The scary episode of the Twilight Zone was inspired by a real incident of the writer

The Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost” follows two suburban parents, Chris (Robert Sampson) and Ruth Miller (Sarah Robertson), who hear their young daughter Tina crying out in fear. When they go into her room, she is not there. With the help of physicist friend Bill (Charles Eidman), they discover that a portal to the fourth dimension has opened in Tina’s room, through which she fell. “Little Girl Lost” is the original “Carolina”: a story about a young girl who crawls through a tunnel into a parallel dimension.

The episode basically consists of the three adults standing huddled around Tina’s room, calling out to an invisible girl. When the fourth dimension is finally seen, it’s depicted as an ethereal, mist-filled realm—the budget and limitations of 60s TV special effects wouldn’t have allowed for anything else.

Little Girl Lost is scary because it taps into the primal fear of losing one’s child. The idea that your child could be stolen from the room also plays into more modern fears about child abduction. During Little Girl Lost, Chris and Ruth to know what’s going on with Tina, but she’s out of their reach and they can’t help her. Episode writer Richard Matheson knew this fear and channeled it into his story.

Matheson was a prolific writer for The Twilight Zone, also responsible for other classic episodes such as “A Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” “Invaders” and “Steel”. Like some of his other episodes, “Little Girl Lost” was based on a story he had previously written. (Matheson was as much a novelist as he was a screenwriter the now famous post-apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend.)

U The Twilight Zone Companion by Mark Scott Zikraa quote from Matheson reveals the gruesome original inspiration for this real-life story:

“It was based on an incident that happened to our daughter. She didn’t make it to the fourth dimension, but one night she was crying and I went to where she was and I couldn’t find her anywhere. I couldn’t find her on I couldn’t find her on the ground and rolled under the bed. At first I couldn’t reach her strangely, and that’s where I got the idea.”

Notice how in “Little Girl Lost” Chris first assumes Tina is hiding under his bed before realizing she’s gone too.

So, from there, Matheson wrote “Little Girl Lost” in 1953 (monkey the apt title of a poem by William Blake), then ten years later revived the idea of ​​”Twilight Zone”. He was pleased with the results, praising Eidman’s performance and director Paul Stewart’s work in The Twilight Zone Companion. Matheson’s only criticism was that “the fourth dimension could have been a bit weirder”. That and the episode’s hidden setting show how it started as a short story, but Little Girl Lost has transitioned to television as well as you’d expect.