Credit: Dangerous Minds / YouTube Stills

‘I Miss You’ by Joyce Chu is an innocent slice of butter that wouldn’t melt folk-pop and nothing more.

Its music video is a similarly pleasant montage of Chu strumming her guitar in front of different backdrops from around the world, where you might not see anything out of the ordinary.

At least until you look at the video’s YouTube comments, that is. Of course, scrolling down to the comments is pretty much always a bad idea, but in this one case…well, it’s also a bad idea but for a very different reason than you might think.

Deep in the discussion, pretty much every commenter mentions the timestamp 1:42, along with various alarming statements. You scroll back up to see what all the fuss is about and click the timestamp. Chu, like the rest of the video, strums her guitar. This time in front of a big, red-brick building in the middle of what looks like a city centre.

It’ll take you a while, but eventually, you’ll spot it. Way out to the left is a building in the distance. Taller than the one in the middle. More modern too. There’s a ledge at the very top left-hand corner of the shot, and something seems to drop off the top of it. Something that seems very human. It’s quite literally blink, and you’ll miss it, but once you spot it, it’ll be the only thing you think about with regard to the whole video. This happy clappy music video for a love song might have caught someone taking their own life?

Once you’ve processed the fact that you might have just watched someone taking their own life, something nearly as awful might just dawn on you. The video is still up on YouTube. Millions and millions of people have watched the same thing you have, and will continue to do so until someone makes the sensible choice and takes the thing down. From then on, you have two options. The first being that the music industry is so morally corrupt that they’d leave footage of a literal suicide up for the sake of a few bucks, which isn’t exactly inconceivable.

The second is that you might not be seeing what you think you’re seeing.

Are we really seeing a suicide in a Chinese music video?

So, whatever this human-shaped object is, it seems to go off the ledge of one building and falls forward over a billboard seemingly connected to the building it dropped off. However, a few Reddit sleuths put their Google Maps skills to the test and found a smoking gun on the suicide theory.

The billboard isn’t actually connected to the building the person supposedly fell from. Not by a long shot, in fact. The billboard is nearly 50 feet away from the building they fell from, so unless their fall was actually the most incredible leap in human history, whatever the thing falling is, it’s probably not a human being.

This is corroborated by taking a closer look at a slowed-down version of the thing that’s falling. Remember, our brains desperately want us to see other human beings in whatever we look at. It’s the reason that people have seen the face of Jesus Christ in their toast or whatever; we’re incredible at finding patterns, and more often than not, we want those patterns to be human-shaped. Slowing down the footage and zooming in, we can see that whatever the falling thing is, it’s certainly not human.

However, the video’s director did comment on the phenomenon. Saying that he noticed it during the editing process, he went to investigate at the scene and asked if there had been any accidents around the time of the video’s production and when he was told there hadn’t been, he went ahead with the video as is. Which leads to two further possibilities. The first is that it’s a strangely shaped plastic bag blowing in the wind, and the second is, in a strange way, so dark that even if it were actually suicide footage could (for lack of a better word) top it.

Did they CGI in a person falling to their death in the background of the video to stir up publicity for a music video? Because if so… Well, it worked.