  We present ground-based observations from the Discovery Channel Telescope
(DCT) of three transits of Kepler-445c---a supposed super-Earth exoplanet with
properties resembling GJ 1214b---and demonstrate that the transit depth is
approximately 50 percent shallower than the depth previously inferred from
Kepler Spacecraft data. The resulting decrease in planetary radius
significantly alters the interpretation of the exoplanet's bulk composition.
Despite the faintness of the M4 dwarf host star, our ground-based photometry
clearly recovers each transit and achieves repeatable 1-sigma precision of
approximately 0.2 percent (2 millimags). The transit parameters estimated from
the DCT data are discrepant with those inferred from the Kepler data to at
least 17-sigma confidence. This inconsistency is due to a subtle miscalculation
of the stellar crowding metric during the Kepler pre-search data conditioning
(PDC). The crowding metric, or CROWDSAP, is contaminated by a non-existent
"phantom star" originating in the USNO-B1 catalog and inherited by the Kepler
Input Catalog (KIC). Phantom stars in the KIC are likely rare, but they have
the potential to affect statistical studies of Kepler targets that use the PDC
transit depths for a large number of exoplanets where individual follow-up
observation of each is not possible. The miscalculation of Kepler-445c's
transit depth emphasizes the importance of stellar crowding in the Kepler data,
and provides a cautionary tale for the analysis of data from the Transiting
Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which will have even larger pixels than
Kepler.
