When Three Men and a Baby began production, the studio went looking for a nice, vacant house that it could use for filming. It found just that, though it was never told why such a nice place was vacant, available and cheap. It seems that the son of the house’s owners had committed suicide in the house and the devastated owners no longer wished to live there. They had an issue selling the house because of strict laws that required them to indicate that someone had died on the property, so they rented it out, as those very same laws didn’t require them to report the death to renters. The ghost of the boy haunted the production, appearing on camera in one scene.
A chilling story, but it is definitely not true. While movie productions often locate real houses for exterior shoots, interior filming almost always takes place in a studio. Three Men and a Baby filmed on a soundstage, not an old house. The supposed “ghost” as shown above in the window was a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson’s character that had been propped up by the window. Ted Danson portrays an actor in the film and is even shown in the movie dancing with the cutout. The studio denied the story and explained that the cutout was really the “ghost” that people saw. Since the film had just been released on VHS at the time, the rumors actually helped sales, so the studio’s denials were seemingly halfhearted.
