There’s nothing chillier than a monster that only you can see. I’ve read this story this morning and while still cozied up underneath warm blankets, I had the feeling that I’ve seen this story before. Where? The Simpsons. I think a lot of horror tropes have been explored in the Treehouse Of Horror episodes and this one was really, really known as it’s based of the now famous Twilight Zone Episode with the same name. And what is that episode based on? Well, this story I’m about to tell you about.

The story is pretty straightforward. A man boards a plane on a rainy night. The flight is going through some turbulence and he thinks he sees a man sitting on the airplane wing, outside, in the freezing rain and wind. He knows it can’t be real, yet there he is. He’s calling the flight attendant in hopes they can realise that something is wrong and alert the pilots but every single time the attendant (or the pilot for the matter) come to see what’s up, the goblin disappears into thin air, making him look crazy.

But is he? My dice are rolling with the fact that he’s taken two pills of sleep medicine and the damage the goblin is doing when it’s only him watching seems to disappear when another witness comes to have a look. So yes, maybe he’s been imagining it. The Twilight Zone added an additional character in the man’s wife (not present in the book) which tilts the odds of non-believers by one. Imagine if only one other person had been sharing his delusion!

The story was popular enough to get a series of remakes across the years and a deep discussion about mental health stigma. If someone is going through an episode where they experience strong hallucinations, what can you do? Believe and support or attempt to show them that there is no goblin on the wings of a flying airplane. The speed and the sub-zero temperatures would see to that.

Suddenly, his stomach muscles jerked in violently and he felt his eyes strain forward. There was something crawling on the wing.
Wilson felt a sudden, nauseous tremor in his stomach. Dear God, had some dog or cat crawled onto the plane before takeoff and, in some way managed to hold on? It was a sickening thought. The poor animal would be deranged with terror. Yet, how, on the smooth, wind-blasted surface, could it possibly discover gripping places? Surely that was impossible. Perhaps, after all, it was only a bird or—
The lightning flared and Wilson saw that it was a man.

Abruptly he closed his eyes. There had been a man, he thought. There had, actually, been a man. That’s why he felt the same. And yet, there couldn’t have been. He knew that clearly.

We have an unreliable narrator just like in American Psycho * Bret Easton Ellis, so we need to take whatever he says with a pinch of salt.

We do have to give props where they’re due as the horror and the disbelief make good companions. And so do the very interesting costumes used in the TV show.