Twin strangers Shannon Lonergan and Sara Nordstrom shock their own families

Students Shannon Lonergan, 21, from Ireland, and Sara Nordstrom, 17, from Sweden found each other via a website which links up people to identical strangers.
The pair were stunned when they first laid eyes on each other as they could pass for twins.
Even Sara’s friends have trouble choosing between them, while Shannon’s father did a double take when he saw them together.
She said: “When my dad first saw myself and Sara he did not know where to look. He kept looking at her than me and looked so confused.
“His facial expressions were hilarious and showed how shocked he was. He honestly needed a moment to see who was who.”
Sara and Shannon share identical long blonde hair, parted on the same side, oval faces and full mouths.
They met via website TwinStrangers.com, which Shannon signed up to earlier this year.
It allows users to search for their secret ‘twin’, but at first Shannon had no luck.
She hadn’t logged on for a while when Sara got in touch with her — the teenager had only joined the site in November and quickly came across Shannon.
It was agreed that Sara would fly to Dublin, Ireland, with the teen admitting she was initially “nervous” in case the similarity wasn’t so stark in real life.
Shannon was also wary, but was blown away when she came face to face with her doppelganger.
“The scariest thing was how our noses, mouths, lips and eyes were so incredibly alike,” Shannon said.
“It frightened me a little bit, but in a good way. As I spent more time with Sara I noticed how our expressions and ways of moving were exactly alike.”
Swedish teenager Sara is shier than her doppelganger, although they quickly bonded after getting over their shock.
“It felt a bit surreal when we finally met, a bit like looking at yourself,” Sara said.
“We seem to see things the same way — there was a bathroom underneath the stairs in the house where we were staying and at different times we both commented: ‘It’s just like in Harry Potter!’”
Twin Strangers initially posted a picture of the two girls on Facebook, and it was flooded by comments from readers who couldn’t believe how similar they looked.
A spokesman for Twin Strangers said: “It sure is happy holidays after another incredible doppelganger match was brought to us this festive season.”
Since Twin Strangers began seven months ago, the site has more than 500,000 members from Albania to Russia and Madagascar, and is growing daily partly down to the explosion of social media.
“I just think it’s like this weird kind of natural phenomenon,” founder Niamh Geaney said. “It’s something that was always probably happening. Throughout history people have had doppelgangers but it’s only with the age of the internet and the age of social media that we’re beginning to see these stories.”