(eerie music)
(people screaming) - Welcome, foolish mortals. I am your host, Caitlin Doughty. Kindly settle in please,
and make room for everyone. There's no turning back now. (cackles) (Caitlin coughing) (people screaming) Previously on The
Wonderful World of Death, some Disney experts claim that Walt had an obsession with death.
(bell dings) Sarah is coming over to join me, and she has talked me into Disneybounding. - We are childless women, and we're here to make the children cry. (Caitlin laughs)
(magical music) - Today we're in the park
and I feel like I'm doing an undercover deathxpose.
(playful music) Most of the original or
early Disneyland rides like Snow White's Scary Adventures, which I had never heard
of but is still there, and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, which they send you to hell at the end of, were based on carnival attractions. Carnival attractions and
rides had deathy themes. (sinister laughter echoing) That one was really fun. (laughs) That was the most fun so far. Anytime I could go to hell, it's happy. This type of ride started
appearing in the 19th century, called dark rides or ghost trains. Passengers would board a type of vehicle that ran along a track
traveling through the darkness, hence the name dark ride. Along the way, riders would experience various lighted scenes,
with sounds, music, and special effects,
usually with a storyline. The Ghost Train had a similar vibe. A group of train
passengers find themselves stranded in an isolated train station. A station agent, before
locking up for the night, warns them about a ghost
train that haunts the railway. Its passengers are the victims
of a tragic railway accident, and those who dare look
upon the ghost train will die.
(eerie music) Spoiler, the stranded passengers
ignore the agent's warning, and spookiness ensues. You can see this exact concept leveled up even further at Disneyland, with rides like Pirates of the Caribbean and of course, the Haunted Mansion. Walt Disney had always planned for a haunted house at Disneyland, but it would be 14 years before
it actually materialized. In the early years of
the ride's development, the storyline centered
on a murder-suicide, a sea captain who murdered his wife and then took his own life in the house. That concept was later scrapped, but you can still spot
a ship's weathervane on top of the mansion, a
nod to this original idea. Original designs for the
exterior of the house had it looking more classic haunted house, old, dilapidated, abandoned. But Walt didn't think it would suit the pristine fantasy world of Disneyland. - Now come right over
here and I'll show you where you're gonna meet the ghosts. This is a little scale model
now of the Disneyland area. You've seen this many times, but we haven't got the
ghosts in there yet. But we're out collecting the ghosts. We're gonna bring ghosts
from all over the world. - Development on the
attraction came to a halt in 1966 when Walt died;
more on that to come. The ride's creative
team was in disagreement about the overall theme,
was it spooky or humorous? Which is why the ride today is both. With years of buildup, Disney
fans were given ample time to cultivate urban legends about the ride, including the death of a journalist, because what he had seen in
a preview of the attraction was so terrifying he had a heart attack right then and there.
(quirky music) Spooky!
(people chattering) I think we're stuck on
the Haunted Mansion ride. We've been here for like five minutes and we're backwards, upside down, and Jack's skeleton keeps yelling at us and being like, "Merry
Christmas, it's all fine!" - [Jack] Christmastime! - According to Sarah, at
this point in the ride, when you turn and you flip
and you go down backwards, it's supposed to be the
moment of your death. So right now we are stuck
in a profoundly liminal space between life and death. And I'm gonna use this moment to reflect. Oh, I can't go backwards,
(giggles) 'cause ah! We made it out, thank
God, it was terrifying. It wasn't actually terrifying, just being in the broken-down ride and being claustrophobic and not knowing how long we were gonna be there! That was a little scarier
than the ride itself. The Haunted Mansion
finally opened in 1969, and has remained one of Disney's
most popular attractions. Two examples of Walt's
lasting death obsession can be found just outside
at the Haunted Mansion. The first one is a pet cemetery. The other is a favorite of
Disneyland's cast members, a truly strange corporate term used to describe Disneyland employees. The white hearse parked
outside the mansion was once an actual horse-drawn
hearse used in funerals! Now there's a weird legend
attached to the hearse, that it was the hearse
that carried Mormon leader Brigham Young to his final resting place in 1877, not true. There's also a claim that
there's a stain that's actual bodily fluids from a corpse
that was once carried in it. How interesting would it be if they went to such great lengths for a
completely spotless reputation and then there's just a
big corpse fluid stain on one of their most popular attractions? - So this is all that remains of the best Disneyland
attraction that never was, The Secret Catacombs. - That's right, at one point, there was a plan for a graveyard and crypt in Disneyland by the 1764 archway. It would lead into underground catacombs inspired by the famous Paris catacombs. The plan was motivated
by an idea to connect the Haunted Mansion,
Pirates of the Caribbean, and Tom Sawyer Island,
a tangible manifestation of how everything in the Disney universe is connected by both Walt
and the spectre of death. The concept designer for
the project, Eddie Sotto, said it would feature a
real-life pirate, Jean Lafitte, and be decorated with the
bones of Lafitte's victims. Sadly, the 1764 Crypt
archway is all that remains of the abandoned project. - Now we're at the next best thing! - This ride broke when
I was here with my dad, so we'll see how it goes. If there's no real skull,
I'm gonna flip over the boat! Here we go, the dead tell
tales, do they tell no tales, or do they tell tales?
- The dead tell no-- - Tell no tales.
- No, they do, it says they tell no tales, but they do. These, these do.
- This is grammatically confusing.
- Dead men tell no tales. (voice laughs evilly)
(ride clunking) (people screaming) - Combining the new technology of Audio-Animatronics
and a dark boat ride, Imagineers were able to immerse visitors in a world of pirate adventure that included secret caverns,
ships firing cannons, a town on fire, and
general pirate shenanigans. But I'm primarily interested
in the real skeletons I have been told to expect on this ride. A bit of a busman's holiday
to go looking for skeletons in my leisure time, but there you go. According to not only
Disneyland cast members, but Imagineers like Jason Surrell, this bit of Disney folklore is true. Because the prop skeletons
available in 1969 looked too unconvincing,
they reached out to UCLA's Medical Center anatomy department, who hooked them up with some
real skeletons and human skulls to be placed around the
various sets on the ride. UCLA doesn't have the greatest track record with its cadavers. There was that whole
scandal in the early 2000s concerning the medical
school's body donation program selling body parts to the highest bidder. Though for the record, under
a new director who I know, UCLA's current body donation
program is exemplary. They're not givin' any
body parts to Disneyland, tell you that. In later years, the
ride's bones were removed and replaced with fake
ones, and allegedly, the original skeletons were
identified and returned for proper burial.
- But, but-- - But some Disney fans
speculate there may be as many as three left
on the ride somewhere, including this skull that's
built into this headboard. ♪ Yo, ho, yo, ho, a pirate's life for me ♪ So what is the future
of death at Disneyland? One of Disney's most
recent successes is "Coco," a film inspired by
Mexico's Day of the Dead, a film which, in keeping
with Walt's legacy, puts death front and center. The movie itself was very well received, but the corporate Disney
tomfoolery surrounding it was not. - I guess I have a lot of
conflicting feelings about it, as with all things that are Disney. It's wonderful to have a
piece of our Mexican culture celebrated and recognized
in mainstream culture, but at the same time, there's
a big dissonance there. The beauty and the rituals of de Muertos are very much celebrated
and commercialized here, but the people aren't.
- How do you feel about, is this celebration or appropriation? - It's Disney, it's appropriation! They've been very sneaky before. - What Sarah is talking
about here is that in 2013, Disney tried to trademark
Dia de los Muertos and Day of the Dead as phrases. Filings at the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office revealed Disney's plans to market hundreds of Day of the Dead themed items, everything from toys to
cosmetics, books, photographs, and frozen foods.
(bell dings) (sad trombone music) After a huge outcry from
the Latino community, Disney withdrew the filings.
- Our dead are not for sale! - Yeah, I think that we forget,
it's not just the Mexican culture you're celebrating here, it's like a specific Mexican
death and funerary culture. - And even into Central
and South America as well! - It can be challenging
separating facts from fantasy, and history from reality
in Walt's Magic Kingdom, especially when it comes to death. In fact, the most widely
believed Disney myth is about Walt's own death. You've likely heard,
or maybe even believed, that upon his death in 1966, Walt Disney's corpse
was cryogenically frozen and is currently being kept
in Sleeping Beauty's castle, awaiting technological advancements that would allow him to be reanimated. The truth is much less exciting. Los Angeles Magazine tracked
down the first mention of Walt being cryogenically preserved to a 1972 LA Times interview
with, surprise surprise, Bob Nelson, the former president of the Cryonics Society of California. To quote Bob, "Walt Disney
wanted to be frozen. "Lots of people think he was, "and that the body's in cold
storage in his basement. "The truth is, Walt missed out. "He never specified in his writing, "and when he died, the
family didn't go for it. "They had him cremated. "I personally have seen his ashes. "They're in Forest Lawn. "Two weeks later, we froze the first man. "If Disney had been the first, "it would've made
headlines around the world "and been a real shot
in the arm for cryonics, "but that's the way it goes." This story likely spread via word of mouth quite inaccurately, like a
game of morbid telephone. - Wah-wah-wah-wah.
- Death! - Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah, wah-wah-wah-wah.
- Death! - What's more, even the idea
that Walt wanted to be frozen may not even be true! It's more likely that Disney Studios was calling as research for a project, the strange utopian city Walt
was planning called Epcot, the experimental prototype
city/community of tomorrow. In reality, Walt Disney was cremated and is interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery, ironically, a place known
as The Disneyland of Death for the cemetery's reputation
as a meticulously fabricated, almost cheerful necropolis,
devoid of any actual death. In short, a perfect place for Uncle Walt. There were even more connections between the cemetery and Disney. Prior to the opening of Disneyland, Forest Lawn was the most popular tourist attraction in Southern California. And Forest Lawn's creator Hubert Eaton and Walt Disney were good friends. When Eaton died, Walt was an honorary pall-bearer at his funeral. Honorary only, because Walt
wasn't physically there because as you may remember
from our last video, Walt didn't do funerals. Another well-known Disneyland legend centers on claims that the
park is a popular destination for scattering cremated remains. That one is true.
(spooky music) (people screaming) Join us next time as we move
from the fantasy of death to the hard realities
of death at Disneyland. If you liked this video, please
click the little like button and it will tell you when
the next video is up. I have to beg you to do this because I too am a corporate pro and my dignity means nothing.
- Disney's head. - This video was made
with generous donations from death enthusiasts just like you. (spooky carnival music) See, I can take my Minnie ears off, but I think they look better. Hi there! Was once an actual horse-drawn hearse, to used. (imitates vomiting) I don't think Disney
would leave that there. (object clunks)
Ooh! (sighs) Spuck it Iceland sales. Oh my god, it's spuckin' essence, eh? Spuck it essences, They're always sackin'
towns and things. (sniffles) I too am always sacking town, blowin' snot and snackin', snacking towns, snacking towns, yum! That's what Disney is, one big snack town. Walt missed out, he never spectified. But the corporate Disney
tomfooly surrounding it was not. Tomfoolery, cut. (imitates choking) I've come to the unfortunate realization that I just sorta fit in. Like you can't tell that I'm
doing this for a purpose. I just look like this
is what I do every day. It's very dark.
Isn't this a Patreon video?