December 1, 2019 | Leave a comment Emilie Sagee was a teacher. In fact she was two teachers. No, she didn’t take the exam twice, it’s just that she was, well, plural. Emilie 1 was born in Dijon, France in 1813 and her story comes to us from a book called Footfalls of the Boundary of Another World, by Robert Dale-Owen, published in 1860. According to Dale-Owen, he learned of the strange story of Emilie Sagee from Julie von Guldenstubbe, the daughter of Baron von Guldenstubbe, who had been a pupil at a boarding school called Pensionat von Neuwelcke in present day Latvia in 1845. It was in this year that Julie became acquainted with Emilie, who had recently joined the school in a teaching capacity. By all accounts the 32 year old teacher was bright, engaging and popular with pupils and colleagues alike. It was surprising therefore, that in the sixteen years that she had been in employment, Emilie had worked at eighteen different teaching establishments. However, the reason for her rapid turnover of employers did not take long to present itself. While teaching a class of 17 girls, Emilie had her back to the students, writing on the blackboard when, to the utter consternation of her attentive charges, a duplicate Emilie suddenly appeared next to the teacher, imitating her movements, minus the chalk stick the real Emilie was using to write with. It appeared that Emilie Sagee had a doppelganger! A doppelganger is defined as “a ghostly double or counterpart of a living person”, and in many cultures it is considered a bad omen to encounter ones own doppelganger. Fortunately in this particular case, it seems that Emilie could never see her own double, although apparently everyone else could. The best witnessed incident of her being seen in two places at once occurred one day when she was gardening, while a large class of 42 girls were being given sewing lessons. When the teacher giving the class needed to leave the room for a few minutes, Emilie walked in and sat down, as if taking over supervision in the needlework teacher’s absence. The only trouble was, the pupils soon realised that she was also still outside gardening. Terrifying as the apparition of Emilie 2 must have been, a few girls courageously approached the spectre and one even touched it, noting that her hand passed through it with only a minimal cobweb like resistance. Most commonly however, Emilie 2 would appear next to Emilie 1 imitating her movements, such as when eating or teaching her class. On one occasion Emilie was helping a pupil with a costume she wanted to wear to an event. When the student glanced down to see how Emilie was getting on with the adjustments, she was stunned to find two Emilies working on the dress. She promptly passed out from shock. Early Photoshopping Apparently poor Emilie had no explanation for her doppelganger. She never saw it herself and had no control over it. People noted that whenever her twin put in an appearance, the real Emilie looked pale and lethargic. As soon as the apparition vanished however, she immediately returned to normal. It seemed as though her double needed to sap her energy in order to be able to manifest itself. Unfortunately for her, students found the ghostly twin so upsetting, that many parents started to remove their children from the school. As a consequence the principal had little option but to terminate Emilie’s contract of employment. Thus ended Emilie’s nineteenth assignment in less than seventeen years. Sadly, as the source of story; Julie von Guldenstubbe thereafter had no further contact with her former teacher, we have no idea of what became of Emilie Sagee and her unwanted sidekick. So what are we to make of this strange and perplexing tale? The easiest explanation is simply that it isn’t true, and was a work of fiction made up by either Julie von Guldenstubbe or Robert Dale-Owen. Owing to the passage of almost two hundred years, we are unlikely to ever know for certain one way or the other. However, history does seem to be littered with sober minded individuals who claim to have encountered doppelgangers. A duplicate of Catherine The Great, Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, was seen by numerous people entering her throne room, even though the real Catherine was lying in bed at the time. Elizabeth I, Queen of England from 1558 to 1603, discovered a corpse like version of herself, apparently lying in state, upon entering her chambers. A few days later the Queen was dead. Poet Percy Shelley encountered his doppelganger on two occasions, and during one encounter it even spoke to him asking “How long do you mean to be content?” But perhaps the most notorious encounter with a spectral double occured to Abraham Lincoln, who, when glancing at a mirror saw two images of himself; the normal one and a paler more deathly reflection. He told his wife who thought it a bad omen. We all know what happened next. If you are inclined to believe any of this at all, an intriguing possibility as to what may have been occuring comes to us from Emilie herself, who is reported to have said that during the incident that occured while she was gardening, she was suddenly overcome with an urge to go inside to the classroom to supervise the children. Could her mere desire to be in another place have been sufficient to project an image of herself to that very place? Although, as Emilie claimed to have no control over her spectral double, this seems unlikely. Alternatively, might quantum physics offer an explanation to the doppelganger phenomenon? Quantum physics, or quantum mechanics as it is sometimes referred to, is the study of nature at atomic and subatomic levels, and suggests the possibility of multiple dimensions. Might a version of Emilie from a parallel universe have occasionally transgressed the dimensional veil and unwittingly given those shocked students a glimpse of herself in another existence? Sources: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/readersblog/james/emilie-sagee-and-the-strange-case-of-the-doppelganger-5362/ https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/the-blog/5-historical-figures-who-saw-their-doppelganger-and-then-died