Irish friends' online search for their doppelgängers goes viral

Irishwoman finds her doppelgänger

An Irishwoman has found an excellent and unusual use for social media giant Facebook – she has managed to locate her ‘doppelgänger’.
The concept of a doppelgänger has intrigued people for generations. It can be fascinating to think that there is another person out there who looks just like you, and to wonder what their life might be like.
It isn’t a question that Niamh Geaney needs to wonder about any more after she and friends Terence Manzanga and Harry English set up the Facebook page ‘Twin Strangers’.
Irishwoman finds her doppelgänger
The three friends created a video which has gone viral. It has been viewed over one million times since being published two days ago.
The idea was simple enough, they wanted to find someone who looked just like them – ideally someone identical.
Harry told the Irish Independent: “There have been stories about people who look exactly like famous celebrities but we wanted to find our ‘real’ Twin Strangers.
“We thought it would be fun to spice it up by making it a challenge between the three of us over the course of a month. It’s something we became really interested in, and it’s not actually as time consuming as you might think.
“Smartphones help us to do a lot of our searching on the go, and good friends and interested media are also helping in the search. There is a huge human curiosity element to it.”

Harry, Terence and Niamh are searching for their doppelgängers
Harry, Terence and Niamh are searching for their doppelgängers

They had their first success after just a fortnight. They met a girl named Karen Branigan near Dublin, who was a spitting image of Niamh.
Niamh said: “Karen probably looks closer than some of my sisters do to me.
“I thought I would be fine until I knew I was about ten minutes away from meeting her.
“Then I started to get ridiculously nervous wondering how I would react to meeting someone that looks like me – I would be looking at my own face!
“For the entire duration of our encounter I pretty much stared at her. I couldn’t get over her face and some of the expressions she should would pull I would think to myself or aloud ‘Oh my God that’s my face’.
“I can’t remember the number of times I said ‘this is so freaky’. It was truly amazing.
“We got on super well. Karen is such a lovely, sweet-hearted girl. Well we’re definitely both up for the craic. I would say Karen is the shyer of the two of us but then you have to remember this was an even more surreal experience for her than it was for me.
“I knew what search I was embarking on. I’m the weirdo that contacted Karen out of the blue and asked her to meet me in person in another part of the country, so she might have been more reserved than she’d normally be.
“We got on very very well and I’m so happy to have met one of my doppelgängers, but there’s 6 more of them out there!”
Harry and Terence have fallen a bit behind but haven’t given up hope. It is quality not quantity that counts and the winner will be the one with the closest match rather than the most lookalikes.
Harry said: “I think I have a two, maybe three at a push who resemble me. But they’re definitely not as close a match as Karen to Niamh.”
Terence added: “I think there are definitely black guys out there in the UK, Europe or the States who just need to see the photos. The more publicity the better, but time is running out.”
Take a look at the video below.

One person that has succeeded in finding his doppelgänger is Glasgow photographer Neil Thomas Douglas. He was boarding a plane from Stansted to Galway when he found his double sat in his seat.
Douglas said: “When I got on the Ryanair flight, there was a dude already on my seat – when the guy looked up, I thought: ‘He looks like me.’ We had a big laugh about it – everyone around us had a laugh, we took a selfie and that was it.”


The duo bizarrely met up again later when they found they were staying in the same hotel and enjoyed a drink together. Douglas said: “Later that night, I went to the pub and again, there was my twin. Total weirdness. We had a laugh and a pint.”