Paranormal activity? Baby dramatically falls as if she were pushed
Experts say it’s a bunch of phantom-foolery.
A viral video of a North Carolina baby “being pushed by a ghost” is being debunked by experts, who claim the so-called supernatural encounter is nothing more than digital trickery.
The 5-second clip, posted to social media last month by Fort Bragg’s Shelby Patterson, shows a toddler ambling — suspiciously swiftly — across a room as her mom watches from the couch. All of a sudden, the tot topples backward onto their bottom, supposedly shoved by a spectral entity.
Patterson told The Post her little girl had been playing on her trampoline when she “ran towards our kitchen area, stopped in her tracks and fell backwards super hard … Obviously I made sure she was OK. It wasn’t until after I had put her to bed [that] I sat and thought about her falling. I knew she wouldn’t intentionally make herself back back like that.”
Go figure: Video analysts didn’t feel the suspect clip proved the existence of paranormal activity.
“To me, it looks like the toddler just fell,” legendary British-American skeptic and science writer Mick West told The Post in an interview. “When someone is pushed the initial movement is quite rapid and leads to twisting or bending of the body at the waist.”
“There is no sudden movement here. Instead, the initial movement is slow, with no reaction. The toddler simply falls over backward by itself,” said the former video game programmer, whose website Metabunk investigates and disproves conspiracy theories from chemtrails to UFOs. “Judging by the earlier stumble it seems like walking is a new thing, and so it has not yet learned how to deal with losing balance very well.”
West concluded that the supernatural smackdown was likely “just an odd-looking fall in the dark.”
The Post’s resident video expert Steven Greenstreet seconded his sentiment, claiming that it looked as if the tyke had “stepped on something, maybe a block.”
“[The] kid’s feet more or less stay in the same place during the fall,” said the ghost-video buster, who made a chilling discovery while exploring one of the US’ most haunted prisons. “If she was pushed, her feet and legs would’ve moved back.”
As for the accelerated speed of the video, Greenstreet said that it’s caused by a “lower frame rate” while the “blurs in the motion are due to a wide shutter speed.”
“It looks like the kid falls faster than they did,” Greenstreet added.
His closing argument: “A ghost couldn’t have pushed this toddler because ghosts aren’t real.”
Meanwhile, mama Pattersons isn’t so sure: “What people don’t seem to really think about in that video was how hard she really did fall,” she told The Post. “No one knows why she fell they only think they know why she fell, just the same as me. I never sped my camera up or slowed it down but she did fall just as hard in the video as it seems.”
And her little girl doesn’t have any answers.
“I’ve tried to ask her about it but she doesn’t respond,” Patterson said. “She just stares at the video. She’s very talkative on most days to say the least — but when asking her while watching the video she just gets a blank stare.”
Either way, the “occult encounter” certainly doesn’t hold a candle to a recent spine-tingling incident in which two adventurers stumbled upon a ghostly figure in an abandoned United Kingdom nursing home.