Was The Wizard of Oz cursed? A Film Historian Clarifies On-Set Issues and Debunks Wild Rumors (Exclusive)

Author and “Oz” expert John Fricke separates fact from fiction about the classic 1939 film

• With Evila prequel to The Wizard of Oznow in theaters, PEOPLE takes a look back at the 1939 classic

• For years it has been claimed that the fantasy film starring Judy Garland is cursed

• Oz Expert and author John Fricke explains the problems on set and debunks rumors

The Wizard of Oz is one of the most influential films of all time. It is also one of the most mysterious, with rumors rife that it is somehow cursed.

Several accidents and mishaps occurred during the filming of the 1939 classic about Kansas teenager Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) who is swept into a magical land by a powerful tornado. People often point to these accidents as evidence that something was wrong.

Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West, suffered second and third degree burns in one scene. Her stunt double, Betty Danko, was hospitalized after an explosion.

The dog that played Dorothy’s faithful Toto was injured when someone stepped on it. And actor Buddy Ebsen, the original Tin Man, had to stop filming because he had a shockingly negative reaction to the makeup.

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Oz Expert and historian John Fricke, the author of The Wizard of Oz, the official 50th anniversary picture story And The Wizard of Oz, an illustrated companion to the timeless film classic confirms these incidents.

However, he attributes many of these to the innovative filmmaking of the filmmakers. “They did things that had never been done before and tried things that had never been done before,” he tells PEOPLE.

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In fact, both Hamilton and Danko were injured during complicated and dangerous sequences. “There was no forethought: ‘Let’s be careless,'” he says.

After suffering burns during a scene in which the Wicked Witch disappears in a cloud of smoke and fire on the Yellow Brick Road, Hamilton spent six weeks recovering. When she returned, she refused to film a scene in which her character rides a broomstick with smoke coming out of the back.

Instead, Danko, Hamilton’s stunt double, filmed the scene. She was supposed to press a button to expel smoke from the back of the broom, and when she did, “the broom exploded,” Fricke says.

“Betty Danko flew in one direction. The hat went in a different direction. The broom flew in a third direction and she ended up in the hospital.”

The ambitious application of makeup was also problematic for the original Tin Man Ebsen (who would later play the lead role). The Beverly Hillbillies). According to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, he reacted badly to the aluminum dust in the makeup.

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“One night I woke up screaming in bed. My arms clenched from the fingers up and curled at the same time, so I couldn’t use one arm to loosen the other. My wife tried, with some success, to pull my arm straight, as well as my toes. Then my feet and legs began to panic. Next came the spasms in my chest that controlled my breathing. I wouldn’t even be able to take a breath,” Ebsen wrote in his memoirs The other side of Oz, per The Academy. (Jack Haley later played the Tin Man.)

Fricke says that “90 percent” of what the filmmakers tried “gave us a classic motion picture.” The other 10 percent that went unintentionally wrong “got blown up to 98 percent – and now it’s been made up and made up into a legend.”

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He resists lurid stories that, in his opinion, simply aren’t true. Accordingly TimeGarland’s third ex-husband, Sid Luft, claimed in his memoir that the actors who played the Munchkins went drinking and “would make life difficult for Judy by putting their hands under her dress.”

“The Munchkins did not sexually abuse Judy Garland,” Fricke says. “One of them invited her to dinner and she said no. That was all.”

After the film’s 50th release in 1989, a rumor spread that an actor playing a munchkin had died by suicide on set – and many claimed to be able to see a shadow of the body in one scene. But Fricke also refutes this rumor and says: “There is no Munchkin hanging in Tin Man’s Cottage. Something like this is maintained.”

“We live in a time where everything is credible,” says Fricke. “It has become the fabric of our daily lives. But we know the truth.”