Well, briefly at least. I’ll tell you the story and you can decide for yourself.
I was a little boy. And I think I was six. My mother and I were shopping in this old store in Hamtramck, Michigan. (I don’t know if you have ever been in an old store. But they had wooden floors, old drapes. Like that.) Anyway, I turned a corner. And there he was. My double!
I was looking at him with shock. And he was looking at me with shock too I remember. All these things, thoughts and emotions, racing through me, I remember. Plus what do I do? What do I say?
You also have to remember I was a shy, quiet child. But someone had to make the first move. Mustering courage, I decided it would be me. So I greeted my would be doppelganger. And that is when I realized it. It was a mirror!
And a pretty impressive one too. I only realized it was a reflection when I moved. But can you imagine? For a brief moment in time I had a double!
Anyone else have a similar story to share? I, and I am sure others, would love to hear it:).
When the lil’wrekker started kindergarten there was a little girl who favored her quite a bit. Their birthdays were 2 days apart IIRC.
They were in different classes. School staff often confused them.
I was always gonna talk to the girls mother and see if we had some common ancestry. I never did. They moved away I guess, the next year they weren’t around.
ETA: there is a yearbook of sorts and their pictures are mixed up in it.
The first thing I noticed was my double had a squirt gun like mine: “Hey you gotta gun just like mi…” It took that long before I realized I was talking to my reflection.
Oh, and this happened in a funhouse at a carnival.
Scared the hell out of myself one night in a motel. Got up in the middle of the night to take a leak and while sitting on the side of the bed, notice someone peering in through a window. My heart skipped a few beats and a cold chill ran down my spine. Then I noticed the person looking through the window wasn’t moving even though I was staring at him. Took about 15 seconds to realize it was my reflection.
I get strange reflections off our crappy windows all the time. Recently, I looked out the Garden Window and saw ‘Jodi’ from Amityville Horror. Scared the shit out of me! Two little red eyes, blinked once, then vanished!
Still not sure what it was, exactly, but had to be a reflection on the glass.
Summer of '95, my wife and I, along with two other couples, spent two weeks driving around Ireland. One afternoon, we stopped for a restroom break at a little seaside resort on the Ring of Kerry, in the southwestern corner of the country. (I should note that, though I have a German-Swiss surname, I’m about 2/3 Irish by background, and when we were in Ireland, a fair number of people thought I looked like I was a local.)
While waiting for several members of our group to return from the restroom, I was standing there, along with one of the women in our group, watching kids jumping off of a small cliff into the ocean.
We saw a guy walking down the hill from the resort, followed by four girls (evidently his daughters) – they were all walking in a line, reminiscent of the animated opening to the TV show The Partridge Family.
As he got closer, he and I made eye contact, and both of us clearly had the same realization, at the same time – we’d just met our doppelgangers. He stared at me as he walked past, his daughters in tow.
After they’d passed by, I realized that my friend was staring at me, her mouth open. “Oh my god, he looked just like you!”
“Yeah, and if I’d gotten married at 21, and didn’t use birth control, that could have been me!”
There have been times at the gym when some weirdo is looking at me but it’s my reflection. But usually, when I get a surprise reflection, it’s my dad looking back at me.
I had a doppelganger in second grade. We looked so much alike that the teachers and priests (Catholic school) couldn’t tell us apart. He was a bit of a screw-up so he got yelled at a lot, but it was even odds whether they would use his name or mine. He moved after second grade and I’ve never seen him again.
I ran into my mom’s twin at the grocery store a few weeks ago. Like, I honestly had to look three times to figure out that this lady wasn’t my mom.
What made it so much weirder was that, the not-mom lady’s interaction with the cashier* made it clear that she’s a pretty regular customer at this store. I shop at the same place at least twice a week, for about 8 years. It’s a small store, in a smallish town, and I thought I pretty much knew most of the regulars by sight. I’d never seen this lady before. I can’t wait until my mom runs into her. I taught Ma how to take a selfie for when that happens.
*Yes, I got in the same line as this lady so I could take a surreptitious photo for proof. AFAIK, no one else in my circle has run into Ma’s doppelganger, but all agreed that they’d have done a triple-take also.
I was traveling around the US on a Greyhound Ameripass (I think that was the name, unlimited travel for a month, at any rate).
Late night bus switch (no idea where after 30 years), I head to the bus station bathroom and nearly run into this guy. After apologizing, I stand there for a bit waiting for him to move around me before I realize it is a mirror. Why there was a mirror there, I have no idea.
I’ve never had the occasion to be surprised by my own image, but I do remember when I looked in the mirror and then told my mom she sewed the troop patch backwards onto my Cub Scout uniform. So, I was in third grade when I realized mirrors reverse left and right.
The nearest I ever came, was a voice double. In the first season of the old American Football League, I was watching a game with several of my friends. When the commentator came on (it was Elmer Angsman) they all laughed and pointed at me. His voice, accent, rhythm, everything, sounded exactly like me.
Not I, nor exactly the same, but it did happen to one of my kin.
I have cousins that are identical twin girls. Their family is fairly large, 14 kids. They only had one bathroom.
My uncle decided that the girls needed another mirror, so unbeknownst to anyone else, he hung a full length one on the outside of the bathroom door. This door is at the end of a long hall. When the bathroom door is shut, the hallway looks twice as long.
My cousin Christina was walking quickly down the hallway to use the restroom & saw her twin sister coming quickly toward her. She just knew that Caroline would step aside at the last second. Then BOOM! She had ran smack into that mirror! Then she started hollering at her sister for not stepping aside. Imagine her surprise when Caroline opened the door & stepped out of the bathroom to see what all the fuss was about.
Boy I wish I had seen this happen.The way their brother tells the story it gets funnier with each telling.
When I was a kid, my siblings and I were playing outside when a familiar-looking Plymouth Valiant turned the corner with a familiar-looking woman at the wheel. We were surprised to see Aunt Pat, as she only ever visited for birthday parties, and then only with her husband and children. Our wondering excitement soon turned to disappointment, however, as the car and driver continued past our property. Turned out it wasn’t Aunt Pat after all, and none of us ever saw her, or her vehicle’s, doppelgänger again.
Not exactly a double, but there was a guy in college who was same height, same weight, same hair color, same glasses kind of thing. We’d get mistaken for each other at a distance.
When I was in NOLA a couple of years ago for a friend’s wedding I was eating breakfast at a restaurant and my doppelganger sat down at the table behind us. I didn’t see the resemblance myself, it was just another Asian guy with a beard and glasses, but apparently that was close enough for all of my friends who were there.
As the only two Asian people in the joint, we gave each other the head nod as I left, but that was our only interaction.
“There was another vast and unnatural silence, and this time it was the judge who spoke. “So you really mean that when you looked down that passage, the man you saw was yourself—in a mirror?””
