Ghosts of Ourselves -Doppleganger Experiences

A subject that I've been extremely interested in pursuing. The Doppleganger - or Double - is when you see or hear either yourself or a loved one, when they're not actually there. No one is really sure what triggers the event, although I have some thoughts on the idea.

So, my husband and I were home yesterday afternoon, my son was gone at his job. Sometime in the early afternoon I distinctly heard my son say, "hey!" It's something he says often, and it had his usual inflection to the phrase and was in his voice. I actually went to the front window and looked to see if my son's car was there. It wasn't. My son and my husband sound nothing alike, but I brushed it off as probably being my husband and thought nothing else of it.

Then my husband came upstairs awhile later and asked if our son was home. I said, "No, he's still at work."

"That's odd," he replied, "because I distinctly heard him say, 'hey!'"

I stopped and looked at my husband. "We've just had our first doppleganger experience!" My husband said, "Speak for yourself, I've seen myself three times before."

Sometimes doppleganger events aren't as benign. For example, one of my team members was home one evening. Her husband was working his night job. She put her son down to bed, and was in her own bedroom reading, when she distinctly heard her husband come home. She heard door open and close, someone enter the house, and then the television turn on. It was his habit to watch television after work.

She waited a few minutes for him to say hello. But when he didn't appear she went downstairs to find him. He wasn't the. She called him on his cell to ask why he had come home briefly and not said a word to her before departing. He told her, as you can already guess, that he'd not been there. To say she was unnerved, is undoubtedly phrasing it lightly.

It's not uncommon for all of the members of her family to have doppleganger style experiences in the house. Hearing the voice of her son calling from his room when he's actually outside, for example. They also experience other paranormal phenomena in the house.

Then there was a case, reported on a podcast, that really fascinated me. We'll call the young man Tom. When Tom was a boy, he reported that one day he ran into the kitchen. Standing at the counter making a sandwich was a teenager he didn't know. Tom turned around and ran out of the kitchen.

Fast forward a few years, Tom was now a teenager. One day he was in the kitchen making a sandwich. Into the kitchen ran a small boy. The boy made eye contact with Tom and was clearly frightened. So frightened that he turned around and ran out of the kitchen. Tom realized he'd just seen himself at two different stages of his life.

I would posit that such experiences are not as uncommon as we suppose. If you consider the theory of residual haunts, where events are recorded into the environment and replay at certain moments, then certainly doppleganger activity might fall under the same type of phenomena. In this case, however, the ghost is still very much alive.

Especially in our homes where we reside each and every day, a little part of ourselves, especially those things that we do repeatedly might become embedded in the environment and play themselves out like little recordings. The fact that these recordings can play in either direction is fascinating, suggesting that Einstein was right, and time really isn't linear.