I’m Haunted By A Movie I May Have Watched As A Kid That Might Not Exist

I watched a specific movie multiple times as a little kid. I think. It was kind of spooky and included a tragic backstory. Or maybe it was a tragic climax. I’m like sixty percent sure it was a tragic backstory. Anyway, the main character’s family, or maybe just her boyfriend or her husband, were riding in a horse-drawn carriage over a bridge when they all went careening into the water and died. The victims may have come back as ghosts, or they may have just been an ominous lingering memory that sorta hung over the rest of the movie.

Or was it a miniseries? Or a TV show? Or was it simply an awful fantasy I fixated on as a child and now misremember as happening in a movie?

I don’t know, and it haunts me. I’ve spent dozens of hours over the last decade on Google searching every keyword I can possibly think of. I’ve tried “movie carriage crash over bridge” and “kids movie drowning deaths.” I’ve tried to pull up lists of kids movies from the 80s and early 90s to see if a title might sound familiar. I’ve gone through Reddit threads where people talk about scenes that scared them as children. I’ve talked to friends, even my parents, to see if they have any memory of this. Nothing. Everyone thinks I’m weird and need to move on. I will not.

Here's The Backstory

Here’s what I know for sure. Between the ages of like four and eight, my parents used to take me to a local video rental store every week. It was not a Blockbuster. It was a local mom-and-pop shop staffed by nice people who would take the time to talk to me. I was always allowed to rent two movies. Most of the time, I would pick one wrestling VHS, and then I would pick a second VHS from the animated or family sections.

Here’s the more specific story I think I remember. One time, I was browsing either the animated or family section after I’d already picked out my wrestling VHS (probably WrestleMania VI) when an employee approached me and, after a brief conversation, recommended this mystery movie. He said it was one of his favorites, and despite having never heard of it, I took his word for it and brought it home. I watched it multiple times during the rental window and absolutely freaking loved it, especially this horse-drawn carriage crash, which I found really upsetting in a cool and emotionally mature way. I rented it several times afterwards during our weekly trips, but then the store closed down and we had to start going somewhere else (RIP).

The new store didn’t have this unnamed animated movie with the drowning deaths, much to my chagrin. I complained about it to my parents for a while. We even tried some other video rental stores, but I never found the movie again. Instead, I grew up and started caring about things like girls and pizza and tennis and driving a car. In college, I suddenly remembered it existed and went through a phase where I was obsessed with finding it for like a week. No luck. Every year or two, it all comes flooding back, and I try to find it again, but each time, it’s a little harder and a little more out of focus and fuzzy, a repressed memory slowly drowning alongside this poor woman’s family and their horses.

I know it was released before 1994, it is animated and it definitely has the scene of someone or someones racing home in a carriage and going over the side of a bridge into the water. I believe it is set in the 1800s, though it could be the 1700s or the early 1900s. I think the visual style is reminiscent of Disney’s Haunted Mansion, though it’s entirely possible that I might be wrong since I went to Disney World as a kid during that same time period. I’m also like sixty percent sure the main character is a teenage girl or young woman. Shoutout to me for being a little boy ahead of his time and appreciating female characters before it was trendy.

I Don't Want To Give Up

That’s all I’ve got, and as another year goes by without me finding this movie, I’m forced to contend with the very real possibility that it doesn’t exist, at least as I remember it. Maybe I watched a news story about a horse-drawn carriage disaster and in my developing, pre-pubescent mind, mashed it together with the OG Cinderella? Maybe I watched the perpetually underrated Great Mouse Detective, followed by an episode of Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, and had weird, vivid dreams that felt real and eventually became real? Maybe.

Or maybe I really am remembering a piece of art that had a profound impact on me as a child. As someone who writes about movies and TV for a living, I need to know. If there’s any chance this movie is real, I need to find it, and I need to figure out why I can’t stop thinking about this carriage crash more than thirty years after I first watched it. I need to know why I’m haunted and why my brain won’t let it go.