Stephen King’s Bizarre Encounter with Michael Jackson: The Moment That Still Haunts Him!

Stephen King has written about some of the most disturbing scenarios imaginable—from haunted hotels to killer clowns—but few real-life experiences have left him as unsettled as his surreal brush with the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson.

In a recent reflection, King opened up about a bizarre chapter from the early 1990s that still lingers in his memory: the time Jackson personally asked him to write the “scariest music video ever made.”

The year was 1993. King was on the set of The Stand, the television miniseries based on his epic post-apocalyptic novel, when someone casually told him, “Michael Jackson is on the phone.” Naturally, King was baffled. “I’d never spoken to him, never expected to,” he recalled.

But Jackson had a proposition: a chilling music video titled Ghosts. “Stephen, we must do this,” King remembered the pop star insisting. “We’re going to shock the world.”

Intrigued, King signed on. The concept he wrote was eerily on-brand: a mysterious man with supernatural abilities lives reclusively in a gothic castle until a fearful mob comes to evict him. The video was to be directed by Mick Garris, a longtime collaborator of King’s and the director of The Stand. But from the start, things took a turn for the strange.

King recounted a moment that still makes him shake his head. Jackson had called King’s wife, Tabitha, to ask for his direct number. She gave it to him. Minutes later, Jackson called back, nearly in tears. “He hadn’t had a pencil,” King said, “so he’d tried to write the number on the carpet with his finger, and he couldn’t read it.”

That call was never followed up. And after three weeks of development, the production was abruptly shut down. King says he never got a clear explanation why.

Then, just as suddenly, it was resurrected three years later—without Garris, and with a final product that strayed dramatically from King’s original script. What emerged was Michael Jackson’s Ghosts, a 39-minute genre-bending short film directed by Stan Winston. It featured three songs—“2 Bad,” “Is It Scary,” and “Ghosts”—and blurred the line between music video and short horror film.

Though it never reached the iconic status of Thriller or the cinematic sophistication of Bad, King says Ghosts still holds a kind of tragic brilliance. Visually reminiscent of Edward Scissorhands, the film showcases some of Jackson’s most intense choreography, filtered through a melancholic lens.

“You’ll also see Jackson’s sadness and almost painful desire to please,” King reflected. “‘Yes, I am strange,’ his eyes say, ‘But I am doing the best I can, and I want to make you happy. Is that so bad?’”

Despite the creative detours and its failure to live up to its “scariest ever” billing, King expressed admiration for the final piece. “The dancing is extraordinary,” he said. “It’s some of the most inspired work of Jackson’s career.”

It may not be a best-selling novel or an Emmy-winning series, but Ghosts stands as a bizarre cultural artifact—haunted by artistic ambition, creative clashes, and a phone call King still can’t quite believe happened.