The phantom ending of "Spirited Away (2001)" is that, after Chihiro parts with Haku, she goes through the tunnel with her parents, and leaves have piled up…
An extremely large number of people remember having seen this phantom ending. There are a fair number of recreation videos and surveys on the internet, and in the survey attached to one such recreation video, at one point in time, out of 38,531 respondents, 6,461 people, an astonishing 17% of them, were said to remember having seen it. If we were to put it in scientific terms, we could call that “significantly many.” In the author’s case, I never made it out to a theatrical screening, but when I watched it on “Friday Roadshow” (a Friday night movie slot on NTV Nippon TV ), I have a memory of seeing this phantom ending. Also, there is another Mandela Effect regarding Spirited Away, namely that the vertical markings above and below No-Face’s (Kaonashi’s) eyes, which should have been red, have shifted over time to purple or gray, and that shift has been pointed out. News of Spirited Away’s phantom ending began to spread around 2014, but even back then, there seem to be cases where people who had gone to see it in theaters multiple times remember that at some point the ending changed. - In the animated adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga about a genius surgeon, Black Jack, there was an episode where the patient was some gambler-type yakuza or something, who had special circumstances that meant he couldn’t just go to a regular doctor, and Dr. BJ, having accepted the request, walked into a mahjong parlor packed with gamblers (anti-social types), and merely upon hearing police sirens in the distance they all, with an energy like they were about to be shot dead, went “The cops (satsu—slang for police) are here! Run!” and bolted in all directions like baby spiders scattering, and that was just too hard-boiled. Not the content of a children’s anime. Also, to add to that episode as I remember it, the yakuza in the mahjong parlor were all guys who had scars on their faces and such, so BJ, too, could get in there on face-recognition alone (kao-pass—being let in because you’re…
This case is part of the Mandela Effect case database based on "The Window of Opportunity: A Guidepost to the Mandela Effect — The Ultra-Secret X-Files" by Aoyama Takuto.