Say cheese.
2 Always a fun day. This is the day the students tell their stories. Yesterday afternoon I went into the Theater to get things set up.
3 I had just scared the beJAYzuss out of my last class of the day by showing them the little ghost boy in Three Men and a Baby.
4 It hadn't worked that well earlier in the day, but for some reason my last class almost jumped out the window when they saw the little ghost in the background.
5 The scene is when Jack Holden (Ted Danson) welcomes his mother (Celeste Holm) into his home to meet the little baby Mary, who was left on his apartment doorstep.
6 Mrs. Holden picks the baby up, and then asks what her name is. He replies, "Mary." She then says, "Well Mary! Aha haaa!" <She pauses. A little coochie-koo with the baby. Then...> "Look at the way she's looking at me." Cue line for the ages. What does she do next?
7 She then moves with the baby. If you look at the curtains behind her, you will see the body of the ghost boy staring from behind the curtains. He is staring right at you, as if something has gone dreadfully wrong.
8 The video clip can be reached by clicking the link under the picture below. This video doesn't show the bottom of the curtains, but if you look at the picture first you will see that the lost boy is not only there, but that he has no feet!
Hit the link below to see the entire scene. The ghost boy appears at :35.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF2f__k0Pnw
9 This didn't go unnoticed by Urban Legend sorts, and soon an urban legend erupted that insisted if you watch those same curtains earlier in the scene you will see a rifle, and later the ghost boy, who evidently had killed himself in that house. Here is an account of that urban legend from the-number-one-lousy source-that-everyone-uses-anyway Wiki:
In the final cut of the movie, there is a scene, just over an hour into the film, in which Jack Holden (Ted Danson) and his mother (Celeste Holm) walk through the house with the baby. As they do so, they pass a background window on the left-hand side of the screen, and a black outline that appears to resemble a rifle pointed downward can be seen behind the curtains.
As the characters walk back past the window 40 seconds later, a human figure can be seen in that window. A persistent urban legend began circulating August 1990 (shortly before the film's sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady, premiered) that this was the ghost of a boy who had been killed in the house where the movie was filmed. The most common version of this rumor was that a nine-year-old boy committed suicide with a shotgun there, explaining why the house was vacant because the grieving family left. This notion was discussed on the first episode of TV Land: Myths and Legends in January 2007[5] and was referenced in "Hollywood Babylon", a second season episode of the TV series Supernatural.
Picture inserted by the DN, and not
part of Wiki piece.
As the characters walk back past the window 40 seconds later, a human figure can be seen in that window. A persistent urban legend began circulating August 1990 (shortly before the film's sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady, premiered) that this was the ghost of a boy who had been killed in the house where the movie was filmed. The most common version of this rumor was that a nine-year-old boy committed suicide with a shotgun there, explaining why the house was vacant because the grieving family left. This notion was discussed on the first episode of TV Land: Myths and Legends in January 2007[5] and was referenced in "Hollywood Babylon", a second season episode of the TV series Supernatural.
10 Needless to say even my smartest students were hanging from the chandeliers.
11 I told them of the night years ago when we were finishing up a tech day for some show, and four or five of us tech people brought the VHS of the film into the band room, where we had a teevee/VCR set up.
12 We knew about the film and the rumor, but none of us (I think there were five) had ever seen it.
13 We turned all the lights off in the band room and rolled the clip.
14 When we saw the little boy, we all screamed, including me. Up to that point I had joked about Heidi, and the ghost and everything.
15 That little ghost boy blew us out of the water. We expected to see orbs, or double exposures, or some other camera blob that generally passes for a ghost, but NEVER thought we would see a floating ghost boy.
16 I remember us watching it over and over, discovering the rifle, noticing him floating, and sitting in that room with hearts pounding in fear.
17 We finally did a frame-by-frame to see if we could discover anything else.
18 I did the pause/un-pause. It took what seemed like forever. Finally we saw the beginning outline of the ghost boy's left shoulder appear. At that precise moment, the movie abruptly stopped and blue-screened simultaneously.
19 We screamed, ran over to turn all the lights on, ran back to the set and turned off the power, and then got out of there as fast as we could!
20 It was definitely one of the scariest moments ever.
21 My students yesterday had a similar experience.
22 They were so scared that I had to tell them this:
23 The entire Three Men and a Baby ghost boy was a complete hoax. Here is the what the late Paul Harvey would have called "the rest of the story:" Says Wiki:
The figure is actually a cardboard cutout "standee" of Jack, wearing a tuxedo and top hat, that was left on the set. This prop was created as part of the storyline, in which Jack, an actor, appears in a dog food commercial, but this portion of the story was cut from the final version of the film. The standee does show up later in the film, however, when Jack stands next to it as the baby's mother comes to reclaim her child. The website snopes.com contends that the figure in the first scene looks smaller from its appearance in the latter scene because of the distance and angle of the shot, and because the curtains obscure its outstretched arms. As for the contention that a boy died in the house, all the indoor scenes in the film were shot on a Toronto sound stage, and no residential dwellings were used for interior filming.
24 Good ol' Snopes.
26 That's just one story.
27 The students tell their ghost stories today. I fill in with stories from Antoinette May's classic Haunted House of California, which I had lost and then found in Barnes and Noble yesterday.
28 The Barnes and Noble crew was awesome, by the way. It's the one at Eastridge. Really helpful staff. It took us a minute to find the book, but once I did, I was glad. I found a couple of other books that looked awesome, one being Life After Life, the perennial best seller by Raymond A. Moody, Jr. M.D. It is a collection of case studies of people who had been pronounced dead, yet lived to tell about what experiences they had.
29 Life After Life inspired Twilight Zone veteran writer Richard Matheson to write the screenplay to the film What Dreams May Come, about a man who dies and sees his own body being worked on, and when he sees a tunnel and the now-proverbial "light."
30 The third book I wound up buying yesterday is called Coast to Coast Ghosts by Leslie Rule, the daughter of true-crime writer Ann Rule, who wrote a forward to the book.
31 I haven't yet opened that one, but I am excited to have a brand new resource that I could use later in the week.
32 My copy is unique in that the cuts from the publisher weren't clean! That is one new book!
33 I'll report on these books in the coming weeks. At this writing, it is late on Monday night, and I have to get up early to set the Theater up for the stories.
34 I'm excited, because every year the stories are amazing. This year has been WAY different than any since I've come up to Evergreen. This year has already had tons of coincidences, electrical occurrences, crazy moments, and incredible stories written by the students.
35 I went into the Theater after school to begin set-up yesterday. It was pitch black, so I relied on my flashlight to get me backstage.
36 So as of this writing, I need to cut this off in order to be well rested, or at least well-enough rested.
37 You have a great day. I'm pretty ready to go in and have some fun today!
38 See you again.
39 Fly low. Hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you.
40 Peace.
~H~
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