Vardøger: Tracking the Double Who Goes Ahead of You

I am glad to have tracked down a published source for the name of a special kind of doppelganger I have encountered a few times: a double who goes ahead of you, arriving early at a place where you will appear later - and is perceived by others. I had been told that the name in Norwegian is vardøger, but that is hard to find in any dictionary, even of the Norwegian language. [1]

In an old book about the paranormal I found a detailed account of an "apparition of the living" who showed up in Oslo a few months before its host traveled there for the first time. He was an importer with an unusual name - Gorique - and to his amazement he was welcomed by the hotel clerk as a familiar guest, and told he had stayed at the hotel months before. He was welcomed again by the wholesaler he had come to visit. who told him he had come to that office months before, though their business had not been concluded.

When he explained to his business associate that he had never been to Oslo before, the Norwegian told him that “the experience of having a vardøger or 'forerunner' as they call an apparition of this sort in Norway, was not too rare as psychic phenomena go, and that heshould not let the whole thing disturb him unduly.” [2]
The mammoth early publication of the Society for Psychical Research, Apparitions of the Living, contains several reports that appear to be examples of this phenomenon, but a specific term for them is not provoded. F.W.H. Myers, one of the coauthors of that foundational work, attributed phenomena of this kind to the effects of psychorrhagy, one of many terms he invented that has not (unlike "telepathy", or "subliminal", also his coinage) made it into our household or even professional vocabulary. He described psychorrhagy as the  bursting through of psychic phenomena. The word literally means a bursting or breaking loose of the psyche, as a hemorrhage is a bursting of blood. In his fuller definition psychorrhagy is “a special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space.” [3] This might be caused by strong emotion, such as grief or fear. It may also happen under calmer circumstances, as in the case of David Leiter and some of my own experiences. 

I was delighted to find an article by Leiter, a Pennsylvania mechanical engineer in the Journal of Scientific Exploration where he describes two episodes in which his "early arriving" self was seen clearly by family members and office colleagues. In the first incident, he took the highway home on a pleasant sunny afternoon and felt completely relaxed at the wheel, almost on autopilot. When he got home, his wife was surprised. Why had he gone out again? She explained that he had come in ten minutes before. Unusually for him he had skipped his usual greeting and kiss on the cheek and gone straight upstairs. She called their son to confirm her story. Worried that there might be an intruder in the house, they checked upstairs and found no one. In the second incident, a colleague was amazed to see him in the  parking lot in a dark pinstripe suit, not usual attire for that office, on a day when he had announced he would skip work to attend a memorial service - where he was wearing the dark pinstripe suit,

Leiter speculates that these projections were the effect of (1) thinking intensely about people and places at a distance while (2) lapsing into a light state of "road trance" while driving along open roads. The Australian editor of the Journal at the time added a couple of likely vardøger sightings from his own experience. [4]

The last time I encountered a vardøger, it was the double of a woman of Norwegian descent who arrived at an airport ten minutes before her physical self. The doppelganger was so real that someone in our welcoming party went running after her. On a previous occasion, reported here, I was startled to encounter a friend of Norwegian descent in my bedroom the night before he was due to arrive as a guest. I told his double firmly that he had come a day too soon. Something about those Norwegians?

My last question received a response after I posted this blog. A Norwegian friend recalled that when he was five or six he often heard the noise of a car door closing and someone approaching the house fifteen minutes or so before his father came home. His mother had similar impressions. They both found confirmation that such things were possible in the television appearances of an "elegant professor" who talked very reasonably about paranormal phenomena. Because of "this wise, humorous and charismatic old man, we could have such experiences and recognize what is was and at the same time have some kind of explanation." His name was Georg Hygen.

I find that Professor Hygen was both a respected botanist, a leading figure in the Norwegian Parapsychological Society, and the author of a book on the vardøger published in 1987. [5] His Norwegian pride is showing when he declares in his subtitle that the vardøger is "our national paranormal phenomenon" (vårt paranormale nasjonalsfenomen).

1. The vardøger is a specific form of the double, which takes many forms and has sevefral names in Old Norse literature. "Harbinger", "forerunner", and psychic predecessor" have been suggested as kennings of vardøger. "Advance guard" or "spirit guard" might be closer to the Old Norse roots. The derivation is from Old Norse varðhygi which combines two names for aspects of our composite nature: (1) a protector, a "guard" or watchman" (vǫrð) and (2) a mobile, separable aspect of "mind" or spirit (hugr).

2. F.S. Edsall, The World of Psychic Phenomena. New York: David McKay, 1982, p.13.

3. F.W.H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Longmans, Green, 1903) vol.1, xx.

4. David  Leiter, L.,“The Vardøgr, Perhaps Another Indicator of the Non-Locality of Consciousness” Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2002) 621–634.
5. Georg Hygen. Vardøger: Vårt paranormale nasjonalsfenomen. Oslo: Cappelen, 1987.

Drawing: "Vardøgr at the Airport" by Robert Moss