After Leonard Nimoy’s 1987 comedy Three Men and a Baby was released on VHS (yes, Spock from Star Trek directed that movie), rumors began to circulate about a mysterious figure spotted in the background of one scene. At just over an hour into the film, Jack Holden (played by Ted Danson) and his mom (Celeste Holm) are seen walking through the home Jack shares with his friends Peter and Michael (Tom Selleck and Steve Guttenberg).
Take a look at the clip below, and pay close attention when Mrs. Holden starts walking away with the baby in her arms.
Did you catch that blurry shape of a person standing in the window there? Yeah, so, believe it or not, that image you just saw was actually scaring the living crap out of people back in the days of low-definition home video.
According to legend, what was peeking through the curtains at the oblivious actors in that scene was the ghost of a nine-year-old boy. And that’s not all: Legend also has it that the boy in question killed himself with a shotgun in the house where the scene was filmed.
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All kinds of other variations made the rounds over the years, with some claiming that the dead kid’s mother sued the film studio because they didn’t remove his image from the movie. She was even said to have appeared on various talk shows, including Geraldo and 60 Minutes, to share her story. That is, until she supposedly ended up in a mental institution, mind you. But surely if some woman was going around telling such crazy tales, the footage would’ve been uploaded to YouTube by now, no?
Well, it hasn’t been, and in short, that’s due to the fact that it doesn’t exist. On top of that, the movie was shot on a sound stage in Toronto rather than a real house. And as for the “boy” in the clip above, it’s nothing more than a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson wearing a top hat. It was created for a storyline that ultimately got cut from the final film and simply got left in the window by accident without anyone realizing.
The post Why People Think ‘Three Men and a Baby’ Features the Ghost of a Dead Child appeared first on VICE.
