A Creepy ‘Ghost’ Appears in ‘The Fugitive,’ and Nobody Knows Who He Is

Seven years after the 1993 Harrison Ford thriller The Fugitive was first released, producer Peter MacGregor-Scott noticed something unusual while working on a new DVD transfer of the film. During the famous train crash sequence in the movie, an unidentified man can be seen eerily staring into the camera from behind the wreckage.

Having watched the film countless times leading up to that, MacGregor-Scott was shocked that the man’s appearance had eluded him for so long. “And I said, ‘What is that? Where did that come from?’” the producer recalled.

According to MacGregor-Scott, he’d never seen the person in question before in his life. He even asked the other people involved with the film’s production about it, including director Andrew Davis and editor Dennis Virkler, and nobody had any idea who the mystery figure was. This discovery evidently creeped MacGregor-Scott out enough that he decided to cut the man out of the transfer he was putting together at the time.

It was later restored on future home video releases. 

33 Years Ago, ‘The Fugitive’ Accidentally Created One of the Creepiest Movie Mysteries Ever

But there’s a little bit more to this story. You see, the train crash scene in The Fugitive was shot not too far from the Cowee Tunnel, located just outside of Dillsboro, North Carolina. As it turns out, a terrible tragedy occurred while the tunnel was being built more than a hundred years earlier. Back in December 1882, 19 members of a prison chain gang drowned in the freezing cold Tuckasegee River as they were heading over to work on the tunnel.

Apparently, the heavy shackles the men were wearing contributed to their untimely deaths. All 19 bodies were then carelessly thrown into a mass grave in Dillsboro. As a result, many believe that the Cowee Tunnel is haunted—even cursed—to this day. Naturally, the tunnel being that close to where the mystery man made his presence known in The Fugitive has led fans to suspect that he might be a ghost himself.