Introduction

by Keaton Moll

“I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits.”
— John Webster, Duchess of Malfi

I love Disney. This may seem like a strange way to begin a travel guide documenting the many horrors which have occurred within the company’s theme parks, but it’s the truth. I’ve had annual passes to Walt Disney World for thirty years and am a stock holder in the company. I go to their movies. I wear their T-shirts (I’m wearing an Epcot shirt as I write this). I buy their products. When I go on vacation, it’s almost always to a Disney park somewhere in the world, despite the fact that I live fifteen minutes from one.

This book is a reflection of that same love. It’s an acknowledgment that no matter how safe the company makes the parks or how hard they try, people will still get hurt there. It’s unavoidable. Disney properties are the size of cities in some cases and when you have millions of people moving around in them, something is bound to happen, eventually. Mix in complicated machinery and stressed, hot, overtired visitors, and those odds go up dramatically. Hour after hour, decade after decade, year after year. Accidents are inevitable. They will happen wherever there are people, because people don’t always do logical things or make good choices.

They get impatient.

They get tired.

They get cranky and drunk and they don’t want to wait in line or obey some stupid park rule which makes no sense to them.

They want to take that shortcut home. They want to have some fun on the ride despite the signs warning them to remain seated. They want to skip a step in the operating procedure so that their work can be completed a few seconds faster.

In short…people are people. They make tragic mistakes and miscalculations because they’re only human. And humans die all too easily, no matter how loved they are.

Perhaps the biggest surprise you should take from this book is that there aren’t more fatalities in the parks. That’s one of the things that amazes me the most and it’s a testament to how good Disney is at protecting their guests and Cast Members.

Well, most of the time, anyway.

This book isn’t an attempt to embarrass or disparage the company or their parks. I’m not trying to give you reasons to avoid the parks or convince you to stop buying Disney products. I’ve spent years researching this issue and I still love going to the parks, so I encourage you to go as well. Besides, as I said, I’m a stockholder, so telling you to stop going would be an exceptionally stupid thing for me to do. On the contrary, this book is meant to share an aspect of the parks which isn’t widely known and which I find interesting.

Disney is so good at maintaining its image of total safety that the idea of something terrible happening in their parks is an utterly foreign concept to most people. They simply can’t conceive of ever not being perfectly safe inside a Disney park. There’s an aura of security within its gates, like all the troubles of the real world will be kept out by a turnstile and some fiberglass castle walls. But just because a park has an excellent safety record doesn’t mean that its guests shouldn’t be careful about what they’re doing. They should obey the rules and be mindful of what’s going on around them or risk ending up in later editions of this book.

On the flip side, some people believe only the worst about the Disney Company. They tell urban legends about deaths and horrible ride mutilations which the company supposedly covers up, even though the storytellers offer no evidence or details of these alleged events. This book is an attempt to answer these critics, demystifying events by listing every death to ever take place in the parks and the circumstances which led to each (discounting most of the people who dropped dead from natural causes while touring the parks, although, there are a surprising number of them every year. People have died from natural causes on almost every ride you can name.) I’m tired of listening to people tell me about deaths which didn’t happen and tragedies which they’d realize would be physically impossible if they knew anything about the nature of the ride system in question.

I’m interested in the real stories of death and dismemberment on Disney rides. The dichotomy of pristine magic kingdoms and bloody tragedies has always appealed to me.

I’m not entirely sure when my lifelong fascination with this idea started, but I’d place it in my early childhood when I enjoyed going to River Country at Walt Disney World. I learned to swim in its murky waters and spent untold hours exploring that quiet corner of Disney’s property in Orlando. Even as a kid, though, I was aware of a series of incidents which marred the water park’s safety record and worried some local parents. It was a place which felt…wild. Dangerous, even. Everyone I know who had ever gone there could tell you a story about almost drowning in one of the park’s deep pools.

As a boy, that just made the place all the more exciting. It was like being an explorer and standing on the edge of the world; treacherous and exhilarating. I tried to gather every strange tale about the place I could, collecting them in order to tell them to my friends as we waited in line for the slides or while we were swimming in River Country’s opaque water. This fascination with tragedies in the park quickly spilled over into supernatural stories about the Disney property itself. The woman across the street from my childhood home was a Cast Member who worked at Epcot, and she would spin me fantastical tales of ghosts which supposedly haunted the attractions I knew so well. She was probably making them up on the spot, but it didn’t matter. The stories sparked my imagination and made me love the parks even more.

Or perhaps my interest in the subject started when I was 8 and enjoying a meal at Top of the World (now California Grill) high atop Disney’s Contemporary Resort. I remember walking out onto the observation deck and my mother pulling me back from the edge, explaining how someone had recently fallen from that very spot and how she didn’t want me to suffer a similar fate. And I stood there, looking down at the twinkling lights of the Magic Kingdom below and the colorful exploding fireworks above, and thought about how bizarre it was that someone could die in such an amazing place. The notion was tragic, but also rather poetic It stuck in my young mind and has been with me all these years.

Whatever the impetus for my interest in this macabre topic, I’ve spent the last decade giving what some of my friends call my “Disney Tour of Death” when they come to town. Several squeamish visitors have told me NOT to give them the tour, since it freaks them out, but I always do anyway. I feel compelled to share these stories, whether they want to hear them or not. I’m not sure why. I think I just find the stories interesting. I find them important.

The company does its level best to pretend that none of these incidents happened, and in doing so, I sometimes feel that they are trying to pretend that the people themselves never existed. I fully understand the business strategy behind this decision and by no means fault them for it, but it’s still sad. You won’t find any memorial markers in the parks for those who died there. You won’t hear Disney tour guides tell you their names or relay any of the details which led to their tragic deaths. Some newspapers even stopped printing the particulars of the accidents in question. In a sense, the people involved in these stories exist now only in the memories of their loved ones and in the tragic circumstances which surround their deaths.

I should also point out that my purpose in this endeavor is also in no way to defame or decry the victims or the dead. As you might imagine, this is a difficult kind of book to write, both in terms of the emotional impact it’s taken on me and in terms of not wanting it to seem like I’m trying to capitalize on tragedy. I’m not trying to reopen old wounds for the loved ones of the people involved in these tragedies or to identify parties responsible for the events. I’m not trying to ascribe blame to anyone by including them in this book, either by actually accusing them or implying responsibility. Just because I include the person in this book doesn’t necessarily mean that I think Disney or anyone else is somehow responsible or not responsible.

In a sense, I find that these stories (no matter how personally difficult they are to research and write about sometimes) are part of the history of the parks. They are part of our popular culture. They actually happened. The people involved in them were real people, who stood where you’re stand when you visit the parks. They had thoughts and dreams and desires of their own, but all of that was tragically cut short. I think we owe it to them to spend a moment to hear about how they died and learn a little about ourselves in the process. I view the stories of their deaths as a memorial; proof that they were once here and that they mattered to someone. For the briefest of moments, we can look at the stories and they live again. We can stand where they stood and see what they saw. We can bear witness to it all playing out in front of us. It becomes real.

It humanizes them. And the company. And ourselves. I find the stories entertaining, true, but more than that, they should make us thankful for what we have and sorry for what we’ve lost.

As such, I have made every effort to provide only the unembellished facts of these incidents and not give any of my personal commentary on why things might have happened the way they did. True, some of the people involved did foolhearty (in some cases almost comically stupid) things, but after a lifetime of visiting theme parks, I can assure you that many people have done similar things and walked away safely. I know I have and I’d be willing to bet that most of you have, as well. We have all almost been the victim of entirely preventable tragedies at some point in our lives. But we walked away. Sadly, these people didn’t. The people involved in the misfortunes I’m about to relate were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had things gone a little differently, many of us could have been entries in this book or ones like it over the years.

We were lucky. They weren’t.

No one is perfect and no one can do the right thing every moment of every day. Sometimes accidents happen. They happen to the old and they happen to the young. They happen to theme park companies and they happen to people who visit theme parks. Accidents happen to people obeying the rules and accidents happen to people who are breaking them in the most unbelievably reckless ways imaginable.

You never know where and you never know when. Accidents happened to these people and they could happen to you, whether you’re in a Disney park or sitting in your own home.

As such, I advise anyone reading this to take a moment right now to sit back and enjoy life. Just pause for a moment and really think about all the fun you’ve had and all the people you love. Be thankful for what you have and enjoy it, just in case it’s all taken away from you unexpectedly and you don’t get the chance again.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

You won’t miss anything.

Done?

Good. I’m glad we had that moment. (Honestly, that was far quicker than I anticipated.)

Contemplating the mortality of the readership is not something most authors would attempt in their introduction, but given the dark nature of this book, I think it’s important for us to recognize that we’re all going to die someday. These people did and I bet they would have loved to have one last chance to be thankful for what they had and to tell their families that they loved them. An opportunity which I just gave all of you. Think of it as an insurance policy against unanticipated disaster, whether that disaster happens while you’re innocently standing on the sidewalk or doing something so asinine that random strangers will talk about it for decades. Now, if you’re crushed by a ride vehicle or shot in a parking lot someplace, you won’t have to worry, because that moment of self-reflection you’d want before dying is already taken care.

I should also add a caveat about the supernatural stories included in this book. Where possible, I have provided the details of the fatal accidents in question and those facts are entirely accurate, to the best of my knowledge. The deaths in this book are all real. I’ve researched them quite a bit, and if there are any inaccuracies in my accountings, the fault most likely lies with the eyewitnesses, the public records I’ve reviewed, or the original newspaper reports I’ve collected. Or maybe I’m just an idiot. In any event, if my accountings are incorrect in any way, I apologize. The oversight or misstatement of fact was not deliberate and was not the result of any ill intent on my part towards the parties.

However, the park related ghost stories you’ll find scattered throughout this book are unproven and their veracity is entirely left to the readers’ own judgment. They are based on my own experiences, tales told to me by Cast Members and other fans over the years, or simply urban legends I’ve heard while living in the Orlando area my entire life. The story about the haunted ferry boat at Walt Disney World, for instance, was told to me by a Cast Member I met at a toy show, of all places. I was there looking for something entirely unrelated, and a friend of mine came running over all excited because one of the sellers at the show had apparently been a Disney ferry pilot. This man recalled all kinds of weird stuff about hauntings and tragedies related to his job. I ended up talking to the Cast Member for about an hour. Cool guy. In any case, I will record his ghost stories here, and all others like it, as they were told to me, for better or worse

I think that most of these stories, like all supernatural stories, should be taken with a big grain of salt and viewed more as campfire stories than anything else. If the tales are all to be believed, then everything in the park is apparently haunted. The stories can’t all be true, so it’s probably for the best that the reader decides which ones to accept and which ones to dismiss outright.

This won’t be one of those books where the author tries to debunk something or is so desperate to believe something that he will literally believe anything. I have a degree in cultural anthropology and I try not to make judgments about people’s beliefs. I accept the story they’re telling me as their individual “truth”, present them to you, and move on.

Well, most of the time. Some of them are clearly delusional.

(Forget I said that.)

Some strange stuff is rumored to have happened around these parks, though, and in all honesty, supernatural explanations for these events sometimes make more sense than anything offered by mainstream science. And even if the stories are all entirely made up or the product of delusional minds, at least they’re entertaining. I know I always ask about them whenever I meet a Cast Member at a party or while attending classes in school. Ghosts and monsters are awesome, even if you don’t believe in them.

If you do believe in ghosts, though, there’s really no question that they would exist within Disney’s gates. Tens of millions of people have visited the parks from all over the world. These places are the sites of untold amounts of joy and numerous painful deaths. They seemingly represent humanity itself: the wonderful things we’re capable of dreaming and the terrible things we’re capable of doing to each other in our darker moments. They are our imagination run wild and brought into the real world; fantasy places where we wish we lived and nightmarish visions of places where we’re glad we don’t. The parks are filled with things which seem impossible, so perhaps in that regard, the ghost stories aren’t so far-fetched after all. In a world of fantasy, what’s one more thing which seems to defy belief?

Now, let’s begin our tour…