it was very strange. I also went on a date with this person once who told me that they met their doppelganger in high school and they actually like dated and hooked up for a while, which I thought was strange and funny. So yeah, would love to hear other people's doppelganger stories if you have any. Send them to us.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:20

Well, it's interesting because it sounds like doppelganger is like a lot of different ways you can conceptualize it. There's like the literal, there's somebody else in the world that looks psycho, but then there's also these other pieces that are like, oh, maybe it's a mimic, or or maybe there's this other part of you that's dark, or maybe it's like soul. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:43

Or maybe it's like from a different timeline. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:48

Different kind of folklore. Okay, well, thanks for sharing. Yeah, it ties really well into the sleep paralysis combo.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:55

Well, thanks for listening. Oh, yeah. Thanks for listening. Hope you got some sleep. Bye. Bye. See you on the next one. Happy Halloween.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:08

Yeah, happy Halloween.