Twice in a lifetime: would you dare meet your doppelgänger?

For a week, I put it off. My deadline crept closer, but I did not want to click the button, I did not want, actually, to “find my doppelgänger”. Perhaps I could write around it, I suggested, weakly. I went to lunch; I kept my eyes on the pavement for fear of catching my own eye.

The subject of doppelgängers swims regularly in and out of popular culture, mirroring, revealing, bringing varying degrees of discomfort. Naomi Klein’s new book grapples with the idea of a doppelgänger after the writer and academic realised she was regularly mistaken for Naomi Wolf. On Twitter, recently, she asked her followers if they’d ever encountered their own lookalike and the replies were filled with familiarly gripping stories, including a comedian who’d been on stage when, as a whole, the audience and he started to become aware of his lookalike sitting in an early row – the two went on to perform the set as a double act.

Every few months there is a tabloid piece featuring similar stories, illustrated with photos of two people laughing side by side, amazed to have met their twin on a plane, or at a wedding – these are framed as beautiful coincidences, we meet the subjects when the shock is fresh and they’re grinning with wonder. Deborah Levy’s new novel explores the same theme – travelling through Europe, a pianist called Elsa comes across her double. “My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person,” Elsa says. “She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more me than I was.”

Those stories relied on coincidence, a sort of supernatural chance, which one can bypass now, if they choose, by downloading an app. But before this long list of lookalike apps existed, before Google Lens allowed a person to upload a selfie then click to find every other stranger on earth that shared their features, seeing your doppelgänger (the word translates from German as “double walker”) was considered a bad omen. The very worst omen, in fact. According to both English and German folklore, it meant death would follow. I tried talking to my editor again: “I’m just trying to write a fun piece, I’m not ready to die.”

The feeling of seeing doubles in those tabloid stories is similar to a kind of seasickness. It’s the differences that destabilise you – the same but different variations of nostril and ear, which cause that familiar psychic wobble. You feel it when looking at the work of Canadian artist François Brunelle, who was inspired to find and photograph more than 200 pairs of unrelated doppelgängers after being taken aback, he said, by how similar he looked to Rowan Atkinson. The picture series, I’m Not a Look-alike!, which took 12 years to put together, features men and women who stare out of the frame with the same round gazes, the same low brows (as seen on the previous page).

When the project went viral, it was brought to the attention of Dr Manel Esteller, a researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, who recruited 32 pairs of Brunelle’s look-alikes to take DNA tests and complete questionnaires about their lives. What was the explanation for these doppelgängers, he wondered? What were we seeing? He found that the 16 pairs who were “true” lookalikes, according to facial-recognition software, shared significantly more genes than the others that the software deemed less similar.

“Now there are so many people in the world,” Dr Esteller explained to the New York Times, “the system is repeating itself.” Not only are apps that can find our doppelgängers multiplying, the population is multiplying, too, at a pace which means we are all more likely to have one. I just… don’t want to meet her.

To be fair, I should’ve known what I was getting into when I started writing. One reason I’d been led here, to this piece, and this list of apps and the blankest selfie I could muster, was a series of news stories about people tracking down their doppelgängers with malicious intent. When the body of a young woman was found last August in a parked car in Germany, her family identified her as Sharaban K, 23, a Munich-based beautician with Iraqi roots. But after the postmortem, questions were raised. The victim was eventually named as Khadidja O, an Algerian beauty blogger – the two looked (said police) “strikingly alike”. They discovered that several similar looking women had been contacted on social media by Sharaban K in the week before Khadidja’s death – in January she was arrested.

“Investigations have led us to assume that the accused wanted to go into hiding because of a family dispute and fake her own death to that effect,” said the state prosecutor’s office. “You don’t get a case like this every day, especially with such a spectacular twist.”

Then April came, and a woman, 47, was sentenced for stealing the identity of her American lookalike, who she’d poisoned with a tranquilliser-laced cheesecake. In August 2016, Russian-born Viktoria Nasyrova had visited the New York home of Olga Tsvyk, 35, carrying a cake. The women looked strikingly similar with the same hair and complexion, and both spoke Russian. The next day a friend found Tsvyk unconscious, “dressed in lingerie with pills scattered around her body as if the woman had attempted to kill herself”. When she got home from the hospital she found her passport and papers were missing; in court this year, Nasyrova shouted “Fuck you” at the Queens Supreme Court judge as he sent her to prison for 21 years.

An earlier doppelgänger case saw a man called Richard A Jones convicted of aggravated robbery after being picked out of a lineup and serving 17 years in prison, despite maintaining his innocence. But in 2018, after witnesses were shown side-by-side photographs of him and another suspect (a stranger to Jones), and couldn’t tell them apart, a judge threw out his conviction. So, yes, that German state prosecutor was right, you don’t get a case like this every day, but also, you don’t… not?

Teghan Lucas, an anatomist who specialises in forensic anthropology, had by chance researched the possibility of a case like Jones’s three years earlier. She analysed the faces of almost 4,000 people, measuring the distances between features, such as their eyes and ears, and calculating the probability that two people’s faces would match. She found the chances of sharing “eight dimensions” with someone else are less than one in a trillion. With 7.4 billion people on the planet, that’s only a one in 135 chance there’s a single pair of doppelgängers. “It’s extremely unlikely,” Lucas told the BBC.

But, as Jones’s case later proved, this analysis had a flaw – it relied on computers rather than the odd unpredictability of the human eye, the ways we respond to a face, or a movement. When we say we recognise someone, we’re not just revealing something about them, we’re revealing something about ourselves – our recognition abilities, and what we’ve learned about how a face might age, the slipperiness of a smile, what we see when we see a stranger.

It’s a subject that interests Anouchka Grose, a psychoanalyst who, a few years ago, found strangers started treating her differently, a mixture of awe and familiarity. She was unnerved, until someone explained they were mistaking her for an actor in Hollyoaks who looked remarkably similar. It’s not an uncommon experience, Grose says. She likens it to falling upon a reflection of yourself in a window or unexpected mirror, and taking a moment before realising that person is you. “Maybe you’re instantly repelled, or feel oddly drawn to this weird you-like person. Seeing yourself as if from the outside is something like seeing a ghost, or being undead.” It makes you wonder, “What if the other you was more real than you? Or better at it?”

I ask her why this is a subject that remains so fascinating to us. Well, she says, “Freud thinks the doppelgänger is uncanny, as it’s unconsciously linked to the idea of one’s own death. The soul is the original ‘double’. Human narcissism is such that we long for immortality and so the ‘immortal soul’,” like the portrait in oil, or the family photograph, “promises to keep us in the world forever. The world without us is just too unthinkable. But that wish or fantasy becomes repressed and so the double becomes uncanny – the thing we were using to defend ourselves against the idea of our own death becomes the thing that reminds us of it.”

Death – there it is again. Why does every road from the doppelgänger lead back to the earth? “Seeing someone just like you can make you feel totally displaced. While part of you might want to take on the world together, another part of you might think, ‘What’s the point in me any more?’ I guess envy and rivalry are the big risks with doppelgängers. What if they stole your job, your friends, your partner? Or – what if they felt as displaced by you as you do by them?” Grose adds, quite brightly, “The only way out would be a fight to the death.” While that idea – that a person must die after seeing their doppelgänger – seems archaic and grounded in the ghostly, like most myths it describes something very real. Later, Grose emails me a warning: “Stay off those apps!”

Still stalling, I sent my editor a history of doppelgänger sightings believed to have ended in death. She was tiring of me now. The best-known stories include Catherine the Great’s servants seeing her double sitting on her throne while she was asleep. The empress ordered the impostor to be shot; Catherine died of a stroke a few weeks later. A hundred years after that, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley told his wife, Mary Shelley, he’d seen his double. He reported a number of sightings, the last occurring on a terrace in Italy in June 1822, where his doppelgänger asked if he would “ever be content”. A few days later, Shelley’s boat capsized, and he died. My editor replied promptly with a link to an explanation: psychologists have identified neurological conditions in which one hallucinates their own image at a distance. It follows, then, that somebody with a brain tumour which was causing hallucinations, hallucinations which include seeing their double, might die shortly after. Fine, I responded, grimly. My selfie glared at me. My deadline tutted. I clicked the button.

In the past, it would have taken a lifetime of travel and remarkable luck to bump into your doppelgänger. Today, apparently, it takes a basic smartphone. The lists of apps are named things like Twin Stranger and I Look Like You, and they claim to match your face to that of its users, or its nearest celebrity, or a long-dead person in a painting. There are functions on social media sites which do similar, like Pinterest’s Visually Similar Results search, and there’s Google Lens, which scans the whole internet.

As I scrolled through the options, I got a brief understanding of the impulse of a person like Viktoria Nasyrova. What if there was a way, a simple way, to slip unseen into a stranger’s life, and move about in their shoes without anybody noticing? Historically, meeting a lookalike would have happened rarely and by accident, but today an industry has formed that offers to search the world for yours while you wait, scrolling in bed. It reminded me of the search for “the one”, the search for a soulmate, now also shifted online after years relying on random encounters. The search for someone who will understand us. Connection.

In the half second it takes for Google to swoop through its many millions of images, my screen filled with faces. But, having scrubbed the internet for my lookalike, it presented me, not with a nice 45-year-old in Hungary or distant sister in Hull, but instead the cropped “before and after” faces advertised by plastic surgery websites. And honestly, I have no illusions that the “after” face was my lookalike. Was this what I’d been worried about? Being confronted with my flaws? With what I really looked like, outside the mirror?

I tried again, a different photo, and got a woman selling earrings in Poland. I realised what the app was seeing was basically: white woman with nose. The mystique had truly been lost. The poetry, gone. I was reluctant to try the celebrity lookalike sites, because what it means to look like a celebrity is to look like a vastly less attractive version of them. Nonetheless, I uploaded my photo and kept clicking until I got Cher. Then, after many false starts, their shonky website creaking under the weight of me, Twinstrangers presented me with 856 results – the majority were simply cheery girls with red hair. But – there was one, a woman with dark eyebrows and a combative stare, who the site said was an 86% match. I saw something of myself in her.

It made me pause, for a second at least. What did it mean to see a person who looked like me? What did it mean, to see a glimpse of myself living happily in Armenia? And to know that it was likely there were other strangers who look even more similar? To know I could be one of hundreds, with the same grim smile, the same pointy chin? I have pencilled in a funeral for July.