The doppelgangers of folklore cast no shadow, and have no reflection in a mirror or in water. They are supposed to provide advice to the person they shadow, but this advice can be misleading or malicious. They can also, in rare instances, plant ideas in their victim's mind or appear before friends and relatives, causing confusion. In many cases once someone has viewed his own doppelganger he is doomed to be haunted by images of his ghostly counter-part. Other folklore says that when a person's doppleganger is seen, the person him/herself will die shortly. It is considered unlucky to try to communicate with such a doppleganger.
Famous Reports of the Doppelganger Phenomenon
* Emilie Sagee was a schoolteacher in the nineteenth century whose doppelganger's public appearances were recorded by Robert Dale Owen after being reported to him by Julie von Guldenstubbe.
* Guy de Maupassant recorded his own doppelganger experiences in his story Lui ( The light continent). It is sometimes claimed that Percy Bysshe Shelley, English atheist and poet, met his doppelganger foreboding his own death. However, Shelley met this "doppelganger" in a dream, not in real life.
* John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, apparently met his wife's doppelganger in Paris, foreboding the death of his yet unborn daughter.
* Abraham Lincoln told his wife that he saw two faces of himself in a mirror soon after being elected president, one deathly pale. His wife believed this to mean he would be elected to a second term but would not survive (Sandburg, 195).
* Rosalyn Greene claims that the doppelganger phenomenon, via bilocation, is responsible for reports of werewolves and other shapeshifters.
* Richard Rossi, the maverick minister and Hollywood filmmaker, allegedly told police a man who resembled him attacked his wife. According to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, he allegedly speculated the mysterious incident was a Satanic counterattack because of his work as an exorcist. Rossi stood trial for the assault, resulting in a hung jury, partially because both Rossi's wife and an eyewitness named John Fair confirmed the story.
* Gustav Weler was a double of Adolf Hitler
Doppelgangers appear in a variety of science fiction and fantasy works, in which they are a type of shapeshifter that mimics a particular person or species for some typically nefarious reason.
A temporal doppelganger is any version of oneself one may meet during time travel. It is an exact likeness of one at a specific time in one's history (or future). Meetings with oneself may occur when one version of oneself travels backwards through the timestream and encounters a younger version of oneself, or when two or more of the same person from different timestreams travel to the same moment in their futures.
