Waltsicle: The History of a Myth

The story goes that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen in 1966, and that his hibernation chamber is hidden inside Disneyland, under either Pirates of the Caribbean, the Matterhorn, or Tomorrowland, awaiting the day when medical science can revive and cure him.

Actually, it’s well documented that Disney died of a heart attack brought on by advanced lung cancer on December 15, 1966, was cremated two days later -- per his wishes -- and was eventually interred in a marked plot near 33 Freedom Way, at Forest Lawn Glendale. The gravity of Disney's illness had largely been kept secret, so his death came as quite a shock to both the press and the general public.

Walt Disney, in life, avoided the subject of death to the point that he wouldn’t even attend the funeral of his brother, Herbert. He specifically asked his family to avoid any kind of public spectacle when he himself eventually died. “When I'm dead I don't want a funeral,” he once told his daughter, Diane. “I want people to remember me alive.” 

However, a small unannounced funeral was held at Forest Lawn’s Little Church of the Flowers the day after Walt's death. Only his immediate family attended, and they never spoke of it to the public. Forest Lawn officials would only say that "Mr. Disney's wishes were very specific and had been spelled out in great detail." The public was not told of Disney’s death until after his cremation and his ashes weren’t even interred for almost a year. 

But how did the “Waltsicle” myth start, and how did it become part of our pop-cultural mythology?

Some say the story began within Disney Studios. Several sources point to an unnamed “Disney publicist” who said story was started by a group of Disney animators who "had a bizarre sense of humor." And unauthorized Disney biographer Neal Gabler writes that Walt's friend “Ward Kimball, a puckish animator at the studio, took some pride in keeping the rumor afloat.” 

Ward Kimball, circa the late 1960s. (Source: The Disney Wiki)

Alternately, Gabler writes that “the source of the rumor may have been a tabloid named National Spotlight, whose correspondent claimed to have sneaked into St. Joseph’s Hospital where Disney had expired, disguised himself as an orderly, picked the lock on a storage room door, and spotted Disney suspended in a metal cylinder.”

In 1969, the story was picked up by celebrity tabloid magazine Ici Paris. From there, it spread to a variety of other American and European scandal sheets and tabloids.

The secretive way in which Walt’s death was handled, combined with his reputation for adopting futuristic technology, provided an environment in which the cryonics myth could thrive. 

Timing also played a role in the “Waltsicle” myth. Articles and books about cryogenics were prevalent in the mid-1960s. The Prospect Of Immortality (1964) by Robert C. W. Ettinger was a bestseller. And the first cryonic suspension of a human -- Dr. James Bedford of Glendale, California -- took place just a month after Disney's death.

Former TV repairman and Cryonics Society of California president Bob Nelson, who was involved in freezing Bedford, discussed the Walt Disney myth with Chris Nichols in a 2013 post on Los Angeles Magazine's "Ask Chris Blog," 

"We got a call from Walt Disney Studios, asking us how many people had been frozen, and what kind of facilities we had, and who the medical staff was,” said Nelson. “He [Walt Disney] was a very brilliant individual and he was checking all the bases.”

In a 1972 Los Angeles Times article entitled, "The New Ice Age: Gone Today, Here Tomorrow," Nelson was even more direct, saying, “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 it in 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 have made headlines around the world and been a real shot in the arm for cryonics.” 

(For the record, if the Cryonics Society of California had actually held Walt at their Ridgeline, California facility, he wouldn't be frozen anymore. Their customers all defrosted in the 1970s when the organization ran out of money.) 

Responding to that article, Diane Disney Miller wrote a letter to the Times editor: “There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that my father, Walt Disney, wished to be frozen. I doubt that my father had ever heard of cryonics. Cremation was his wish, as was the simple family service we observed for him.”

In the take-it-for-what-it’s worth department, website Snopes.com, (noted as one of the “fact checking” websites that lies whenever it serves their purpose) claims it checked out the Waltsicle story and that “the name, license number, and signature of the embalmer appearing on the death certificate are those of a real embalmer who was employed at the Forest Lawn mortuary at the time." They also point out that a marked burial plot, for Walt Disney (and his son-in-law) can be found at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park... “and court papers indicate that the Disney estate paid $40,000 to Forest Lawn for interment property." 

But the frozen Walt myth persists and has been reinforced by numerous unauthorized Disney biographies which revived the old rumors and added colorful details, but offered no proof nor meaningful footnotes. Among these were Robert Mosley's Disney's World (1986) and Marc Eliot's Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince (1993). Historians looked askance, but the public ate it up. 

The second part of the myth – that Walt’s cryonic chamber was hidden under Disneyland – seems to have developed later. It was probably bolstered by the secretive nature of Disneyland’s “back lot,” which actually does include underground access tunnels, hidden apartments, a “secret” exclusive restaurant called Club 33, and even a hidden basketball court inside the top of the Matterhorn. Again, it was this semi-secrecy that provided the perfect breeding ground for an urban legend.

The alternate story that the chamber was hidden under Pirates of the Caribbean can probably be attributed to the fact that the attraction was under construction at the time of Disney’s death, and that the ride was mostly built underground. 

The Tomorrowland theory may stem from the fact that the entire area underwent a major transformation shortly after Disney’s death. 

The Matterhorn version of the story probably has the most obvious roots, since a hollow, “ice”-covered mountain seems the perfect place to freeze someone.

The Matterhorn, Disneyland, Anaheim

Specifics aside, the overall myth is astonishingly persistent. Even Michael Eisner, when he was lobbying to become CEO at The Walt Disney Co., thought the cryogenics story might be true. He actually asked Diane Disney Miller about it, point-blank, the first time they met. Author James B. Stewart described the conversation in his book, Disney War:

"Eisner… leaned toward Diane. ‘There's something I've been wanting to ask you,’ Eisner said. ‘Is he...’

"Diane cut him off. ‘I know what you're going to ask, and no. Dad isn't frozen.’ She couldn't believe Eisner would ask her about the rumor… which she considered as credible as reports that Elvis was alive."

In a February 2012 interview with the Huffington Post, Miller cited a number of ugly myths about her father -- including his apocryphal freezing as reasons she founded the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco. She also cited a number of "really terrible books written about him," one of which "was a total invention." Miller said she couldn't let such lies stand.

Setting aside half-baked biographies and the speculation often generated by the Walt Disney Company's reputation for secrets, it's still easy to see how the Waltsicle myth caught on and survived. On one hand, Disney was a well-known innovator, introducing us to new technologies like monorails, audio-animatronics, the Plastics Home of the Future, and his plans for a super-futuristic "community of tomorrow" called EPCOT.  And on the other hand, Disney seemed something of a magician: Hanging out with Tinkerbell and bringing fairy tales and history to life both on the silver screen and in his breath-taking master-work, Disneyland. Via either science or pixie-dust, if anyone could figure out the trick of immortality, wouldn't it have been Walt Disney?  

But most of all, the enduring myth of a not-quite-completely-dead Walt Disney shows just how unwilling the world is to let go of him.

[Note: This article was originally published in the Dino-mite newsletter in 2013.]