On October 4, 1996, in the middle of his massive HIStory World Tour, Michael Jackson slipped into London for a short break. He checked into the Lanesborough Hotel, but this was not a holiday. He had work to do, and it was unlike anything else in his career.
Everyone knows Thriller. Far fewer people remember what Michael made a few years later, a project he was deep in the middle of during that London visit. It was called Ghosts, and it might be the strangest, spookiest thing he ever put his name to.
Ghosts was not a music video. It was a 39-minute horror short film, long enough to hold a Guinness World Record as the longest music video ever made. Michael co-wrote the story with none other than Stephen King, the king of horror himself, and handed the directing to Stan Winston, the legendary monster-maker behind some of Hollywood’s most famous creatures. In it, Michael did not play one character. He played five, burying himself under heavy makeup and prosthetics to become everything from a mysterious Maestro to a stuffy small-town mayor.
It is dark, funny and properly eerie, full of dancing ghouls and the kind of jaw-dropping effects only Michael would bother to chase. If Thriller was his Halloween calling card, Ghosts was him going all in.
Take a look at the project he was pouring himself into that week:
Michael Jackson – Ghosts (Official Video – Shortened Version)
There is a lovely footnote to that same London trip. One evening Michael quietly bought his way into the London Palladium to watch the classic musical Oliver!. He loved it so much that the moment the curtain fell, he went backstage to thank the cast in person, telling the performers how much their show had moved him. Then, just like that, he was gone, off to Tunis to pick his tour back up.
That was Michael in a nutshell. One minute he was crafting a 39-minute horror epic with Stephen King, the next he was sitting in a theatre like any other fan, so swept up in a musical that he had to go tell the cast himself.
Press play and watch the eerie little masterpiece most people forgot Michael Jackson ever made.