One of my friends was especially concerned last year with a potential Doppleganger. She had never encountered evidence of her Doppleganger until she came to USC. Here she explains the first instance she heard about her other’s existence, and her most recent experience with her Doppleganger’s antics:

“Freshman year during welcome week, I was with my friends at one of the events and I was eating a snow cone and a guy came up to me and asked me how my snow cone was and started a conversation in a way that seemed like he already knew me, which was confusing, then he introduced himself to the girls I was with and asked me for my name again, though he hadn’t gotten my name the first time…he then told me that we should go to chipotle again sometime soon. This was extremely odd because I had never been. My roommate looked at me and asked ‘When were you at chipotle?’ and I responded that I wasn’t at which point the guy told me that there was a girl on campus who looked just like me.

At one point last year at a block party, the girl was there as well. I kept having random guys come up to me and “reintroduce” themselves. I even had a man try to kiss me. Everyone was dancing in the street and all of a sudden a guy I’d never seen before dances over to me, grabs my head and tries to kiss me. I didn’t really know what to do. I pushed him off and he got all confused and asked ‘Aren’t you the girl in my class.’ I was not. But apparently my Doppleganger was and she would’ve been okay with this dude making out with her. So not only do I have a doppleganger, I have a superskank doppleganger.”

A Doppleganger is a German “double goer” – a physical double of someone who lacks their soul and is therefore some kind of spiritual void. It is believed that when a person encounters their Doppleganger, they will die. Fyodor Dostoyevsky explored this frightening superstition in The Double (1846).

My friend took a class freshman year that introduced her to the concept of Doppleganger’s and the imminent death associated with their presence.  After the bombardment of sightings of her Doppleganger last year my friend had the following conclusion, “I have to kill her.” She of course didn’t actually kill her, in fact she has never seen her Doppleganger herself. But after she started joking about this her look-alike never resurfaced and hoards of strange men stopped assuming she would be okay with them kissing her.