Explanation Unravels

Dark-haired man holding a lit cigarette

There are lots of stories in various media that follow this pattern:

1. Something spooky happens.

2. Someone (the story's rationalist) explains it, perhaps with the help of a surprising twist. The spooky thing has a natural explanation.

3. Finally, the twist is retwisted, the explanation comes unraveled. We are left with the initial spookiness.

This was a common template in the old Rod Serling Twilight Zones.

Here is a single example of which I have a memory both indelible and vague. A notorious bad-guy cowboy comes into town, and goes to a cemetery on a dare. He dies standing on a gravesite. It is the plot, we soon learn, of a man whom this newly departed hombre had murdered years before. Ah, spooky ... could the dead person have reached out from beyond the grave and killed him? Looks like it: but ...

The town rationalist has an explanation. Lots of townspeople are standing around the scene of the suspicious/spooky heart attack while the rationalist explains what really happened, how the newly departed had caught his boot spurs on such and such an obstruction, must of thought he was being grabbed supernaturally (silly bad guy), and had the natural-world heart seizure out of fear.

Just when we think we've absorbed that, nice wrap-up, show's over, we get the REAL surprise. Which I've blocked out and I'm too lazy to look up. But someone, only a bit character until now, comes forward to observe that the death couldn't have happened the way the rationalist says because ... something topographical.

Anyway, we're left with the reinforced spookiness as the credits roll.

No lesson here folks, just a question. Does this sort of story pattern have a name? Is it sufficiently frequent to need one? Any suggestions?

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