Was the Wizard of Oz cursed? Film Historian Reveals Wild Rumors (Exclusive)

• With Evilone more prequel The Wizard of Oznow in theaters, PEOPLE looks back at the 1939 classic
• For years, people have claimed that the fantasy film starring Judy Garland was cursed
• Oz Expert and author John Fricke explains the problems on the set while debunking the rumours

The Wizard of Oz is one of the most influential films of all time. It is also one of the most mysterious, due to widespread rumors that it was somehow cursed.

During the filming of the 1939 classic about Kansas teen Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland), who is swept away to a magical land by a powerful tornado, several accidents and mishaps occurred. People often point to these accidents as proof that something was wrong.

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

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

Oz expert and historian John Fricke, 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 events.

But he credits many of them to the filmmakers’ innovative filmmaking. “They did things that had never been done before and tried things that had never been done before,” he tells PEOPLE.

In fact, both Hamilton and Danko were injured during complicated and dangerous sequences. “There was no preconceived notion of, ‘let’s be careless,'” he says.

After Hamilton was burned during a scene where the Wicked Witch disappears down the Yellow Brick Road in a cloud of smoke and fire, she spent six weeks recuperating. When she returned, she refused to film a scene where her character rides a broom with smoke coming out of its back.

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

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

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

“One night in bed I woke up screaming. My arms spasmed from my fingers up and curled at the same time so I couldn’t use one arm to curl the other out. My wife tried to pull my arm straight with some success, as did my toes began to curl; then my feet and legs bent back at the knees my chest to the muscles that controlled my breathing If this continued I would not even be able to breathe,” Ebsen wrote in his memoirs The other side of Oz, according to the Academy. (Jack Haley went on to star as the Tin Man.)

Fricke says that “90 percent” of what filmmakers tried “gave us a classic movie.” The other 10 percent that went wrong unintentionally “has been inflated to 98 percent — and now it’s been made up and lied right into a legend.”

He bristles with scary stories that he says are simply not true. According to TimeGarland’s third ex-husband, Sid Luft, claimed in his memoirs that the actors who played the Munchkins would go out drinking and “would make Judy’s life miserable by putting their hands under her dress.”

“The Munchkins did not sexually abuse Judy Garland,” says Fricke. “One of them asked her out to eat and she said no. That was as far as it went.”

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 see a shadow of the body in one scene. But Fricke also puts that rumor to rest, saying: “There’s no Munchkin hanging in Tin Man’s cottage. It’s the kind of thing that gets immortalized.”

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