Three Men and a Baby Ghost: (Paranormal Cardboard)

 

This is an urban legend I once fell hook, line, and sinker for.

I first heard of the 'ghost boy' who appeared in the film Three Men and a Baby when my dad told me about it after reading the story in a magazine. The story said that if you went to a certain part of the movie, a little boy could be seen in the background and that little boy had died in the apartment the film was shot in.

In short, the little boy in the background of the film...was a ghost.

So my dad put in his Laserdisc copy (yes, I said  Laserdisc) of the movie, scanned his way to the proper scene and I saw the little ghost boy staring out at me from behind the curtains. So as much as I loved ghosts stories and Halloween, this scared the hell out of me.

For years I would show the scene to my friends when they came over, with most having the same awestruck reaction I did. In the age way before YouTube, I was doing my part to share this modern-born urban legend.

Because there is no ghost in Three Men and a Baby, just a cut out of Ted Danson, which might actually be scarier.

The cardboard cutout was used for a part of the film where Ted Danson's Character Jack gets a job promoting dog food, but that aspect of the film never made it to the theaters, although the cardboard cutout remained in some scenes. Another sequence the cut out is seen comes near the film's conclusion and is pictured here:

If you are wondering why the cutout looks so much smaller and creepier in the infamous clip from the film, the cutout is at a distance and its arms are blocked by the curtains. The cutout also has a perfect position, with its head peering out from the part in the curtains.

Besides the incriminating cutout, there is also the fact that those scenes and all the scenes in the apartment shown in Three Men and a Baby were shot on a sound stage in Toronto.

Some speculated that the film company's that made the film pushed the ghost boy rumors a bit as Three Men and a Baby went on to get record video rentals. The rumor also became popular as the film's sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady were set to come out.

So the Three Men and a Baby ghost, although a bit creepy looking and a neat little part of film history is less of an amazing spectacle than Tom Selleck's mustache.

- Thomas Spychalski

(Via Snopes)

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