twin, where have you been? (part 2)
even more doppelgängers, doubles, and death omens
And we’re back with part 2 of our tale of phantom doubles and death omens!
When we last met in the hallowed pages of Substack, I told you that days before Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in a tragic accident, he confessed that he’d seen his doppelgänger numerous times.
It’s an anecdote that might sound familiar to some of you, but there’s a bit more to Shelley’s story you might not know…
Now, Shelley was not the only person to see his phantom double. Mary’s close friend, Jane Williams, once saw it as well.
Jane was sitting near the window of her apartment in Italy and looked up to see Shelley walking by. It was normal to see Shelley walk past this particular window since the Shelleys lived in the same building as Jane, so she didn’t think much of it initially. She wondered why he hadn’t stopped to say “hello”, but presumed he hadn’t seen her. She leaned out the window and called out to him, but he didn’t respond. Then, she watched as Percy Shelley walked into a dead end and vanished.
Shelley was nowhere near Jane’s apartment or even the same part of town that day. And while it’s easy to say she was mistaken—that it was a similar-looking man who walked by or the man never turned around because she was calling someone else’s name—that doesn’t explain his vanishing act.
The eeriest part of Shelley’s story is that shortly before his death, he spoke with his doppelgänger. On a warm summer day, Shelley strode out on the terrace of their home, and found his double standing there as though it was waiting for him. Shelley stood in silence as his double approached and asked, “How long do you mean to be content?”
It’s a peculiar thing for a death omen to say, isn’t it? One would assume it would go with something a little more death forward like “your time is coming” or “don’t fear the reaper”. But, there’s something about Shelley you probably don’t know that complicates this doppelgänger case, and in order to understand, we have to go back to 1814, when Percy met Mary.
While it might seem odd to do a deep dive into the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley for an investigation into doppelgängers, I ask that you bear with me and keep the words Shelley’s phantom double said to him in mind.
There are many fun anecdotes that describe the non-traditional courtship Mary and Percy Shelley had, ranging from her losing her virginity on her mother’s grave to her keeping Shelley’s dried-up heart as a memento after he passed. But, perhaps the most shocking part of their love story is that Shelley was still married to his very pregnant wife when they began their very public romance.
Shelley met his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, through his younger sister. Harriet was her schoolmate and spent a great deal of time at the Shelley household. Though Shelley and Harriet were five years apart in age, they struck up a friendship and kept in touch after he went to study at Oxford.
When Shelley was eventually expelled from Oxford for publicly sharing his views on atheism, his correspondence with Harriet increased. While his family was appalled and embarrassed by his expulsion, Harriet was a sympathetic shoulder to cry on and continued to provide emotional support as Shelley experienced his first of many nervous breakdowns.
Now, while Shelley and Harriet were close, their marriage was not born out of romantic love, but rather deep friendship and necessity. You see, Harriet had a difficult home life. We know from correspondence between the two that she lived in an abusive situation and suffered from severe bouts of depression.
After Shelley received a letter from Harriet with what seemed to be a credible threat of suicide, Shelley helped her in the only way he could, by proposing to Harriet and removing her from her familial home. Shelley had no desire to ever enter into matrimony, he didn’t believe in marriage or in being tied down to one person, but while he was not in love with Harriet, he was fond of her and her companionship, and wanted to offer what protection he could.
It’s hard to get a fully accurate picture of Harriet because much of what is commonly repeated about her frames her as a young girl who tricked Shelley so she could trap him into marriage or as someone silly and naïve, holding back her brilliant husband. You may be surprised to know that Mary Shelley was the Taylor Swift of her time, and her fans (Shellies?) did not like Harriet complicating their girl’s love story. And they went quite far out of their way to make sure she looked like the Kim to Mary’s Taylor.
We do know that Harriet was smart and witty. She spoke multiple languages, had a love of history and politics, and was beloved by Shelley’s friends. More importantly, she was a source of stability for Shelley. She dutifully supported his work, helped him through his nervous breakdowns, and offered stability despite their lives being in constant chaos.
You see, both had been cut off from their families due to their scandalous elopement, and Shelley did not have much in the way of personal income. However, that didn’t stop Shelley from attempting to live a life he was accustomed to, which left them often on the run from creditors. But, Harriet was steadfast in her support of Shelley. No matter how many times they uprooted or how many lovers he took, she was always there ready to take care of him.
Then in May of 1814, Shelley has the opportunity to meet one of his idols, famed political philosopher, William Godwin, in the flesh. The two had corresponded for some time, and Shelley was thrilled to finally have the chance to pontificate with one of his favorite thinkers. And it was at Goodwin’s home where would also meet Godwin’s daughter, who many of you know better by her married name: Mary Shelley.
Shelley was immediately taken with Mary. She was educated, opinionated, open-minded, morbid, and a bit of a freak. It also probably didn’t hurt that her father helped Shelley get back in his own father’s good graces, which finally gave him access to family money again.
Shelley and Mary began a very public romantic relationship, which did not particularly please his mentor (hopefully Goodwin never found out that they had done the nasty on his wife’s grave). Goodwin banished Shelley from his home and forbade him from ever speaking to Mary again. Unfortunately, the banishment did little to stop the affair, and in July of that year, the two absconded to France with Mary’s half-sister, Claire, in tow.
Harriet, who was very pregnant by that time, was left humiliated and abandoned. She no longer had a husband, but could not remarry, as divorce was incredibly expensive in Victorian times (and literally required an Act of Parliament). She was forced to return home, under her father’s rule, and endure increasing rumors that her second child was illegitimate.
And for the rest of her days, Harriet would be alone. Her two children would be sent away to the countryside for their health, former friends would distance themselves, and the man she once confided in, who saved her from herself, now only communicated with her when he was in need of money.
We know that despite her isolation, Harriet became pregnant for a third time. The identity of the father was never established, but some of Shelley’s biographers believe he may have been the father of the child, as there is evidence of him being in London around the time the third child was conceived. After her death, there would be rumors of a mysterious military man and a story she had descended into prostitution and the baby’s father was a john.
It’s impossible to say if the father was Shelley or not, but what we do know is that by September 1816, it had become almost impossible to conceal her pregnancy. We know that she ran from her father’s house and took a room at a boarding house in Knightsbridge. She told the landlady her name was “Harriet Smith”, and that she was waiting for her husband to return from business abroad.
Harriet lived there for several months before vanishing on November 9, 1816, and would not be seen again until her body washed up on the shore of the Serpentine River on December 10th of that year. Her death, though initially investigated as a murder, was eventually ruled a suicide, in part due to a lack of defensive wounds, and a letter she sent to her sister that stated her intent to kill herself.
It’s important to note though that writing a letter like this was apparently not out of character for Harriet, who was known to openly discuss suicide, even in mixed company. This is not to say she was not legitimately suicidal at the time, but that maybe what happened was not so cut and dry.
You see, there are still some who believe she may have been murdered.
But, who would have murdered a lonely pregnant woman?
Well, there are still people who point to William Goodwin as the chief suspect.
And why was Mary Shelley’s father suspected of killing her lover’s first wife? Well, remember when I said Mary Shelley’s fans did a lot to blacken the name of Shelley’s first wife? Many of the rumors about Harriet’s potential unfaithfulness, her being dumb, or consistently drunk, were traced back to William Goodwin.
See, though Goodwin was not particularly a fan of the man who ran off with his daughter, he was desirous to restore her reputation and repair the reputation of the Goodwin family. And he felt the only way to do this was to make it seem reasonable that Percy Shelley had abandoned his wife and children—after all, who could expect a man not to be tempted by the smart, accomplished Mary when the woman he was married to was a vapid lush who slept around?
There is one more thing though.
One thing that has perplexed historians for years.
On November 9th, the day Harriet was last seen, Goodwin wrote in his diary that she was dead. But, how could William Goodwin have known Harriet was dead, when her body wouldn’t be discovered for over a month?
It’s possible he went back in his diary and added the note at a later point, but that seems like an odd thing to precisely document. Especially since we don’t actually know what day Harriet died, only that she was last seen at the boarding house on the 9th.
Now, it is still far more likely that after years of struggling with depression, the extreme isolation and potential social fallout from this third pregnancy had simply left Harriet feeling hopeless and without options. But, is it not possible that Goodwin, desperate to amend his daughter’s reputation, might have sought out Harriet and confronted her? Could he have pushed an already fragile woman to the point of no return? Could he have made her feel as though she was nothing but an albatross around her husband’s neck preventing him from being with his true love—preventing Shelley from being content?
It’s impossible to say. Though barely a month after Harriet was laid to rest, Mary and Percy were wed at the insistence of William Goodwin, and the smear campaign against Harriet was in full force.
A note was eventually found among Harriet’s belongings. While it appears to be written in her hand, it does look as if it was written down hastily, as it is uncharacteristically messy with several misspellings:
When you read this letr. I shall be no more an inhabitant of this miserable world. do not regret the loss of one who could never be anything but a source of vexation & misery to you all belonging to me. .. My dear Bysshe … if you had never left me I might have lived but as it is, I freely forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have deprived me of… so shall my spirit find rest & forgiveness. God bless you all is the last prayer of the unfortunate Harriet S—
It’s not clear when the note was written or if it was written under some sort of duress, but it paints a picture of a woman who felt that her life held no value to the people around her and that while she ultimately forgave Shelley, she wanted him to know that it was his betrayal that left her without hope of a future.
Shelley never truly recovered from Harriet’s death. For the rest of his life, he would continue to write about her and dedicate works in her name. He expressed to friends the guilt he felt over the role he played in her isolation, even going as far as to tell Lord Byron he was not sure how he continued to survive. He would even eventually push his family to relocate to Italy to get away from the river and the country Harriet died in.
And when pressed over the cause of his increasing depressive episodes later in life, Shelley would always respond:
“I was thinking of Harriet”.
So, how does this relate to Shelley’s doppelgänger encounters?
Remember what the doppelgänger said to Shelley, not long before he died:
“How long do you mean to be content?”
Was the doppelgänger a true death omen? Or was it merely a manifestation of all of the guilt Shelley had kept inside over Harriet? After all, he’d not only abandoned Harriet, his dearest friend whom he’d promised to protect; he’d allowed his in-laws to destroy her reputation in life and her memory in death.
Now, it behooves me to mention, that Shelley was known to use laudanum recreationally to open his mind to new inspiration and “ease his nerves”. Is it possible, in the same drug-induced state he once saw a vision of a bare-breasted Mary Shelley with eyeballs for nipples, he could have hallucinated an ominous version of himself? Perhaps.
But, while it is possible that Shelley, consistently abusing substances, somehow managed to hallucinate a perfect double of himself on numerous occasions because he could no longer bear the weight of his grief or guilt, that still doesn’t explain how Jane Williams also saw a perfect double of Shelley walking down the street and vanishing. And yes, we can say people were on the good stuff back then with cocaine in everything, but it seems unlikely that two people would have the same particular hallucination, especially since Shelley did not share his encounters with anyone outside of Mary.
Now, I wasn’t telling you the full truth before about Jane Williams. She wasn’t just Mary’s friend; Jane was the current object of Percy’s affection.
It might not surprise you to know that marrying Mary did not put a damper on Shelley’s need to sow his wild oats. Over the years they were together he had numerous affairs, including an emotional affair that may or may not have been consummated with Mary’s step-sister, Claire. Shelley also continued to be on the run from creditors, and may or may not have been blackmailed into taking in one of his former lover’s children and pretending Mary was her biological mother.
Mary also struggled with serious depression. She’d had multiple miscarriages over the years and lost her three-year-old son to Malaria in 1819. And while she loved her husband, his need to seek comfort from others, particularly her sister, left her feeling unsupported and jealous on more than one occasion. Shelley would often describe her during this period as cold and distant.
Once Jane and her husband Edward joined the Shelleys in Italy, Percy began to obsess over her. The pair grew quite close, and while there is nothing to indicate that their relationship was anything more than platonic, his favor for Jane was obvious, and tensions between the couples grew. Shelley even started to write thinly veiled love poems inspired by Jane, including one entitled, The Serpent is Shut Out of Paradise, which he sent to Jane’s husband to read to her.
In June of 1822, Mary nearly died from a miscarriage, and while Shelley was able to stop the bleeding and save her life, this loss seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of their marriage. A few days after the miscarriage, Shelley would write to a friend expressing that there was little sympathy between him and Mary, and if the past and future could be obliterated, he would be content in his boat with Jane and her guitar. He would also go on to say, "I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not."
A few weeks later, on July 8th, Shelley, Jane’s husband Edward, and their boat boy would set sail for Lerici, and vanish in a freak storm. Ten days later, Shelley’s corpse would wash ashore in Viareggio and would be identified by his friend, Edward Trelawny. Shelley was found with a copy of Keats’ poem Lamia in his pocket.
It is believed the men died in the storm from a lack of experience sailing. Some people have speculated that Shelley killed himself, and others blame pirates. I would venture to say though, that it is perhaps unwise to get into a boat with a man whose wife you are heavily suggesting through poetry that you’d like to sleep with…
Shelley would be cremated after a small funeral in late August on the beach he was found on in Viareggio. Mary Shelley would not attend her husband’s funeral, and while Lord Byron stopped by to pay his respects, he found it kind of dull and left early.
The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889): a mostly fictional interpretation of his funeral, since most of those people didn’t show up or got bored and left early (I’m looking at you, Lord Byron).
To the keen observer, there are a series of strange coincidences surrounding the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Consider that as Mary was struggling with depression and loss, the new object of Shelley’s affection sees his phantom double, and his words about Jane would literally come back to haunt him. Shelley told his friend all he needed to be content was Jane, a boat, and her guitar, and shortly after his doppelgänger would ask him how long he meant to be content, Shelley would drown while sailing in a boat.
Then there’s the snakes.
Now, this might be getting into the weeds, but hear me out on this one:
One of the first poems Shelley wrote about Jane Williams was The Serpent is Shut Out of Paradise. The poem implies that Jane is the paradise that Shelley, the serpent, cannot reach, and this is the source of his sadness. The serpent is doomed to always remain on the outside, watching the joy and love of those around him, and while he longs for paradise, the serpent knows the only peace it will ever find will be in death.
Then there’s the poem found in Shelley’s pocket after his body washes ashore: Lamia by John Keats. While it’s true that Keats and Shelley were dear friends, that Shelley continued to be distraught over Keats’ death, well over a year later, and it would not be entirely out of character for Shelley to carry a remembrance of him; it is the subject of this specific poem that is of interest.
Lamia is a tragic poem based on the Greek myth of Lamia, a woman punished by Hera for her affair with Zeus. In the original myth, Hera kidnaps all of Lamia’s children, and curses her with the inability to close her eyes, so she can never sleep and is slowly driven mad trying to find her missing children. Zeus gifts Lamia with the power of prophecy and the ability to remove her eyes so she may rest, but the damage is already done. Driven mad by Hera’s curse, Lamia begins to devour any child she sees and slowly begins to appear more snakelike than human. In later lore, Lamia would be conflated with the lamia, serpent-like creatures that appeared as beautiful women to seduce men and feed off their flesh.
In Keats’ poem, Lamia is primarily based on the mythological snake creatures that can shapeshift and create grand illusions. She falls in love with the handsome, young Lycius, and the two are married. However, as Lamia and Lycius celebrate their nuptials with a feast, the sage Apollonius appears and reveals Lamia’s true nature: a half-woman, half-snake creature. Lycius is horrified by Lamia’s true form and ultimately dies of grief, and Lamia, along with all her illusions, vanishes into thin air.
It’s strange that, on the day that Shelley died, out of all Keats’ works, Shelley carried around a poem about a serpentine creature that ends with a man falling for the wrong woman and dying of grief. It’s especially strange when you consider that a heartbroken Harriet Shelley drowned in the Serpentine River after her world fell apart.
Is this all a strange coincidence? Was Shelley merely obsessed with snake imagery because he couldn’t stop thinking about Harriet drowning in the Serpentine? Was the doppelgänger simply a manifestation of his guilt over ruining another wife’s life? Or is it possible that what he encountered wasn’t a doppelgänger at all, but rather a wraith?
There are different versions of wraiths in folklore. In some stories, wraiths are similar to doppelgängers and appear as a ghostly double. In other versions, they are the result of dark magic, such as necromancy, and some stories say they are spirits with unfinished business who torment the living, feeding off their negative emotions, with the hope of ending their lives.
Part of the reason there are so many versions is because the origin of the term is rather murky. We believe “wraith” can be traced back to a potential mistranslation of “shade” from Gavin Douglas’ translation of The Aeneid.
Those familiar with Greek Mythology will remember that the Ancient Greeks believed when one died, their “shade” or “shadow self” was taken to the Underworld. A shade is not like the concept of a soul; it is far less substantial. Shades have some understanding of who they were, and we know this from the legend of Orpheus, that Eurydice’s shade is able to recognize her former lover. Shades are also able to feel emotion to some degree—they have the ability to desire and want, but because they are mere shadows that cannot fulfill these wants, they are often ruled by singular feelings of sadness, longing, or even anger.
And, on occasion, shades are unable to cross over.
According to myth, passage to the Underworld requires paying the ferryman, Charon, to transport the shade across the River Styx or the boundary between life and death. If an individual was not properly buried with the appropriate coinage, they would be cursed to walk the shores of the river for a hundred years.
Presumably, some of the shades that cannot cross, do not remain wandering the banks of the River Styx. Perhaps they wander back into the realm of the living. Maybe some look for the justice they never received in life, and maybe others see a world full of things they can no longer have. And perhaps those most envious of the living will do anything they can to force others to feel their pain.
Could the entity Shelley witnessed be a wraith or shade of someone with a bone to pick?
Now, I imagine Harriet Shelley seems like a likely candidate for haunting her ex. She died tragically and Shelley never truly acknowledged how he treated her or the things he allowed his in-laws to do in order to tarnish her name so that he (and Mary by proxy) would be spared. But, it is hard for me to imagine that after everything Harriet endured in her short life, she would not have found some peace in death.
The thing about wraiths is, they do not necessarily have a specific earthly attachment to those they haunt, rather they are said to seek out those whose negative emotions are so profound they are easily manipulated. Wraiths are almost parasitic, feeding off of these negative emotions until the host is driven to the edge and ends their life. And they’ll do anything to torment their victims from poltergeist-like activity in the middle of the night to shapeshifting into a form that causes the most anguish.
Maybe it was Shelley’s perpetual unhappiness that drew in the entity or maybe it was the fact he was a careless man who didn’t appreciate all he had in life. He was careless with words, with money, and with the people he claimed to love the most, and no amount of loss or tragedy ever changed that.
I don’t think we’ll ever really know the truth behind Percy Shelley’s encounters with his phantom double, but whether it was an entity or a manifestation of grief and guilt, we know that something haunted him to his grave.
It feels like we are left with more questions than answers. There are so many different stories behind these entities, but what are they really? Are there really phantoms that appear to warn us of our impending demise? Are there other versions of us, trapped in some sort of parallel mirror world waiting to cross over? Are these a sort of hallucination multiple people have experienced throughout time?
Or, as Shakespeare once asked, are there more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in our philosophies?
There is one final thing I will posit before we part, and that is a theory proposed in 1970 by Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori, known as the “uncanny valley”.
The term “uncanny” originates in the 1920s with Sigmund Freud, who defined it as: “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” Mori used Freud’s term mostly to discuss robotic design principles and the discomfort people feel when something like a robot appears humanlike, but there’s something a bit off.
Mori felt that there was something appealing about robots that were more human-like, but only to a point. For example, the Disney/Pixar creation WALL-E has vaguely human-like features like eyes, precious little claw hands, and a body that has discernable arms, legs, a torso, etc.
Precious baby, WALL-E (2008)
But, there is a toyishness that makes WALL-E palatable, as opposed to what I can only describe as a cursed mash-up of Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie:
The Sophie Robot was developed by Hanson Robotics circa 2015.
At first glance, this robot appears fairly humanlike—it has features that aren’t perfectly symmetrical, makeup that looks as though it’s been applied by an average person, and even some laugh lines to make it look like a real adult. But, then you start to notice the skin is too smooth, the lips look rubbery and off, and despite the realistic prosthetic eyes, there’s no emotion behind them. This robot, for all intents and purposes, is what we would describe as uncanny.
It’s the same reason we find porcelain dolls, clowns, and Ronald Reagan creepy and off-putting.
Pictured: President Ronald Reagan (aka - “The Gipper)
We don’t really know much about this phenomenon, but some scientists hypothesize that it’s some primitive instinctual response that existed to deal with a specific threat, which is actually quite terrifying since that means at some point in prehistory there were potentially predatory creatures that appeared human.
And if we’ve evolved since prehistory, who’s to say these creatures haven’t as well?
Maybe they’re better now at hiding among us.
And maybe we have reason to still be very afraid.
We may never have an answer to what these phantom doubles are, but there has to be some reason why these stories exist in every culture and why it’s a bad sign to see your double.
And whether these are entities from a parallel universe, a different astral plane, or they’re creatures that have always walked among us; I think it’s safe to say, the best thing you can do if you see yourself is run very far in the other direction and hope it’s not already too late.
I hope you enjoyed our brief sojourn into the world of doppelgängers, and are not too deeply haunted by the image of Ronald Reagan. Join us next week as we delve into urban folklore and dangerous games to play in the dark.
That’s all for now…
(Unless you’re one of our paid subscribers, then I have one more little treat that includes one of the most witnessed cases of a phantom double in history. Scroll down for one more tale.)
Resources:
Fear and Loathing in Geneva by Neel Dozome
In Defense of Harriet Shelley by Mark Twain
Lamia by John Keats
Reflecting on Shelley’s Late Lyrics by Anna Stevenson
Romanticism: Harriet Shelley by E. A. Fitzsimmons
Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography by James Bieri
The Hand of the Other Woman in Shelley’s Life by Dalya Alberge
The Uncanny Valley by Masahiro Mori
What is the Uncanny Valley? by Rina Diane Caballar