SUICIDE MOUSE.

“Suicide Mouse” is the name of a chilling urban legend that suggests the existence of an old short film starring the popular Disney character, Mickey Mouse, centered on a suicide plot.

"Suicide Mouse."

I never saw it... But to the person who did... It didn't end well.

A long time ago, in the early days of cartoons, Walt Disney studios made a Mickey Mouse cartoon. It was just Mickey walking down the street, past six buildings. It wasn't like the funny cartoons we’re used to. It wasn't Mickey laughing or dancing.

In this cartoon, Mickey was just walking, as if he were just a normal person walking to work. He wasn't skipping or smiling; his facial expression was just... neutral.

For a long time, we all thought that was it. Just a loop of him walking for two or three minutes. But then, Leonard Maltin, who was reviewing it for inclusion in a set of older pieces, decided it was too junk to be on the release, but he wanted to have a digital copy for the archives since it was a production of Walt's.

When it was on his computer, he realized something. The cartoon actually lasted nine minutes and four seconds. This is what my source told me:

At the six-minute mark, the cartoon suddenly cuts back to the beginning. The sound was different this time. It was a murmur. It wasn't a language, but more like a gurgling cry. The noise got louder and more distinct after a minute, and the picture began to get weird. The sidewalk started to go in directions that seemed impossible based on the physics of walking. And the doleful face of the mouse was slowly curling into a smirk.

On the seventh minute, the murmur turned into a piercing scream (the kind of scream that is painful to listen to). The colors started doing things that shouldn't have been possible at the time. Mickey's face began to fall apart. His eyes rolled on the bottom of his chin like two marbles in a fishbowl, and his smile curved upward on the left side of his face.

The buildings became rubble floating in midair. The sidewalk was still in a twisted, impossible direction, looking somewhat like what you might see from a person walking through a hellish landscape.

Mr. Maltin was so disturbed that he left the room, sending an employee to finish the video and take notes on everything that happened until the last second, and then immediately store the disc of the cartoon into the vault.

The employee, who was a bit more grizzled, said that the last thing the footage showed was a piece of text in Russian that roughly translated to "The sights of hell bring its viewers back in."

I don't know what happened to the employee after that, but it is said that after playing that last frame, the employee walked out of the room, looking pale, and said "Real suffering is not known" seven times before rapidly taking the guard's pistol and offing himself on the spot.

"Suicide Mouse" recreations.