One of the most persistent urban legends in Hollywood history revolves around a munchkin hanging himself during a scene from 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. As the story goes, the actor in question was driven to suicide by his unrequited love for a fellow little person. This was said to have been captured on film as Dorothy skips down the yellow brick road with the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”
Take a look at the sequence below, and keep your eyes on the trees in the background.
Did you catch that movement in the center there? Well, as it turns out, that’s what people have been claiming is a dangling munchkin corpse for decades now. But what do the experts have to say on the matter, you ask? For starters, historian John Fricke, who wrote The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History, told People in 2024 that there’s no dead munchkin in the movie.
“This is the kind of stuff that gets perpetuated,” says Fricke. “We’re living at a time when anything is believable.”
The Truth Behind the Infamous ‘Wizard of Oz’ Hanging Munchkin Myth
However, Fricke is far from the only person to have dismissed the longstanding rumor. In fact, Snopes debunked this whole thing way back in 1997. According to them, what you see in that shot isn’t a person at all, but a bird (believed to be a crane) that was borrowed from the Los Angeles Zoo to give the indoor set more of an outdoors feel. What may have looked like a body swaying back and forth in the grainy days of VHS was, in fact, just a large bird flapping its wings.
Furthermore, the timeline of this alleged suicide doesn’t make sense at all. You see, the Munchkinland scenes in the film were actually shot after the forest scenes, meaning none of the munchkin actors would’ve been hanging around (one way or another) at that point. It also defies logic that not a single one of the many people involved with the movie would’ve caught this while it was happening. Oh, and as for the idea that the studio edited the “real” hanging out of later home video releases, that’s been discredited as well; case in point, this recording from a 1980 TV broadcast that predates the earliest VHS release:
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