There’s a horror trope I’m reasonably certain hasn’t been named yet: The moment a group catches onto the fact that there’s one extra among them, someone who managed to blend in but should absolutely not be there. Early on in Lost when a couple of the survivors realize that Ethan wasn’t on the flight’s manifest but was still very much a part of the wreckage scene, for example.
We could borrow from New Age and pop psych and call it the “third man factor,” a phenomenon that supposedly haunts/comforts explorers in cold climates. But more fitting might be “fourth man syndrome.” As Sir Ernest f*&%ing Shackleton wrote in his memoirs:
“I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across the snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”
But what happens when this extra presence isn’t so benign, and pops up not in the Arctic (where you’d want all the neutral-to-positive supernatural input you could get, to balance out the Lovecraftian giant penguins), but in a more mundane setting?
What if you were just a kid, packed in a remote double-wide trailer with a dozen of your near and dear, and suddenly realized that there’s a shapeshifter in your midst, eating your bratswurst, and that he’d been there all day?
Hence the brilliance of season 2, episode 28 of The Twilight Zone, “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” After a bus crash, the driver and passengers retreat to a diner, where state troopers point out there were only six passengers on the trip, but now there’s eight people total. (There also happened to be a UFO crash in a nearby pond, with footsteps in the snow leading away.) And no one completely trusts memory, and the passengers all failed to take much notice of their fellow travelers — even the one who’s a solid 9, even the raving lunatic — or the fact that an extra popped up, or when. And it’s all very silly but taut, and someone manages to rack up a $2 bill just on coffee, which is insane, when you adjust for inflation.
But this happens! We can’t keep track of more than a handful of people at a time! Creepy people hide in plain sight! In September 2013, 14 students sharing a house near Ohio State became convinced the place was haunted. It was standard-issue ghost behavior — cupboards left open, knocking sounds. When a couple of the tenants decided to go Encyclopedia Brown (by which I mean check out the basement), they discovered what they had assumed was a locked utility closet was actually a fully furnished bedroom, complete with photos on the wall. They recognized the guy who was in most of them — they’d bumped into him outside the house, and he’d been nice enough. They assumed he was a neighbor or a friend of one of the baker’s dozen of roommates inside. (He was actually the cousin of a guy who’d lived in the house the year before.)
