It has become common parlance in the Western world to refer to a stranger who bears striking physical resemblance to someone you know as that person’s ‘doppelganger’. The term ‘doppelganger’, in this context, denotes a near-identical copy of the other person, evoking, with tongue in cheek, the ‘evil twin’ of popular fiction.
This relatively modern word – a German compound which literally translates to ‘double walker’ – has a darker origin, initially designating the apparition of a living person which appears either to the person it resembles, or to someone close to that person, heralding the impending death of its double. Long referred to in English and Irish folklore as a ‘fetch,’ this preternatural portent is astonishingly common in the fireside tales of Canada’s Atlantic provinces, which collectively have the highest Anglo-Celtic population in the whole country.
The Doppelgangers of Seabright, Nova Scotia
In her 1957 classic Bluenose Ghosts, folklorist Dr. Helen Creighton included several doppelganger stories from her native Nova Scotia, which she learned first-hand. Creighton never referred to the phenomena she described as ‘doppelgangers’, classifying them instead as ‘forerunners’ – auditory and visual portents of death and disaster common in Maritime folklore.
“I remember how my breath stopped momentarily one day,” she wrote, “when Mr. Eddy Deal of Seabright finished the folk song he was recording for me and said, knowing my interest in such things, ‘Did you ever heard of a man walking with himself?’”
When Creighton replied that she hadn’t, Deal continued, “‘Well, there was a man here… who felt some-body walking beside him, and when he looked, he realized it was his own apparition. He was so frightened that he couldn’t speak, for he knew the belief that this was a forerunner of death. A few months later, he died.’”
In another story from that tiny settlement on the eastern shores of St. Margaret’s Bay, opposite the Chebucto Peninsula from Halifax, a man named Henry Awalt saw a man resembling himself walking on a backroad in the country, carrying a lantern in one hand. This man, however, was so tall that Awalt could have easily walked between his legs. The shaken traveller returned to town to tell his story, before dying several months later.
In a third tale, another Seabright local named Pat met a vision of himself on a bend in the road atop a promontory called Seabright Hill. He returned to town convinced that he was being punished for breaking a promise he had made his wife on her death bed, having courted other women in violation of his vow to never remarry. Three months later, he died.
Deal’s tales reminded Creighton of another story she had heard involving a Captain McConnell, who hailed from the hamlet of Port Medway, located on the southeastern shores of the Nova Scotian Peninsula. The captain was said to have seen his own apparition walking ahead of him. When he called out to it, it did not answer, but rather veered off the path and walked through the gate of the local cemetery. Soon after this eerie vision, McConnell succumbed to a bout of pneumonia.
The Fetch of Tangier Island
After briefly referencing another incident in which a man from Tancook Island, in St. Margaret’s Bay, died from diphtheria after seeing a vision of himself when he was going to shore, Creighton included a story told to her by an anonymous witness who hailed from the community of Tangier, about 70 kilometres up the coast from Halifax. The Tangier Island referenced is located five kilometres offshore of the settlement.
“‘Mother lived on Tangier Island before I was born,” the witness told Creighton, “and her sister, my Aunt Maime, was with her, a young girl at the time. One night, Aunt Maime was looking out the window. The moon was bright. There was a little outbuilding nearby with a window in it, and she said to my mother, ‘There’s a woman looking out that window. It’s myself, and I have a baby in my arms.’ Mother went to the window and looked, and she could see it, too. It was too far away for it to be a reflection, and anyway Aunt Maime wasn’t holding a baby at that time. But fifteen years later, when she died, she had a baby in her arms, and my mother recalled the incident.’”
Rachel’s Doppelganger
The fifteen-year gap between the sighting of the apparition and the fate it foretold seems to be an anomaly in Maritime doppelganger lore. One incident in which the gap was much shorter took place in the town of Amherst, Nova Scotia, at the northern tip of the Bay of Fundy near the New Brunswick border – incidentally, the setting of one of Canada’s most chilling poltergeist cases. In this story, a woman named Rachel lived with her husband in an old house, the doors of which had bolts instead of latches. One night, when the couple was settling into bed, the bedroom door kept swinging open, as if the bolt had slipped. Rachel’s husband arose several times to refasten the door, but every time he stole back into bed, the door swung open again. On the last occasion, the husband looked behind the door to see whether he might ascertain the cause of the malfunction and met with a terrible sight. He fastened the door, returned to bed, and began to shiver violently. ‘What did you see?’ Rachel asked. The husband refused to tell her. Several days later, Rachel, who had hitherto enjoyed good health, fell ill, and died shortly thereafter. When her husband saw her body prepared for burial, dressed in a white gown and laying in the casket, he told the story of his experience to his family, claiming that he had seen Rachel laid out in her grave clothes on the other side of the door.
The Forerunner of Three Mile Plains
Another doppelganger story which Creighton included in her book harkens back to a time when Nova Scotians from the western end of the province had to travel to Halifax by ox team. Many years ago, a family of three who were compelled to undertake this journey stopped for the night in the home of the wife’s sister, in the settlement of Three Mile Plains, at the southern end of the Bay of Fundy’s Minas Basin. That night, the husband got up to fetch a bottle of liniment for his wife, who was suffering from a toothache. While walking through the house, he caught a glimpse of his sister-in-law, the woman of the house, sitting in a chair nursing her baby. With a thrill of terror, the husband realized that he could hear his sister-in-law sleeping soundly in the next room. Fleeing the apparition, he awoke his sister-in-law and told her what he had seen. She, in turn, roused some hired farmhands who were asleep in another room, who arose just in time to see the apparition walking into a blacksmith’s shop across the road. A search was made of the small building, but no trace of the woman or her baby could be found. The following week, the sister-in-law’s newborn infant died, leading the family to conclude that the apparition had been a forerunner of the tragedy.
The Skeleton Man of Karsdale
One last chilling doppelganger story which Creighton included in her book, which this author covered in a previous piece, involved a man named A.B. Thorne, who hailed from the settlement of Karsdale, near the western coast of the Nova Scotian Peninsula. Thorne, who told the woeful tale to Creighton, claimed that one moonlit night in the early 1900s, when he was about twenty years old, he and his friend Joe Holmes had a run-in with a terrifying creature which appeared to be a skeleton with skin and hair, dressed in formal clothes. The creature chased the pair down a dirt road to the Holmes’ family farmhouse, where it alighted atop a rotten pole and stared at them.
One year later, Joe fell ill with laryngeal tuberculosis – a condition which left his mind clear and rational, but gave him terrible throat pain. Near the end of his illness, when the pain became almost too much for him to bear, Holmes claimed that he was visited by the same skeletal apparition that he and Thorne had encountered one year earlier. The frightening figure massaged the dying man’s throat, immediately relieving him of pain. Several days later, Holmes succumbed to his illness.
“I sat up with him every night,” Thorne said, “and do you know what he looked like when he died? He looked just like that man, for he was pretty well wasted away.”
A Dreifachganger Story
Creighton included a unique doppelganger story in her 1950 article Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, Lunenburg being a historic German-Canadian settlement located just south of Mahone Bay and the storied Oak Island, the site of Canada’s longest-running treasure hunt. This remarkable tale might be more accurately termed a Dreifachganger, or ‘triple walker’ story, as a vision of the living subject was spotted in two different places at the same time. It also has a distinctly different ending from all other forerunner tales which Creighton reproduced.
An anonymous informant from Mahone Bay told her, “I wasn’t married yet, and I was coming home one [moonlit] night when the snow was on the ground and it was almost as light as day. About 100 yards ahead of me, I saw a man get up out of a snowbank, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to tussle with you,’ thinking he was drunk. Then I thought, ‘No, I’ll see who it is.’
“As I got nearer, I thought it looked like my brother, but I knew that my brother was out courting in another direction and I couldn’t understand it. The apparition walked ahead of me 300 yards, and when I got up to him it was 20 yards. He had a brown ulster on and his pipe was in his mouth. I even saw his eyes blink, and then I waked up behind him about 3 or 4 yards, and when I went up closer to look at him, there was nothing there. He had vanished.
“My brother lived with my uncle, and the next morning I told my uncle what had happened and asked him where my brother had been at that time. He said he had been home in bed because he was sick, so we decided not to tell him anything about it because we thought that seeing him when he wasn’t there must be a forerunner, and that he was going to die. When he got better, I told him, and he said to me to stop because another friend of his had met him in another place that same night.
“The evening after it happened, I went back to the same place to see if it could happen again, but there was another man there, not an apparition, but a real man this time. He said, ‘What are you going to do, fight me?’ I knew him, so I told him what had happened the night before.
“He said, ‘Was he coming towards you or going away from you?’ I told him he was going away from me. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘take it from me, that is a sign of a long life for both you and your brother.’”
The Doppelganger of Riverport
Helen Creighton is not the only Maritime folklorist to document Nova Scotian doppelganger stories. In his 1980 book Ancient Peoples and Modern Ghosts, folklorist George Young, perhaps best known for his colourful theory regarding the nature of the fabled Oak Island treasure, included a forerunner story set in the fishing village of Riverport, located just south Lunenburg.
One day in 1974, while doing household chores, a young woman named Audrey Nauss, who lived with her husband, Frank, in a large duplex in Riverport, caught a glimpse of a short, silver-haired man in a black suit standing in the living room, watching her with a mournful expression on his face. “It was only for the briefest of moments,” Young wrote, “then he’d disappear as though he had never been.” Audrey contemplated the vision for some time and concluded that it was a forerunner portending the death of her father, who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness the previous week. She decided to keep the distressing news a secret from her family.
The old man appeared to Audrey several more times over the next eleven months, sometimes alone, and other times when she was in the company of friends and relatives, who apparently could not see him.
One day, the old man appeared when Audrey’s uncle was visiting. “They’d been standing in the hallway chatting,” Young wrote, “both facing the direction of the living room doorway, when the old man materialized, just standing there looking at her very sadly. The uncle became speechless, staring at the opening with wide eyes. Suddenly, the ghost was no longer there.
“‘You saw something, didn’t you?’ Audrey asked.
“‘Yes,’ was the uncle’s only reply.
“‘I’ve seen it several times before,’ she continued. ‘Sometimes he stands in the doorway like that, and sometimes he’s just standing in the living room. One time I saw him sitting in the old rocking chair. I wonder who he is!’
“The uncle didn’t say anything, but turned and walked back into the kitchen. Within a few minutes, he’d said his ‘goodbyes’ and was gone.”
One morning at around 9:00 o’clock, eleven months after the vision first appeared to her, the old man materialized in front of Audrey one last time. This time, the man wore a light grey suit, and wore a smile instead of the melancholy frown he typically affected. After about five seconds, he disappeared.
“Shortly afterwards,” Young wrote, “she received a call informing her that her father had peacefully passed away in his sleep.”
A Cape Breton Story
One last Nova Scotian doppelganger story appears in folklorist Mary L. Fraser’s 1932 book Folklore of Nova Scotia. This tale is set on Cape Breton Island, the large, rugged isle which lies just north of the Nova Scotian peninsula, home to the brackish Bras d’Or Lake. This story is remarkable in that the apparition seen was not a human being, but rather a lifeless machine, apparently challenging the notion held by some Maritime folklorists that forerunners are the manifestations of souls of the living, divorced from the conscious mind of the people in question by some mysterious barrier.
“Some years ago,” Fraser wrote, “people who live on a certain hill at Barrachois, Cape Breton, used to watch a phantom train glide noiselessly around the headlands of the Bras d’Or, and came to a stop at a gate leading to one of the houses. One who saw it herself told me how at seven o’clock every evening for a whole month, every family on the hill would go out of doors to see it. Every coach was lighted, but no people could be seen. At the hour of its approach, some people sometimes went down to the track to get a better look at it, but were disappointed at its not coming at all, although the watchers on the hill saw it as usual. At the end of the month, a man was killed by a train just at the gate to which the phantom train used to come. Nobody saw it afterwards.”
The Phantom Train of Medicine Hat
This tale bears remarkable resemblance to another phantom train story from Medicine Hat, Alberta, which this author covered in detail in a previous piece. In this story, a pair of railway employees, upon rounding a particular cutbank at the eastern end of town one night, were confronted with the headlight of a westbound train on an imminent collision course with them. Right before impact, the oncoming locomotive glided laterally off the tracks and sped past them, its phantom crew waving greetings to them from their places in the cab. This eerie nighttime apparition, which recurred several more times, proved to be a warning or foreshadowing of a terrible train collision which took place on July 8th, 1908, on the very spot where the apparition appeared. The crash killed five men, one of them an engineer who had seen the phantom train, and seriously injured three more, including a fireman who had witnessed the apparition.
Doppelganger of the Wyandots
The phantom train of Medicine Hat is not the only Canadian doppelganger story set outside Nova Scotia. In his 1899 book Wyandot Folk-Lore, American historian William Elsey Connelley included a superstition of the Wyandot tribe – a marriage of the Huron and Petun nations, whose members are scattered throughout Quebec, Ontario, the American Midwest, and Oklahoma – which evokes the doppelganger phenomenon. Intriguingly, the Wyandot conception of the doppelganger seems to accord perfectly with Helen Creighton’s dreifachganger story from Lunenburg.
“Many superstitions are believed in to this day by the Wyandots,” Connelley began. “Perhaps some of them are those of white people. Others are of Indian origin.
“One of these is the seeing of the soul of a person. Often, persons that are known to be miles away, or to be sick in bed, are met on the highway, usually at the crossings of streams; or they are seen walking about the fields and paths. If they are seen in the forenoon, the omen is good for the person so seen, and the earlier seen the better the omen. But if seen in the afternoon, the omen for the person so seen is bad, and if after sunset and before midnight, it indicates that the person so seen will die in a short time.”
The Iroquois Double
The Wyandots appear to share a belief in doppelgangers with their historic Iroquois enemies, whose 17th Century depredations resulted in the birth of their hybrid nation. Rather than being a portent of death and disaster, however, the doppelganger of Iroquois legend appears to be a First Nations variation of the ‘evil twin’ trope of modern fiction.
In his 1923 book Seneca Myths and Folk Tales, American folklorist Arthur Caswell Parker included an old Seneca Iroquois legend about a youth who had black hair on one half of his head and reddish hair on the other, who lived with his sister in a wigwam in the woods. This young man, for reasons unexplained, had a double who shared his appearance in every respect, going so far as to wear the same clothes as him. In character, however, the double was the opposite of the youth he resembled. While the youth was virtuous and forthright, the double was treacherous and nefarious.
One day, while the young man was away on a hunting trip, the double visited his sister and made romantic advances towards her. The sister angrily spurned these overtures and sent the double away, believing that she had been assaulted by her own brother. When the youth returned, his sister scolded him for his impropriety. The young man pleaded that the offender must have been his double, but the sister did not believe him.
Sometime later, the youth went out on another hunting trip. As before, his double visited his sister in her lodge, and was again angrily rebuffed. This time, however, the sister scratched the doppelganger’s face with her fingernails, leaving angry red marks which she hoped would help distinguish the supposed imposter from her real brother.
Later that day, the brother returned from his hunting trip bearing marks on his face identical to the scratch marks that the sister had left on the double, leaving the sister with no doubt that her brother had concocted the ‘double’ story in an attempt to escape censure for his deviant behavior. When confronted with this evidence, the brother pleaded that he had scratched his face on thorns while hunting deer, and surmised that whatever befalls his double also befalls him.
The double returned to the lodge a third time with the brother was on a hunting trip. This time, the sister slit his shirt with a knife and spattered it with grease. When the brother returned home, his shirt bore similar damage, which he attributed to a broken tree limb and his lunch of bear grease soup. Predictably, his sister did not believe him.
Determined to bring an end to his double’s predations, the brother set out into the forest, located his mysterious duplicate, and brought him back to his lodge to present him to his sister. On the way, he proceeded to berate the double for his lecherous conduct towards his sibling and, heedless of the repercussions, shot him in the heart with an arrow. “The sister saw her assailant fall to the floor,” Connelley wrote, “and then looked up as she heard her brother give a war cry and fall as dead, with blood streaming from a wound in his chest over his heart.”
In Part 2 of this story, the brother is magically brought back to life. He disposes of the double’s body, and warns his sister that the double’s mother will soon arrive at the lodge, believing that her son had successfully won the object of his affection. He tells his sister that he must play the part of his double, and that the two of them must pretend to be man and wife.
“After a while,” Connelly wrote, “footsteps were heard and the door was flung back. A witch woman looked into the lodge, and seeing someone that resembled her son standing closely to a young woman, the witch said, ‘I now perceive that I have a daughter-in-law.”
The deception is almost betrayed by the ghost of the double, who speaks to his mother through the flickering fire, telling her that he had been murdered by the man who was presently assuming his identity. The youth manages to explain this away, and agrees to return to his maternal lodge, as was Iroquois custom, with his new ‘wife’. After feigning married life in the witch’s lodge, the young man and his sister make their escape.
What Are Doppelgangers?
The doppelganger is perhaps the most baffling paranormal phenomenon this author has ever researched – a phenomenon which challenges our current assumptions regarding the nature of time and the condition of the human spirit. Many of the Maritime informants who furnished Helen Creighton and Mary Fraser with their stories contend that forerunners, or preternatural warnings of disaster, of which the doppelganger phenomenon is but one type, are messages sent by the spirits of the living unbeknownst to the conscious minds of the people to whom they belong. This notion appears to rest on the bend-bending concept that the human spirit transcends the temporal dimension, apparently possessing either foreknowledge of the future or the ability to travel back in time. It flies in the face of the Western assumption that the human spirit and the human mind are united in life, separated only by death. And, when considered in the light of locomotive doppelgangers like the phantom trains of Bras D’Or Lake and Medicine Hat, it contradicts the age-old rule established by the international canon of ghost stories that human spirits can only manifest in a form they once took in life.
That doppelgangers are messages sent by some sort of intelligence seems to be undeniable, assuming such stories are true, but are the messengers truly spirits of the living, as many Maritimers contend? Is it possible that the bearers of these mortal missives are angelic in nature, serving either the divine or the diabolical? Might the conveyors of such gloomy prognostics be the spirits of the dearly departed, intending to prepare friends and relatives for their imminent reunions with their Maker? Or do they represent a hidden truth about reality which the human mind has yet to comprehend?
Sources
Bluenose Ghosts (1957), by Helen Creighton
Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia (1950), by Helen Creighton
Ancient Peoples and Modern Ghosts (1980), by George Young
Folklore of Nova Scotia (1932), by Mary L. Fraser
Wyandot Folk-Lore (1899), by William Elsey Connelley
Seneca Myths and Folk Tales (1923), by Arthur Caswell Parker
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