I have one more interesting story about phantom doubles. It's about a young woman named Émilie Sagée and her doppelgänger.
It’s possible you’ve heard the story of Émilie Sagée before, as it’s often cited as proof of the phantom double phenomenon.
Émilie was a thirty-two-year-old woman from Dijon, France who traveled to Latvia in 1845 to teach at Pensionnat of Neuwelcke, a boarding school for young women. To set the scene, the boarding school was small, with approximately 42 students, all of which were young women from extremely wealthy families. It was also located in an extremely rural part of Latvia; the nearest town was miles away, and very few people there spoke anything other than Latvian. And as an unmarried woman, Émilie would have been expected to live at the school, and would likely have additional duties monitoring the dorms and taking care of the girls outside of classroom hours.
If this sounds like an incredibly lonely existence, you wouldn’t be wrong. It almost sounds like the beginning of a gothic novel. But, after being let go from over a dozen other institutions for the supposed supernatural activity that seemed to follow her everywhere; at thirty-two years of age, the Pensionnat of Neuwelcke was Émilie’s last hope for finding financial security, as a marriage was unlikely at this juncture.
But, unfortunately, Èmilie would not find the security she was looking for. Within a year of arriving, she would be sent home, after the paranormal activity surrounding her became so disruptive parents began to withdraw their children from the school.
What happened exactly? Well, there were several notable occurrences we are aware of that students witnessed:
On one occasion, a young student had asked Èmilie to help her fasten her dress. While the girl waited for Èmilie to finish, she glanced up and saw a carbon copy of Èmilie, standing next to her, making the same motions with her hands as though she was also fastening buttons on a dress. Overcome with shock, the student passed out. Strangely though, Èmilie didn’t see her phantom double standing in the mirror beside her.
There is another account of a time when Èmilie was sick with the flu and confined to her room. A student went in to check on her and offered to read out loud for a bit to entertain the sick teacher. As the student read, she noticed Èmilie was growing paler and her eyes glassy and dazed. The girl asked if Èmilie was feeling okay and offered to fetch help, but Èmilie declined. When the student looked up, she saw an exact copy of her teacher pacing back and forth, as though she was waiting for something. Horrified, the student pointed out the phantom double, but once again, Èmilie could not see anything.
The phantom double supposedly wasn’t shy either. On several occasions, in front of a classroom of thirteen girls, Èmilie’s double appeared beside her, mirroring her exact movements. The double would stand beside Èmilie at the chalkboard tracing the same loopy letters in midair, and even stand next to her as she read aloud to the girls, silently making the same gestures and holding invisible books. It would also appear behind her chair during mealtimes, copying her exact motions, lifting invisible utensils and goblets to its mouth, as though it was enjoying the same meal.
There are also accounts of Èmilie’s double appearing in separate areas of the school. Girls claimed to have seen the teacher walking the garden at the same time she was patrolling the halls or giving a lecture. Supposedly, a few brave girls even attempted to approach the phantom Èmilie and speak with her, but every time one grew close, she would vanish.
And despite the frequency of these encounters, Èmilie was unable to see her double, which made it all the more saddening when families began to withdraw their children from school out of fear, and yet another school decided it was best to part ways with Èmilie.
Émilie Sagée’s story is obviously tragic. Here was a woman considered too old to be desirable by society, who was desperate enough to leave her country behind and travel to rural Latvia in the hope of financial security, only to lose it all over a doppelgänger she couldn’t even see.
But, what if I told you, after hearing the story of Émilie Sagée, that this entire story might be complete fiction?
When Robert Dale Owen was compiling stories for his collection on spiritualism, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, a compendium of true supernatural tales, he interviewed Mademoiselle Julie de Guldenstubbé, a member of a prominent family within the French Spiritualist movement who claimed to be a medium.
Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé claimed she was a student at the boarding school during Èmilie’s brief tenure, but oddly her account is Owen’s only source. And while it’s certainly possible that Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé’s story is true, it seems strange that after years of being forced from job to job due to a doppelgänger who seemingly hates gainful employment that there are no other accounts of Èmilie, not just from the students at Pensionnat of Neuwelcke, but any of these supposed other schools.
Similarly, we don’t really have any evidence of the existence of the Pensionnat of Neuwelcke. There don’t seem to be any records of this school, and while that doesn’t preclude its potential existence, the fact that the name roughly translates to Boarding School of Neuwelcke means that we might not even have the school’s real name.
Owen also never asks Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé to provide names of students, letters, or other contemporaneous evidence like diary entries to confirm her story. Years later, she will mention to a friend, the name of the headmaster, a Monsieur Buch, but we have no evidence that anyone ever attempted to track down the man to confirm whether Èmilie really was fired because of her phantom double.
And as for Èmilie Sagèe? Well, no one by that name seems to exist.
Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé provided Owen with a birthdate for the young teacher from Dijon. How she remembered her teacher’s exact date of birth should probably have been questioned, but de Guldenstubbé claimed that Èmilie was born on January 3, 1813.
Unfortunately, no one by the name of Èmilie Sagèe was born in Dijon on or around that date.
Now, it’s certainly possible that Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé misremembered the teacher’s name, or the teacher, after losing multiple jobs, changed her name along the way. Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer and psychical researcher who claimed to be intimately acquainted with the de Guldenstubbé family, defended Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé's account by saying a translation issue was likely to blame.
She found a record of an Octavie Saget born on January 3, 1813, and believed Owen either mistranslated the name or that Octavie became Èmilie at some point along the way to avoid explaining her numerous dismissals. And while Flammarion makes an interesting point, it seems odd that Èmilie would have somehow easily obtained a job at a prestigious boarding school for extremely wealthy children under a new name without past recommendations.
And again, as I mentioned earlier, there’s still no contemporaneous evidence of Èmilie’s existence. Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé never provided Owen or Flammarion with any letters or diary entries from the time, nor did she share any names of classmates who could back up her story and provide their evidence.
But, here’s the part of Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé's story that is the most peculiar:
According to de Guldenstubbé’s story, Èmilie never saw her doppelgänger. For all the times the double supposedly mirrored and followed the teacher, Èmilie never saw this phantom out of the corner of her eye or caught a glance of the entity in the mirror.
From what we know of doppelgängers or similar entities, they tend to like to be seen or have some sort of purpose in making their presence known. Now, there are historical cases of bilocation—of individuals appearing to people in two separate places at the same time, but while Èmilie does appear in separate locations in some of these stories, the entity also is frequently with her, copying her movements.
It could be a case similar to Goethe of another timeline or parallel universe bleeding into this one, but again, why would the entity be copying Èmilie’s movements perfectly?
We could go down a long rabbit hole of possibilities, but I have a different theory to posit:
While it’s not impossible, it seems unlikely to me that Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé would completely fabricate a boarding school and a made-up woman to advance the French Spiritualist movement.
So, I wonder, if de Guldenstubbé was not a firsthand witness, but instead was repeating a story she’d heard, maybe from older schoolmates or even a friend, and pretending it was her own.
Consider this alternate version of events:
Perhaps there was a thirty-something teacher who took a job at a rural boarding school. Maybe she no longer wanted to be a financial burden to her parents or maybe she was uninterested in marriage and saw it as an opportunity. And maybe, as children and teenagers are known to do, they played a prank on the new teacher.
Maybe it began with a few students causing a bit of chaos by claiming they saw the young teacher in two different places and grew into entire classrooms of girls pretending that there was a ghostly double of their teacher that only they could see, mirroring her movements and following her around.
And perhaps the teacher didn’t quite know how to deal with the students and the administrators, tired of the constant disruptions, asked the teacher to leave.
It seems more plausible that this doppelgänger story was a prank that became slowly exaggerated over the years and was passed down as truth rather than a bit of school folklore. It also seems likely that Mademoiselle de Guldenstubbé, a firm believer in Spiritualism and the supernatural, might have truly believed the story and passed it off as her own experience to ensure Owen would include it in his book.
But, whatever happened to “Èmilie Sagèe”? Couldn’t they have tracked her down?
Well, supposedly, after she was asked to leave, she went to live with her sister for a time, before moving to Russia to conveniently never be heard from again.
For nearly 200 years, Mademoiselle Julie de Guldenstubbé’s story of Èmilie Sagèe and her doppelgänger has persisted. But, the question is why—after all, it doesn’t seem like there’s much proof to back it up.
Maybe it’s because de Guldenstubbé was an excellent storyteller or perhaps it’s because the people in her life were so eager to find proof of what they believed in, they were afraid to dig too deeply. And while it’s not proof of the existence of doppelgängers; it is proof of the power of folklore and our desire to believe there’s something more to the world around us.
Èmilie Sagèe may merely be the invention of the overactive minds of a group of girls, but despite all that, isn’t there a part of you that still wants to believe there’s a grain of truth to the story?
We repeat these stories over and over, despite the lack of evidence, not simply because they are entertaining, but because there’s a part of us that wants to believe in seemingly impossible things—that maybe someday we’ll encounter the strange and uncanny.
But, what would you do if you actually encountered the creatures in the stories we tell? Join us next week as we discuss dangerous games to encounter the other side.
You might find it’s much safer to tell stories instead of trying to live them.
____________________________________________________________________
Resources:
Animism and Spiritism: An Essay on a Critical Examination of Mediumistic Phenomena, Especially in Relation to the Hypotheses of "Nervous Force", "Hallucination" and the "Unconscious" by Alexandre Aksakof
Émilie Sagée and the Curse of Unintentional Bilocation by Curious Archive
Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World by Robert Dale Owen
The Great Enigmas by Jacques Marseille and Nadeije Laneyrie-Dage