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By Melissa Fleur Afshar
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A 26-year-old from Maine was left stunned after stumbling upon a drawing for sale in a thrift store that looks eerily like him.
The drawing, which predates the man's birth by over two decades, depicts a different man with a similar face shape, hairstyle and glasses, gazing off while smoking a big pipe. The piece was described as an "original" by Chris Cunningham from 1978 in a shopping label from the Maine store.
“The thing was uncanny,” Mitchell Carey, who found the drawing in 2024, told Newsweek. "Especially considering how long my hair was at the time!"
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The image sat unnoticed for two years after his discovery, until Carey began seeing similar posts gain traction on Reddit—stories of people stumbling across paintings, photographs or objects that appeared to look like themselves. Encouraged by those posts, he decided to finally share his own experience online, pairing the thrift store drawing with a photograph taken of him around the same time.
"Thrift store drawing made 22 years before I was born that looks like me with as broody fisherman," Carey wrote alongside the images.
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Reddit users quickly took notice and the post, shared under u/soldierzombie, amassed over 3,100 upvotes as commenters weighed in on the hilarious likeness. Some expressed genuine astonishment at the similarity, while others leaned into humor. The tone, Carey said, was mostly good-natured, even if not universally kind.
"I had found the drawing at a local thrift store called the Big Chicken Barn, I was with my partner at the time because he loved going to thrift stores and old art, as we looked at the art section he stumbled upon it," Carey said. "I find [the online response] entertaining, of course there are mean comments, but I didn’t expect it to get the response it did, lots of people telling me I should grow a mustache, but I don’t think that’s going to happen!"
Beyond the humor, the post tapped into a broader fascination with thrift store discoveries and the stories attached to them. Carey added in the comments section that he felt it would be wrong not to take the surprise find home.
"I took it home, felt if I didn’t, I’d get cursed," he wrote. "Also weird to think someone else might have a photo that looks like me in their house."
"Your coming was prophesied a long time ago," a viewer joked in the comments. "Welcome Chosen One!"
"And there I was thinking you paid someone to draw you. Just learned I actually cannot read," another added.
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