I Have A Doppelganger And It’s As Spooky As It Sounds

This has happened to me

I first learned that she existed in 2002. I was in a fairly new relationship and this man, who I was really keen on, stumbled across her while he was taking his dog to see the vet. She was working as a receptionist in the vet’s office. He said he was shocked to see me sitting there at that desk, since I had told him I worked in finance twenty miles from there.

His first thoughts were hurt and anger that I had lied about my job. We were getting along so well, and this lie was about to tear us apart. Then he remembered how we met — I was on a Christmas night out with my colleagues from that finance job. I was telling the truth and this woman was just someone who looked eerily like me. He said that he studied her closely while waiting to be seen by the vet and we had different mannerisms. Her voice was nothing like mine, but to someone else, someone who could only see her from a distance, she was me. We were one person.

Do we all have a doppelganger?

Is there a fairly good chance that everybody has a double of them walking around? Michael Sheehan, an assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, once said,

“If you shuffle that deck of cards so many times, at some point, you get the same hand dealt to you twice.”

That makes perfect sense and since the population of the world is rising all the time, there is an increasing chance that we will have a double out there somewhere. I’m just not sure that it is so common for someone to have their double living in their area, be around their age, and to have continued to look exactly like them as the years pass by.

There is even an industry built up around doppelgangers, with celebrity lookalikes apparently commanding anything from £300 up to £10,000 per appearance. That’s great for people who look like a celebrity, but what if you’re like me and you simply look like a receptionist who lives twenty miles away, or my doppelganger who looks like me, a writer who does a bit of foot modelling on the side?

It makes sense that she and I had never crossed paths until that point because the man who first told me about her, the man I got into a relationship with (who is now my husband), lived twenty-six miles away from me, at the other end of the county. She and I came from different towns and had different social scenes. We were in our early twenties and had obviously grown up going to different schools and had no opportunity to cross paths — until I met my future husband who was from her area.

The sightings continued…

They were infrequent but regular. When I moved in with my husband, our neighbour Rae, who worked at a gas station, told me a story about her meeting with my doppelganger. Rae had chatted to this woman when she came in to pay for fuel, sharing gossip from our street and asking questions but the woman had been quiet, unsettled and uncomfortable. Rae knew after a few minutes that this wasn’t me, especially after looking at her car, which was sitting outside. Rae saw the humour in the situation, but it seems that my doppelganger did not, which to Rae, made it even funnier.

More recently, my Dad’s friend sent me a message on Facebook. He told me he had seen my “twin” having breakfast at an upmarket restaurant in a local seaside town. I’ve never been to that restaurant and rarely eat out, but having spoken openly about my doppelganger before, he knew it was likely to be her.

“Do you have a double?” my son’s dentist asked me last year. “I started talking to her before I realised it wasn’t you. I don’t think she was amused!”

It must be getting very irritating for this woman too, I thought. Imagine being a quiet person who just wants to mind her own business and people keep mistaking you for a blogger who is everywhere and posts her whole life on social media. That’s got to be difficult.

Why Hasn’t Anyone Mistaken Me For Her?

This seems to be a very one-sided situation. People are always telling me that they thought she was me and then spoke to her and found her to be uncomfortable talking to them. She is probably getting really upset at always being mistaken for me.

I, on the other hand, have never had anyone start to talk to me and then say, “Oh, you’re not who I thought you were.” You may ask why. I think that’s because I regularly talk to strangers. I like doing it. I will chat to anyone and I don’t find it odd at all. People often smile at me in the street and I smile back. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially in the part of the world where I live. Scotland’s a pretty friendly place.

I grew up being very shy and almost having a kind of selective mutism, although it wasn’t quite bad enough to be diagnosed as such by anyone. Now, I’ve gone the other way and I will speak openly to strangers a lot. I guess that my doppelganger isn’t that kind of person, and that’s perfectly fine. She doesn’t want to talk to strangers and I understand.

The negative side of having a double

Here are a list of things that have happened to me that I can’t explain that I suspect are caused by having a doppelganger:

• A family member swore that I was drunk in a bar when I am actually a committed non-drinker.
• My first boyfriend had people tell him I was not a virgin when I absolutely was, but his friends swore after seeing a picture of me that I had once been the intimate girlfriend of someone they knew.
• A woman I worked with (we sat opposite each other) abruptly stopped speaking to me after we both went out for a lunch break at the same time. When she returned, she hated me with a passion for no reason and never spoke to me again.
• A boss accused me of being perfectly well and out and about when I had called in sick.
• My uncle’s ex-wife refused to come to my wedding because she had seen me in the street and I blanked her. She swore it was definitely me.
• People regularly disbelieve I have a life-threatening allergy and claim to have seen me somewhere eating my allergen which is impossible.
• Multiple acquaintances have stopped speaking to me and cut me off for reasons unknown to me and never explained it to me when they are asked.

For many years, I believed that I was just an unpleasant person and that’s why people stopped talking to me. I wondered if I smelled, or if I had off-putting facial expressions. Maybe I was saying something wrong and I didn’t know it. I knew I was trying my best to be a nice person and be friendly, but out of the blue, people would stop talking to me. I would be accused of behaving in ways that I never would and doing things those closest to me know I would not do. It was frustrating, to say the least.

At one point, I really did think that maybe I was having a mental health issue and doing things I had forgotten about. It killed my confidence.

I never made the connection between these things and my doppelganger until recently, when my husband and I were discussing the situation and we realised that when I worked and socialised in another town for a few years, nothing odd ever happened. There were no random falling outs, and no weird accusations — and nobody ever said that they had met a woman who looked just like me. Honestly, if my own husband hadn’t met her and mistaken the two of us for the same person, I might have shrugged this off, but he knows every line on my face and every bump, every freckle. If he can mistake us for the same person, anyone can.

I asked him this morning, before I hit publish, “When you met this woman, were you attracted to her?” He paused and then he said that he wasn’t, even though she looked just like me. Something about her was different enough to quash any attraction. So maybe we’re not exact doubles after all.

It makes sense now that people are meeting this woman, saying hello or trying to talk and because she doesn’t know them, she walks away, which is perfectly reasonable. They think it’s me, a woman they know very well, who is freezing them out, and so they cut me off.

Could there be an explanation for why you are so alike?

I have thought a lot about this. All sorts of fantastical ideas went through my head. What if I was swapped at birth? What if my family aren’t really my family? My mother was under general anaesthetic for my birth and it was an emergency c-section so my Dad wasn’t there. Maybe there were two of us and one was given to another woman…? These ideas are crazy but I’ve definitely heard of them happening. But no. There is nothing that can explain this.

I did a DNA test and my family are most definitely my family. I matched with my cousins who also did tests with 23 & Me on my Dad’s side and some more distant relatives from my mother’s side. My parents are definitely my parents. I also once looked at my own medical records when I was making a complaint about something and I saw the letter from the hospital sent to my GP about my birth. “Baby Millar” was a single birth. I was not adopted and there was no mention of a twin.

I also have a mix of features from my Dad’s family and my Mum’s family. I look like both sides, with my Dad’s nose and hair colour and my Mum’s chin and cheeks. I’ve got my maternal grandmother Meg’s eyes and my paternal aunt Sandra’s height and body shape. So she couldn’t be a long-lost cousin or sibling. It’s very unlikely.

If We Meet, What Would Happen?

I wondered what would happen if she and I ever met. We clearly still look a lot like each other, but have different personalities. Perhaps we wouldn’t get along. I couldn’t help thinking it would be interesting to find her though and see what her take on this situation is because she obviously knows that I exist.

So, last week I tried to find her, starting with a LinkedIn search for the vet’s surgery where she used to work. I found nothing. One woman has listed that as a workplace, but I can’t connect with her due to her privacy settings. Everyone who works there now has a picture on the surgery’s website and none of them look like me. I tried Facebook searches for historical posts and again, there was nothing. It would make sense, since she seems to be a very private person who doesn’t like talking to people she doesn’t know. She probably doesn’t even have social media.

It’s a needle in a haystack, but I’m still keen to find her so that if anyone does ever mistake us, I can show them her picture and say, “No, you mean Emma/Claire/Louise” or whatever her name might be.

Until then, I’ll just have to stay vigilant and make sure I keep talking about my experience of having a doppelganger so that if anyone in my life does get ignored by me or see me doing something out of character, they can explain it to themselves too. In an ideal world, she and I would meet and I could get a picture of us together so that I can show everyone how alike, or how different, we actually are. According to Science Alert, the chances of having an exact doppelganger are one in a trillion so it feels to me like there are differences there that nobody is seeing because they are so fixated on the similarities.

What to do if you have a doppelganger

Honestly, I haven’t fully figured it out, even after all these years, but my advice would be to ignore all the old wives tales about doppelgangers being bad omens. Yes, they can cause mischief, but that’s probably because you are two different people, living separate lives, with different personalities. The mischief comes from misunderstandings rather than the person themselves.

My only advice would be to be kind and understand how unsettling and frustrating it might be for them. Like me, your doppelganger may have lost connections or been accused of behaviours and actions that had nothing to do with them, so they might be upset about that. They are probably going through those feelings, as well as being a little bit freaked out. A little understanding might go a long way to preventing future misunderstandings and causing disruption to both your lives.