Spooky stories are part of the season. I’m convinced this holiday originated in people huddling closer to some communal fire on the longest, coldest night of the year, staring over their shoulders at the shadows and telling tales of spirits and demons. And so, I’ll tell here about my own closest brush with the uncanny. I saw and spoke with my own doppelganger.

Encountering your doppelganger is supposed to be a sign of impending death. I was twenty-seven, when I saw mine and I’m in my sixties now, so that’s obviously a myth. (One of George Sand’s lovers, the dissolute, occasionally insane poet Alfred de Musset, is said to have been badly shaken by seeing his doppelganger pass him while he was walking in a forest. He died a mere 24 years later.)

Back in the ’80s, my boyfriend and I had decided to move from Pittsburgh PA to San Francisco. He’d already done his bit by traveling to California and sofa surfing with friends until he had found a place for us. The apartment was tracked down, the lease was signed. All that was left was for me to ship our books, sell off as much as I could and, on a bitterly cold day in March, load up the car and thoroughly clean our apartment in Squirrel Hill.

This took all night, a long, depressing, discombobulating process. There’s nothing quite like scrubbing a wooden floor in an empty apartment, lit up all yellow and echoing in the dead of a black, bitterly cold night. It feels like a sort of murder. You are dismantling a segment of your life.

By the time I finally walked to my car, bearing the cat in its carrier, the sun was coming out – or rather, its smudged version behind the solid gray cloud cover. I scraped some of the ice off the windshield, climbed in, and began the trip to North Carolina, where I would spend a week with my parents before starting the cross-country journey.

I felt awful, of course. Weak. Tired. Cold. Horribly, horribly thirsty. I wanted a fruit drink so badly that when I pulled up to a McDonald’s drive thru and learned that all they had left was grapefruit juice, I settled for the pink stuff, even though I hate the taste and drinking grapefruit juice typically gives me a pounding headache. In this case, however, it tasted wonderful, which was a strange experience – the taste was the same, but I liked it. And instead of making my head hurt, it made me feel significantly better. I drove for another hour, then felt myself beginning to lose steam.

By this time, I was out on the highway, driving across a cold, snowy landscape beneath a leaden sky. If I continued, I was, without question, going to pass out at the wheel. Fortunately, I spotted a rest area up ahead, one of those places that truckers use, and I pulled into it, parked, and sat for a moment, weighing the danger of falling asleep there as opposed to falling asleep while driving. I was young, female, alone except for a cat securely locked in its carrier. The rest area seemed fairly busy – trucks were coming and going constantly, the truckers didn’t appear especially rough or menacing, and in any event, I’d locked the doors of my car.

But what if I were to hear a tapping on the window, and wake up to see someone discreetly pointing a gun at me? What if I froze to death, fell asleep and just didn’t wake up?

Something might happen to me if I took a nap here, but something would happen to me if I tried to drive in my current state.

Resigned, I crossed my arms and settled back in my seat. As I took one last anxious look around, I heard someone say, “Don’t worry.”

I looked to my right and, with no surprise or alarm, saw myself sitting on the passenger side. This was even more of a physical impossibility than it sounds since the passenger seat was piled high with boxes. Nobody could sit there. But there “I” was, leaning forward slightly in the seat to catch my own eye, looking friendly, calm, and slightly concerned.

“Sleep as long as you want,” “I” said. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”

Well, thank God for that, I thought, as I closed my eyes and drifted off.

I woke up about two hours later. In my half-awake state, I turned to let “myself” know that I was alert again, and for an instant, I was baffled to see nothing but boxes in the passenger seat. It took be a moment to get my bearings and explain to myself (internally) that “I” could not, in fact, have been sitting next to myself in the car.

What mattered was that, once I was fully awake, I felt much, much better and was confident I could make it to North Carolina without having an accident. I started the car, set off, and reached my parents’ house safely.

Since then, I’ve read about supposedly true cases of doppelgangers (and by this, I mean the apparition of oneself – not cases where long-separated identical twins meet each other on the street.) What’s striking about them is that they follow a pattern that lends verisimilitude to the accounts. The stories include:

• An account from several hundred years ago, in Italy, where an isolated traveler on horseback was riding down a dark, dangerous highway in December. He was exhausted, and desperately worried about either freezing to death or falling prey to brigands. As he struggled to stay awake, he became aware of another rider on the road beside him. It was himself, looking quite alert and watchful. Reassured, he traveled on until he reached an inn safely.

• An account from World War II, of a GI in Europe who was driving alone in his jeep at night, cut off, scared, in the dead of winter. He saw another GI by the road, stopped to pick him up, and saw it was himself. His doppelganger climbed into the jeep and talked him through the night, giving him advice on where to turn, where to slow down, how to survive. He made it to his destination safely.

• An account by a sailing enthusiast who was out on the open sea, by himself in rough waters. He was taken ill just as a storm hit and was forced to hunker down on his bunk below decks, shivering, terrified, and miserably sick as his yacht pitched and rolled in the storm. At one point, he decided that he simply had to make the effort, go up to the deck and take the helm. He managed to drag himself up and saw, to his astonishment, that there was somebody at the wheel steering the ship through the storm. The helmsman turned his head and he recognized himself. When the doppelganger smiled encouragingly at him, he realized that it was all right, things were under control, and returned to his bunk. When he awoke, the storm was over and, of course, the doppelganger was gone.

Doppelgangers never seem to stick around for thanks.

Anyone reading this probably noticed the same pattern I did – cold, fear, exhaustion, and unfamiliar surroundings. My own theory is the doppelganger is a hallucination triggered by these things, rather than a helpful spirit. (Without a Ouija board, we probably wouldn’t have heard from a sailor telling us, “I thought my doppelganger had it all under control, but then I woke up and water was rushing down the steps and the yacht was sinking…”)

Remembering what led up to meeting my own “helpful” doppelganger is interesting. I’d just spent the previous weeks and the night before dismantling my old home. Bit by bit, all that was familiar – an armchair, a beloved oak desk, my bookshelves – had been sold off and carried away by strangers. The hours before my encounter had been spent scrubbing away the last traces of our lives there. It was as if the “I” who lived in Pittsburgh and worked in a bookstore had been erased, and I was in limbo between that and becoming another “I,” one who lived in California and worked for a magazine.

Then there had been that odd moment of sucking down a tall cup of a hated drink that normally would have made me ill. I can remember thinking how weird it was to be enjoying a taste I despised, and without getting that familiar pounding sensation in my temples. It was like being someone else for a moment, someone who loved grapefruit juice.

So, it’s not surprising that I would have a waking dream about my own ghost. The old version of my Pittsburgh self had been haunting me for weeks.