There’s a Ghost Hiding in ‘The Godfather,’ and Even Francis Ford Coppola Didn’t Catch It

The funeral sequence at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 mob classic The Godfather turned out a lot creepier than the director ever intended it to be. If you pay close attention at the point where Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) stands up, the ghostly image of a woman’s face very briefly appears on his right shoulder. Though many undoubtedly noticed the anomaly over the years, it would take decades before we got any official word as to what exactly happened there. In the meantime, people, of course, jumped to the conclusion that this was some kind of supernatural occurrence. 

Roger Ebert became aware of the mysterious face in December 2001, and was as puzzled as everybody else. “Is this a real ghost image, or only an optical illusion, like those Elvises people see on screen doors?” he wrote at the time. Ebert reached out to Coppola to get his take, and to Ebert’s surprise, Coppola had no idea what he was talking about. Somehow, nearly 30 years after the film was released, the man who directed it hadn’t even heard of this strange image that was hiding in plain sight.

The Creepy ‘Godfather’ Mystery Francis Ford Coppola Didn’t Know About for Decades

“The funeral scene was shot really quickly, and I was disgruntled that they removed one day from its schedule,” Coppola told Ebert initially. “So nothing elaborate was done: we shot it as fast as we could.” However, later that same month, Coppola asked Kim Aubry, who produced the Godfather DVDs, to take a look at the scene in question. What they discovered was that it wasn’t a ghost or a mystery woman, for that matter, but Morgana King, who played Michael’s mother, Carmela.

King was sitting next to Pacino during the scene, and her image was inadvertently reflected into the shot by a filter in the camera’s matte box—thus explaining her ghostly hue. As Aubry and Coppola were studying the sequence, they also discovered that King was chewing gum, which bothered Coppola because she was supposed to be playing a grieving widow. Obviously, this was unintentional on her part since she didn’t think she was being filmed in that moment.

You can check out the sequence for yourself below.