My brother’s friend’s wife looks so much like me that we’re frequently mistaken for sisters. When I went to her wedding, people she’d known for years came up to her and demanded to know why she hadn’t told them she had a sister. She replied that she *didn’t *have a sister… and they’d point at me.
My mother also went to her graduation from college, and her teachers approached my mother and congratulated her on ‘her’ daughter’s grades. My mother said, “Well, I am very proud of her, but I’m not her mother!”
She and I look more alike than many actual siblings I’ve seen.
I never met mine, but many of my college friends saw her. Back in college, I would occasionally get complaints from friends that I didn’t say hi when they yelled hi to me. I thought it really was me at first and that I’d been spacing out, but then it turns out I was spotted in places/at times that I hadn’t been at. More friends started noticing that sometimes “I” didn’t really look like myself, and we figured out it was someone else, who we started calling my “evil twin.” Same hairstyle and color, similar jacket, both bicycling around campus, both wore bike helmets, similar face and build.
My sister is a few years younger and ended up going to the same university. I warned her about the “evil twin” before she arrived. See, we thought we just looked like sisters, but some people would double-take upon seeing us together and ask if we were twins, so we already knew to look out for people calling us by the other’s name. Sure enough, her friends started spotting “her” around campus too; even her boyfriend was fooled. This unknown woman became the “evil triplet.”
The funny thing was, neither of us ever knowingly saw the “evil triplet” around campus. I’m not sure if we would have recognized her if we did, because we would roll our eyes if people said the two of us looked like twins; we saw a huge difference between us. So I suspect we would have looked straight at this woman and not seen what others saw that made them think she was either of us.
Unfortunately, because none of us actually met her, we don’t know about personality traits.
I did meet a guy who I would have sworn was a long-lost brother of a friend, though. I had a friend living out in Maine who matched in looks, build, personality, even speaking style to one of the corporate finance guys where I work, which I discovered when I had to meet with him and a few other people about some changes at work. It wasn’t a complete “twin!” experience only because the finance guy had light brown/blond hair and my friend’s was dark brown. I spent most of that meeting trying to concentrate on what he was saying and shake off the weird feeling that my friend was playing a prank on me.
Three times I was mistaken for Allen Ginsberg. Aside from a beard and being balding, he didn’t really resemble me. I have also been mistaken for the conductor of the Oregon Symphony who was actually a HS classmate of mine. I still have my HS yearbook and he didn’t look anything like me then. He is a black (but light skinned) among other differences. Again, it is not a close resemblance especially in a photograph when the skin color is not obvious, but I see the resemblance. Of course, he would probably talk a lot like me since we spent four years together in HS (and we knew each other, although not really friends).
I apparently have some, because I was seen in Montreal in 2008 and I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 2002.
Except that I haven’t been to Montreal since 1970 and I haven’t been in WI since 1973. So either I am skilled at astral projection or there are a fair number of people out there who look and act like me.
In 10th grade, my friend looked EXACTLY like a senior at our school, except that the senior had a goatee. We always referred to him as the “evil twin”.
I have an old friend who is Ben Stiller, though a little younger. It’s weird, because I’ve known him since he was 12, at which point he didn’t look at all similar, so he’s gradually become the terrifying doppelganger he is today…
About 25 years ago my husband (at the time) and I were sitting on a commuter bus that was taking on passengers, and this guy got on board who looked IDENTICAL to my husband. As he came down the aisle it was clear that the guy was as unnerved as we were, and thought the same thing. He got off the bus before we did and we kept staring at him out of the window. My ex was weirded-out and also thought they looked exactly alike.
During her senior year in college, one of my cousins dated a guy who was the spitting image of one of her older brothers. So far as I know, none of her family met the guy until her college graduation. I didn’t comment on it to her face, but there were some … concerned … private disucssions, to be sure.
On a less horrifying note, judging from photographs, my baby sister at 18 was the spitting image of our mother at the same age.
My husband and I were in a local grocery store a year or so ago, and a guy came up to my husband and was absolutely freaked out. He exclaimed over and over again that he looked just exactly like a friend of his. He actually asked my husband if he would mind him taking a picture with his cell phone–said his friend would totally freak too. Husband agreed to it. Very weird, isn’t it?
In high school, my best friend showed me a picture in his Sociology book. On stage, as a singer for some band (of no repute) was my exact twin. People in his class were asking him if it was me.