It has been said that the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, was disturbed one night in her bedchamber by her ladies-in-waiting when they were disconcerted to find her there.

They explained to her that she was in the throne room.

They insisted she was not in bed, she was waiting in the throne room.

Well, in disbelief, and probably quite angry to be disturbed in such a way by her servants the empress followed her ladys in waiting into the throne room only to find that an exact copy of herself was indeed waiting there seated in the royal chair

it was said that her response was to order the royal guards to shoot at the figure.

It was not many weeks after this that the Empress died.

In the 1800s, writer Agnes Strickland described a strange incident that occurred during the reign of Elizabeth I.

As the Queen lay on her deathbed, one of her ladies-in-waiting, Lady Guilford, went out of the Queen's bed-chamber to take smear, when to her dismay she met her majesty, as she thought, three or four chambers away.

Alarmed the thought of being discovered of leaving the Royal Patient alone, she hurried forward in some trepidation in order to excuse

herself when the apparition vanished. She returned, shaken, to the chamber, but there lay the

queen still in the same lethargic slumber in which she left her. Throughout history there

are tales of people meeting the double of themselves, their doppelganger.

Eighteenth-century German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose poems included The Sorcerer's Apprenticed

and Prometheus, wrote in his autobiography of meeting his doppelganger.

Giotz described how he was travelling to the city of

Drozhenheim to visit his mistress, Frederica Brion, on horseback, as he rode alone, lost in thought,

he saw a figure on horseback approaching him, dressed in a grey suit trimmed in the colour of gold.

Eight years passed by, and again,

travelling on the same road on horseback, he saw his doppelganger once more. But this time,

Gioth was wearing the same coloured suit. He wrote, my own figure coming toward me on horseback and on the same road, attired in a dress, pike grey, with somewhat of gold.

As soon as I shook myself, the figure had entirely disappeared.

It is strange that, eight years afterward,

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