I remember the day my grandma shown my brother and I our first ghost. We just got home from school and she was sitting in her usual place at the kitchen table. A freshly lit cigarette accentuated a mischievous grin. Through the smoke I could make out a VHS tape lying on the table. Tapping the tape “ Want to see a ghost?” she mused.
The VHS tape was a copy of the 1987 Disney movie, Three Men and a Baby. A light hearted comedy about three bachelors who unwillingly find themselves trying to take care of a baby.
As my grandma queued up the tape. Let me pause here (pun intended) to remind you or inform you. This was the late 80’s. Home entertainment technology was still in its infancy. Trying to find a certain scene in a movie was like trying to skip backwards. You had to fast-forward at one speed until you thought you saw the scene you were searching for. No scene selection or fancy menu directory. I know, it was barbaric but we survived somehow. This agonizing task gave my grandma ample time to bait her hook and reel us in.
Taking a deep puff from her cigarette as she asked if we have ever seen this particular movie. To this we eagerly nodded.
“Then you are aware of the boy?” she casually said. Looking at our blank faces she continued, “The house where they filmed this movie was once owned by a couple who had a young boy. The police reports indicated that they were a happy family. The neighbors said they never heard them fighting and the boy seemed to be happy. Of course this was before the boy found his father shotgun and blown his face off.”
Dramatic pause.
“The police ruled it as an accidentally shooting but they were probably just being respectful to the family.”
The ash on my grandma’s cigarette was burning dangerously close to her fingers. She continued, “The grief for the couple was too much. They fought and couldn’t live in the house anymore. They sold the house to the studio who used it as the main location for this film. The studio was so grateful for the house that they invite the couple to the film’s premiere. You see this should have been a fun and exciting night for the hapless couple. Unfortunately, this was not to be. In the middle of the screening the boy’s mother stood up and repeatedly screamed ‘That’s my boy!’ They had to stop the film and rush the couple out of the theater. The mother insisted that she saw her dead son in the background of the movie. She told the studio she could clearly see him peeking through the curtains.”
Taking another deep puff on her cigarette, my grandma pushed on, “You see the worst part was when the mother told the studio that it seemed like her son was wearing the suit they buried him in.” The ash from her cigarette suddenly broke off. As if on cue, and seared into the carpet.
“The studio believed the mother had gone insane but she insisted that she saw her dead son in the film and even threatened to sue the studio if they didn’t cut the scene out.”
At this point in her story my grandma paused the movie and said, “Sadly, the studio never cut the scene and the mother eventually went insane.” She pressed play.
The scene is when Jack Holden (Ted Danson) and his mother (Celeste Holm) are walking through the house with the baby. In the background you can just make out a small figure peeking through the curtains. At first I didn’t see it. But my grandma paused the tape. There it was. The imaged danced on the static line. My ten year old mind could not comprehend what I was seeing. The image in the background was defiantly there but it seemed out of place. Then out of nowhere the image of the boy came shooting into focus. And there he was. A small boy hiding behind the curtains, playing witness to the movie that was acting in front of him.
Jesus! This was a ghost captured on celluloid for the world to see. My brother and I must’ve replayed that scene a thousands times. The next day, word got out at school and to my mother’s displeasure we had a theater of kids bearing witness to the ghost boy in our living room.
But like must incredible things there was a reasonable explanation to the ghost boy. First of all the film was not shot in the house but on a sound stage. And it turns out the ghost boy is actually a cardboard cut-out of Ted Danson’s character, dressed in a tuxedo. This infamous cardboard cut-out can clearly be seen in another scene in the movie.
Since that magical day in my childhood, the now “ghost boy” urban legend has been debunked. But like most urban legends it has taken on a life of its own. Some people now believe that Disney purposely staged this scene to create the ghost boy theory to drive additional video sales. To this day people are still talking about the scene. Jimmy Fallon asked Tom Selleck about it during a 2017 interview on The Tonight Show.
Over thirty years have past since I first saw the ghost boy. Even though I now know it was not a ghost. I still want to believe. I want to rediscove the excitement, and fear I felt. Call it a plea for youthful innocence. Now, when I watch Three Men and a Baby and that scene plays, I do not see a ghost or a cardboard cut-out. Instead I can clearly see myself as a ten year old boy, peeking through the curtains. Staring back at me, scared of the future, and yearning for the childhood we lost.
