Rumors

Is Walt Disney's body frozen and buried under Disney World?

Growing up as a kid, we should all know who Walt Disney was and what he did. Walt invented Disney movies, Disney land, and Disney world. On December 15, 1966 Walt Disney died when his circulatory system collapsed. After that people claimed that he arranged for his body to be frozen and to be buried in a chamber right below the “Pirates of the Caribbean” attraction, so when the day came, they could fix his body and bring him back to life (Mikkelson 2007). Rumors can be true, but it all depends on the background and facts behind it. Is Walt Disney really buried below Disney World?

While Walt Disney was alive, he did a lot of research on cryogenics. Cryogenics is the study of materials and their behavior at very low temperatures (Helmenstine 2017). Sometimes Walt would talk to his brother Roy about having himself froze, but Roy never really believed in what Walt said. This information came from Robert Mosley’s 1986 effort, Disney’s World, but was fabricated because none of the information was based on facts, just more rumors (Mikkelson 2007).  Although a lot of information was false about Walt Disney, there was some things that may have made people think he was froze. Ten years before Walt died he told his family that he did not want to have a funeral, and his family made sure that wish came true (Mikkelson 2007).  Walt’s death certificate showed that he was cremated two days after his death, and his ashes was spread at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. The rumor is clearly false.

 I would classify this as a pipe-dream rumor. A pipe-dream rumor is a rumor that is spread because the person who circulates the rumor wishes the rumor was true (Knapp 496). I think people spread this rumor because they want to believe that Walt Disney may eventually come back to life again one day. Even if the rumor was true and Walt Disney did return one day, it would have a drastic tole on people’s basic anxieties such as death and disaster. Reason being, if a mass murder was laid to rest after his execution, what would keep someone from going through the process of cryogenics to bring them back to life making the situation that the public thought that was taken care of reoccur. The rumor about Walt Disney’s death has some good qualities, it makes a great story, it’s short and simple, it’s harmonized, it’s attributed to a high authoritative source, and it adapts to the immediate and traditional circumstances of the group (Knapp 497-498). Even though the rumor has some good qualities, it’s lacking some as well. The rumor was not easily distorted because it’s not passed on person by person, the rumor was on passed by social media and TV (Knapp 498). Also, the rumor mainly focused on Walt Disney and everybody knows who he is and what he accomplished. The names, numbers, and places were stable, and according to Knapp, unstable information makes a good rumor (Knapp 498). Although the rumor lacked two qualities, the rumor was good, I even questioned it myself.

This rumor encourages “shared human sense making” because people want to make sense of a rumor that talks about bringing someone back to life by cryogenics. People who hear this rumor and believe it, want to know if it’s possible because when they experience something as horrible as losing a family member or friend, they want to know the secret. Knowing the secret can give them the opportunity to bring them back. Only the ones who has experienced the loss of a loved understands why someone would want to bust this rumor because they want to dig deep. Anyone else just wants to know if its true or not through the ones who did all the work in diagnosing it. And that goes for every rumor. 

“FACT CHECK: Was Walt Disney Frozen?” Edited by David Mikkelson, Snopes.com, 27 Aug. 2007, www.snopes.com/fact-check/suspended-animation/.