I ended up going down a rabbit hole yesterday -- not, honestly, a surprising nor an infrequent occurrence -- when a friend of mine asked if I'd ever heard of an English legend called the "fetch."
I had, but only because I remembered it being mentioned in (once again, unsurprisingly) an episode of Doctor Who called "Image of the Fendahl," where it was treated as kind of the same thing as a doppelgänger, a supernatural double of a living person. And just so I can't be accused of only citing Doctor Who references, the same idea was used in the extremely creepy episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker called "Firefall," wherein an obnoxious and arrogant orchestra conductor ends up with a duplicate who also has the nasty habit of killing people and setting stuff on fire. The scene where the actual conductor has figured out what is happening, leading him to take refuge in a church -- and the double has climbed up the outside wall and is peering in at him through the window -- freaked me right the hell out when I was twelve years old.
I ended up looking for similar legends in other cultures, and turns out there are a lot of them. One example is the Finnish etiäinen, a double that can only be vaguely glimpsed on occasion, and frequently precedes a person in performing actions (s)he later does for real. You might catch a glimpse of your significant other opening and then closing a cabinet door in the kitchen, then when you look again, there's no one there -- and you later find out that (s)he was in an entirely different part of the house at the time. But twenty minutes later, (s)he goes into the kitchen, and opens and closes the same cabinet door.
Apparently, appearances of the etiäinen aren't considered especially ominous; there's usually no special significance to be extracted from what actions they perform. It's just "something that happens sometimes." Not so the tulpa, a being originally from Tibetan folklore that was eagerly adopted (and transformed) by western Spiritualists. Originally, the tulpa was a ghostly stalker that would attach itself to a person and follow them around, generally causing trouble (the name seems to come from the Tibetan sprul pa སྤྲུལ་པ་, meaning "phantom"). But once the Spiritualists got a hold of it, it turned into something you could deliberately create. A tulpa is a creature produced by the collective psychic energy of a group of people, that then takes on a life of its own. Prominent Spiritualist Alexandra David-Néel said, "Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker's control," and relates the experience of creating one that initially was benevolent (she describes it as "a jolly, Friar-Tuck-type monk"), but eventually it developed independent thought, so she had to kill it.
Is it just me, or is this admission kind of... unsettling?
In any case, we once again have a television reference to fall back on, this time The X Files, in the alternately hilarious and horrifying episode "Arcadia," in which Mulder and Scully have to pose as a happily married couple in order to investigate a series of murders (Mulder embraces the role enthusiastically, much to Scully's continuing annoyance), and the tulpa turns out to create itself out of garbage like coffee grounds and old banana peels.
And if you think that just plain tulpas are as weird as it gets, there are apparently people who are so addicted to My Little Pony that they have tried focused meditation and lucid dreaming techniques to bring to life characters like Pinky Pie and Rainbow Dash. This subset of the community of "bronies" call themselves "tulpamancers" and apparently honestly believe that these characters have become real through their efforts. I'm a big believer in the principle of "You Do You," but the whole brony subculture kind of pushes that to the limit. Lest you think I'm making this up -- and let me say I understand why you might think that -- here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on "brony fandom:"
The brony fandom has developed a fandom vernacular language known as bronyspeak, which heavily references the show's content. Examples of bronyspeak terminology include ponysona (a personalized pony character representing the creator), ponification (transformation of non-pony entities into pony form), dubtrot (a brony version of dubstep), brohoof (a brony version of brofist), and brony itself.
The next obvious place to go was to look into the fact that apparently, a lot of "bronies" want the My Little Pony characters to be real so they can have sex with them, but I drew the line there, deciding that I'd better stop while I was (sort of) ahead.
Well, ahead of where I would have been, anyhow. I'm shuddering when I think about the searches I already did, and the insanity they're going to trigger in the targeted ads on my social media feed. I can only imagine the horror show that would have ensued if I'd researched imaginary friend brony sex.
I don't even like thinking about that.
It's a sacrifice, but I do it all for you, Dear Readers.
So anyhow, thanks just bunches to the friend who asked me about fetches. You just never know where discussions with me are gonna lead. I guess that's the risk you take in talking to a person who is (1) interested in just about everything, and (2) has the attention span of a fruit fly.
You may frequently be baffled, but you'll never be bored.
