by Barry Pirro
Almost everyone has heard the term doppelgänger. It’s a German word that means double-walker or double-goer. Basically, a doppelgänger is someone who looks, acts, and sounds exactly like another person.
The following creepy tale isn’t fiction. It comes from a paranormal investigation I conducted at a home in Larchmont, New York. The family had a number of bizarre experiences after the father brought a haunted organ home, but Michael coming face-to-face with his doppelgänger-mother was by far the strangest:
Michael burst through the backdoor, snow swirling in after him. He slammed the door shut, threw his book bag on the mudroom floor and pried off his snow-caked sneakers, losing one soggy sock in the process. He pulled off the other drenched sock and threw both on top of his book bag, then threw his wet jacket on top of the pile.
Music was blasting in Michael’s headphones as he headed to the kitchen to grab a snack. School was let out early because of the snow, and with more than a foot predicted by morning, it looked like tomorrow would definitely be a snow day. He riffled through the junk food cabinet and settled on something he considered to be highly nutritious – Strawberry Pop-tarts.
He tore open the two-pack of Pop-Tarts, took a bite, headed out into the living room, making for the staircase. When he was half-way across the room he slowed, took another bite of his Pop-Tart, then stopped and looked at the crucifixes that hung on all four walls of the room. He couldn’t help but wonder what his dad got the family into.
Three months earlier, unexplainable things started happening around the house after the father bought an antique pump-organ he saw while doing a job at a house in Larchmont. The man was an electrician, and a musician on the side. So when he saw the organ, he bought it from the guy, even though it came with a warning. The guy told him that the organ was…
Michael shook the thought away and started walking to the staircase when he slowed and eyed the large wooden crucifix that hung above the front door. To the right of the door hung a string of rosary beads and on the door itself was a picture of Jesus, his eyes lifted to heaven. Michael shook his head and turned up the volume on his headphones. Haunted my ass, he thought as he turned the corner and headed upstairs.
Michael was on the third step when he looked up. He quickly pulled the headphones off of his ears and turned off the music. His mother was standing at the top of the stairs. She was looking down at him, and she didn’t seem very happy. Christ, what did I do wrong now?
“Hey mom! I didn’t know you were home. What’s up?” he asked, making his voice sound just a tad too cheerful. His mother just stood there looking at him. Michael smiled up at her and climbed a few more steps until he was just eight steps down from her.
“We got let out early because of the snow. Kelly should be home soon, too. They let the middle school out a half-hour after the high school. I bet we’ll be off tomorrow. We’re supposed to get a foot of snow!”
His mother only stared at him, nothing more.
“Mom? What’s up?” he said as she continued her accusatory glare. “Oh, sorry I didn’t clean my room this morning. I’ll do it now.” He started to climb the rest of the stairs, but she just stood there on the landing at the top of the stairs looking down at him as if she wanted to confront him about something.
She was holding a dish towel, so he guessed she had just come up from the kitchen for something. But what was her problem? She was literally blocking his way, but she wasn’t saying anything, just holding the towel in one hand, twisting it with the other, and staring at him.
Michael was genuinely getting concerned. Maybe his mom had had a stroke? As his concern grew, he continued to look up at his mother. The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, and she shifted the weight off of one foot and took a step back as if she was about to let him pass. But just as Michael started to climb the stairs again, she slowly took a step forward and twisted the towel tighter.
“Mom? What’s the matter? Did I do something wrong? Talk to me!” he yelled. Then, the corners of her mouth slowly turned upward into a big grin, like she had just been playing some kind of a joke on him. He sighed with relief and smiled back at her. He laughed, “Mom, you really had me fooled there for a minute.” From downstairs, he heard someone walk in from the kitchen and through the living room. “There’s Kelly now,” he said. “Her school bus must have just dropped her off.”
Suddenly, a voice called to him from the bottom of the stairs: “Michael, who are you talking to, Honey? I could hear your voice from all the way in the basement.”
Michael turned around quickly and stared down the stairs in total disbelief. The skin on his scalp crawled, and he began to shake. His mother was standing at the bottom of the stairs, smiling up at him as she held a roll of paper towels in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaner in the other. Michael’s head jerked back to the top of the stairs.
There was no one there, just a twisted dish towel laying limp on the top step.
Stories of doppelgängers have been around for literally thousands of years, and many theories surround these mysterious doubles.
One theory is that a doppelgänger is a duplicate version of ourselves from an alternate reality, or from another dimension. But in their reality, they are living an entirely different life than the one we live in this reality. When both realities line-up, one of us ‘bleeds over’ into the other’s world and we end up seeing each other. The sightings are usually brief, and the doppelgänger usually vanishes when spotted.
Another theory is that a doppelgänger is our exact double, a cell-for-cell duplicate living in the same reality. Some think that it’s impossible for two of the same person to live in the same reality, so when the two meet up, one of them must die.
Several famous people have reported seeing their doppelgängers, and many of them died soon after. Abraham Lincoln saw his double in a mirror. He said that the figure appeared to be around three shades paler than him, and that it hovered several inches above his real body. He saw this same figure once again, and a little over a year later, he was assassinated.
The English poet Percy Shelly saw his doppelgänger numerous times. Once, it even spoke to him. Percy’s friend saw the poet’s double walking on the terrace of his house when he wasn’t at home. Percy’s last sighting of his doppelgänger was when he saw it standing on a beach pointing out to sea. When he approached the figure, it vanished. A few weeks later, Percy Shelly died in a boating accident at sea at the age of twenty-nine.
Seeing a doppelgänger can be a terribly frightening experience. I was recently contacted by a woman named Melanie who was desperate for me to run a paranormal investigation at her house. She and her family had just moved in a month earlier, and she was hoping I would be able to get to the bottom of some mysterious happenings in the house, such as odd sounds in the middle of the night and a feeling of being watched. But those experiences paled in comparison to what she and her daughter witnessed.
One night, Melanie woke up a little after midnight for no particular reason. Looking out of her bedroom door, she could see the front foyer, and the staircase that led to the second floor. Coming down the stairs was her 12-year-old daughter, Sarah.
“Sarah, is everything OK?” Melanie called out to the girl, but she didn’t respond. She just kept walking down the stairs. When Sarah was almost to the bottom step, Melanie quickly got out of bed and walked across the room toward the doorway.
Just as she was about to walk into the foyer, she watched in horror as Sarah turned into a silvery mist. The shimmering fog rose up to the ceiling, then vanished.
Melanie was terrified. She raced upstairs to check on the girl, only to find her fast asleep in her bed. She ran downstairs and woke her husband to tell him what had just happened, but he just wrote it off as a bad dream.
Melanie knew that it was no dream, but she didn’t want to frighten the kids, so she didn’t tell them about it.
Three days later, Sarah woke up at around 2 AM after hearing a sound. The hall light was always left on, so her room was well lit, and as she looked around the room, she saw her father standing about eight feet away from her bed. His back was to her, but she knew it was him because he was wearing a t-shirt that he frequently wore, and that she often poked fun of. It was red with a big picture of a race car on the back.
Sarah watched her father, totally puzzled by what he was doing. He was looking at the framed photos of various family members that hung on her wall. As he looked at each one, he leaned in as if to get a better look, then ran his hand over its surface. Then he moved on to the next photo and did the same thing.
After watching him doing this for a few minutes, Sarah said out loud, “Dad, what are you doing? It’s two in the morning?”
As soon as she said this, her father half turned his face toward her, then turned and bolted out of the room. Sarah was frightened and confused. Why would her father be in her room in the middle of the night? Why was he acting this way, and why did he just run away? She bolted downstairs to her parents’ room, but when she got there she found both of them asleep. Her father wasn’t wearing the shirt she had just seen him in.
Sarah was totally unaware that her mother had seen her doppelgänger walking down the stairs three nights earlier, and yet she too saw a phantom double in the house. How could this be? If the house was haunted, why did the ghost look like family members?
I have a theory about doppelgängers, specifically the type that show up in haunted houses. Spirits need energy to manifest, and they often get it from the living. This is why people often report feeling physically drained after seeing a ghost.
I believe that the doppelgänger Melanie saw used her energy to manifest, and in the process, it unintentionally ‘borrowed’ her memories. This was why it appeared as the image of her daughter. It could have resembled anyone that Melanie knew, but Sarah’s image was probably the strongest in her mind when it pilfered her energy. Likewise, Sarah saw her father because the spirit inadvertently absorbed her memories. When it used her energy to manifest, it took on the appearance of her father.
There are more and more reports of doppelgänger sightings these days. I wonder why. Perhaps the veil between realities is becoming thinner. Or maybe an army of doubles is fleeing their dimension because of some cataclysm that made their world uninhabitable, and now they’re jumping over into ours and replacing us. All I know is that the thought of doppelgängers gives a whole new meaning to the phrase: You look exactly like someone I know! Maybe the person doesn’t really look “exactly” like you or maybe, just maybe, they are “an exact copy” of you, after all. No matter, if anyone asks to introduce you to your look-alike, run – don’t walk! Because if the theories are true and your doppelgänger catches you, you might just disappear into oblivion.
UPDATE: Due to lack of reader interest, this is the final Reality Meets Fiction story by Barry Pirro. Thank you so much for reading!
“Reality Meets Fiction” is a series on non-fiction, real-life stories as experienced through personal accounts and investigations conducted by Barry Pirro, a paranormal investigator known as the Connecticut Ghost Hunter. Barry has over a decade of paranormal investigation experience and shared his stories every 4th Friday of the month from June 2021 to November 2021. To learn more about the Ghost Hunter, visit http://www.connecticutghosthunter.com/.
READERS: Have you ever seen a doppelgänger? If so, tell us about it in the comments. Better yet, write your non-fiction story and send it to us: darksiremag@gmail.com (subject: Doppelgängers). Your story may be picked to appear on our blog as a follow up to Barry’s.
WRITERS: Use Barry’s real-life story to inspire your creativity! Write a story using doppelgängers and then submit it to us for publication consideration at: https://www.darksiremag.com/submissions.html.
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