‘Is That Your Son in the Machine?’ 3-Year-Old Squeezes His Body Into Claw Machine, Gets Stuck

Stock image of Teddy bears. Conger Design/Pixabay

A three-year-old boy in England gave his mother the “most terrifying 10 minutes” of her life when he got stuck inside an arcade claw machine while desperately trying to grab a teddy bear.

Noah and his twin brother, Joey, were at a play center in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire with their mother, Natalie Draper, 37, when the incident took place, reported the Mirror.

The mother left Noah with a friend and took Joey to the restroom, and when she returned, a woman asked her, “Is that your son in the machine?”

Draper discovered that Noah had squeezed his body into the machine to get the soft toys inside. It took ten minutes for the play center staff to open the machine, because it was operated by a third party and they didn’t have keys to open it.

“So they had to break off three padlocks using a screwdriver and then twist the lock using a knife to be able to break the door open and get him out,” Draper told The Mirror.

The mother said those few terrifying moments quickly turned into relief. "But he came out completely unscathed, thankfully, and an ‘out of order’ sign was placed on the machine.

“Now it’s all over and we’re home I can’t stop laughing at what happened,” she said.

She said that if Noah would have asked her for teddy she would have got him one. “He didn’t need to go to such extreme lengths!” she said.

Media reports indicate that Noah is not the only little boy to crawl inside a claw machine. A child in Florida got stuck in one of the machines last year.

The incident happened in Beef ‘O’ Brady’s in Titusville, Florida and was shared on Facebook.

“This evening little Mason was enjoying some food and decided he wanted a stuffed animal. He wanted it so bad, he climbed into the game to get that toy!!” said a Facebook post by the Titusville Fire Department.

In most of these cases, the children crawl in through the hole that dispenses toys. But getting out proves to be much more difficult.

Mason’s rescue was captured and shared on Facebook by Amanda Evans, and the post gained 233,000 views.

In another similar incident, a child in Tipperary, Ireland got stuck inside a toy machine in March 2017.

Jamie Bracken-Murphy, 3 was disappointed after not winning any toy in the claw machine and decided to take matters into his own hands. He crawled inside the machine and got stuck.

“We were in a play centre here in Nenagh and I took my eyes off him for about five seconds as he walked towards the claw machine. I then heard a muffled complaint and when I looked up, he was behind the glass of the machine,” Bracken-Murphy’s father, Damien Murphy told Independent.ie.

“I tried to get him out, but it seemed like he did not have enough space to maneuver his way out, so I told him to be calm and wait while I got one of the staff to find the keys to the machine.”

An off-duty fireman came to the child’s rescue. “He told Jamie to crouch down and move back further into the machine, which he did calmly, and the fireman shimmied him out.”

The mischievous child was able to keep the teddies that came out along with him through the machine.