in his leg and neck. Doctors discovered a walnut-sized spot on the x-ray of his left lung and advised immediate surgery.
Disney left the hospital to attend to studio business for a few days, then re-entered St. Joseph on Sunday, November 6, for surgery the next day. During Monday morning's operation, doctors found his left lung to be cancerous and removed it. His oversized lymph nodes were an indication that Disney hadn't much longer to live.
After two weeks of post-operative care, Disney was released from the hospital. He crossed the street to his studios and spent another ten days tending to studio business and visiting relatives before he grew too weak and had to return to St. Joseph on November 30. His health started to fail even more rapidly than expected, and drugs and cobalt treatments sapped what little strength he had left. Walt Disney died two weeks later when his circulatory system collapsed on the morning of December 15, 1966.
In the decades since Walt Disney's death,
the claim that he arranged for his body to
be frozen has become ubiquitous. Nearly
everyone familiar with the name 'Walt
Disney' has heard the story that Disney's
corpse is stored in a deep-freeze chamber
Was Walt Disney aware of the possibilities of life extension through cryogenics? He certainly could have been aware of the progress being made in cryogenics research. Numerous articles and books on hypothermia and the preservation of animal tissue through freezing appeared in both the scientific/medical and general press in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Anyone with an interest in the subject could easily have located this reading material, and even someone without a particular interest in the subject may have run across one or more articles on the topic in the general press.
The subject of cryonics was further brought to the public's attention with the publication in 1964 of Robert C.W. Ettinger's book, The Prospect of Immortality. Ettinger's book, drawing on much of the available literature about cryonics, covered the practical, legal, ethical, and moral impact of freezing and reviving human beings. Ettinger, while admitting that science had as yet no way of reviving frozen human beings, was unflaggingly optimistic that a viable means of reanimation would eventually be found, telling his readers:
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Given the prevalence of articles published about cryonics in the mid 1960's, and the relative popularity of Ettinger's book among science buffs (even if few of them had actually read it), it is certainly possible that Walt Disney was aware of the potentiality of cryonic storage of humans.
Whatever the possibilities, however, there is no documentary evidence to suggest that Walt Disney was interested in, or had even heard of, cryonics. Documentation of Disney's alleged fascination with preserving or extending his life through cryonics did not appear until decades after his death, and what little information is available has predominantly been provided by some extremely questionable sources.
Claims about Disney's interest come primarily from two of the more recent Disney biographies: Robert Mosley's 1986 effort,Disney's World, and Marc Eliot's 1993 entry, Walt Disney -- Hollywood's Dark Prince. Both books have been largely discredited for containing numerous factual errors and undocumented assertions, rendering them rather untrustworthy as sources of reliable background material.
Eliot's biography, which dwells unrelentingly on every salacious incident and rumor connected with Walt Disney's name, is fairly easy to dismiss. Charitably described as "speculative," it contains a single passage concerning Walt Disney's alleged interest in cryonics:
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Not surprisingly, the source behind this piece of information is nowhere to be found in Eliot's notes. And as there is no record of Roy ever having spoken of his brother's alleged interest in cryonics, Eliot's "source" was likely nothing more than repetition of rumor.
Mosley's Disney's World is also rather long on rumor and short on facts. The book has been described as "poorly researched and filled with inaccuracies", a biography that seemed "to promote certain preset points of view, regardless of evidence". The same critique goes on to say, "One of its central themes, for example, is Disney's fascination with cryogenesis and the strong suggestion that his body was frozen following his death. It makes for titillating reading; however, few facts support Mosley's claims".
Disney's World
paints a picture of an anxious Walt Disney desperately searching for a way to spring back to life in order to prevent or correct the horrible mistakes his followers were bound to make in turning his EPCOT dream into reality:
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Mosley's book is filled with repetitions of the claim that Walt Disney grew increasingly interested in cryonics as his health waned in late 1966, such as this paragraph:
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Mosley's statements regarding Disney's belief in the feasibility of cryonics are somewhat difficult to take seriously, given that his book includes such ludicrously erroneous (or fabricated) statements as:
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(Samples of tissue removed during cancer surgery are preserved in formaldehyde, a method of "preservation" which, while useful for microscopy studies, damages the tissue biologically. Organs removed from Disney by his surgeons could never be "put back where they belonged", no matter what the treatment.)
Mosley provides no source for his statements, other than to assert that Disney's "closest colleagues and advisers" were "confident" that Walt Disney "eventually became convinced of cryogenesis as a viable medical process and was persuaded that, even in 1966, it was possible for a human being to have himself brought back to life after death". In fact, these "close colleagues" of Disney's turned out to be a few employees on the periphery of the Disney organization who had never spoken to Walt about cryonics, and were merely repeating the same decades-old rumor for Mosley's benefit. On the other hand, someone much closer to Walt Disney, his daughter, Diane wrote in 1972:
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Despite the persistent rumors, available documentation indicates that Walt Disney was in fact cremated. Although Disney's preferences regarding the disposal of his body are not public record (instructions or provisions for his funeral and burial were not included in his will), other publicly-available material is entirely consistent with the claim that he was cremated:
- Walt Disney publicly stated -- ten years before his death -- that he wished not to have a funeral.
Since Disney's demise, several unmremarkable events and circumstances surrounding his life and death have been combined to try to establish a pattern of mystery and secrecy concerning the disposal of his body. All of these events, however, have straightforward, non-mysterious explanations:
- "Disney had a long preoccupation with death"
- "Disney had a neurotic fear of
death"
Statements concerning Disney's alleged preoccupation with death are generally attempts to sensationalize the topic by distorting the facts. Although he did worry about dying prematurely, Disney was not "obsessed with death". Having been told by a fortune-teller that he would die when he was thirty-five, Disney did brood about his inevitable demise during occasional bouts of depression, even after he had long passed the allegedly fatal age. Contemplating one's mortality is not an unusual behavior, and there is no evidence that Walt Disney did so to an excessive degree.
William Poundstone quotes some ridiculous passages from Anthony Haden-Guest's The Paradise Program to try to establish Disney's preoccupation with death, detailing a "gruesome seven-minute Mickey Mouse cartoon" made in 1933 in which "a mad scientist tries to cut off Pluto's head and put in on a chicken. The cartoon in question is The Mad Doctor, which was nothing more than humorous spoof of 1930's horror films. Even in the cartoon itself the "horrific" events are not portrayed as real: the whole episode turns out to be nothing more than a nightmare of Mickey's. Although Poundstone wrote that the film was pulled from the Rank film library in 1970, it has been readily available in the Mickey Mouse: The Black and White Years laserdisc set since 1994.
This claim that the announcement of
Walt Disney's death was deliberately
withheld from the press for several
hours has been made most persistently,
presumably because Disney's aides would
have needed time to furtively whisk his
body away from the hospital to the
secret cryogenic chamber before the
presence of reporters made the task
impossible to accomplish in privacy.
Leonard Mosley's description of the
event features some of more absurd
stretches of truth made in this regard:
In fact, it was not
until hours after he was
declared dead that an
announcement was made.
First came radio
announcements, then a
curt official notice
informed the press and
public that Walt Disney
was no more. It added
that there would be no
funeral. He had already
been cremated, the
announcement said, and
his ashes interred in
the Forest Lawn Memorial
Park in Glendale,
California. Only
immediate family members
had been present. It is true that Disney's death was
not officially announced to the press
until several hours after it occurred at
9:30 AM on Thursday, December 15, 1966,
but the reasons behind the delay were
perfectly ordinary ones. First of all,
Disney's death would not have been
announced immediately under any
circumstances. Several family members
had to be notified before a public
announcement could be made, and Disney
studio executives had to be located and
informed that the head of their
organization had passed away before the
information would be released to the
press. Additionally, the gravity of
Disney's illness had largely been kept a
secret from the press, so there were no
hoards of reporters crowding the
hallways of St. Joseph Hospital, waiting
for the inevitable announcement of his
death. The reason for Disney's original
hospitalization had been announced to
the press as "treatment of an old neck
injury received while playing polo," and
when Disney re-entered the hospital for
the final time two weeks before his
death, the statement made to the press
was that Disney was undergoing "a
routine post-operative" checkup.
Although it was certainly no secret that
Disney was quite ill, the seriousness of
his condition was not generally known.
The extent to which the details of Walt
Disney's illness were kept from the
press are evidenced by the newspapers
reports of his death, which stated that
his left lung had been removed during an
operation on November 21 (an error which
Poundstone repeats in Big Secrets).
That operation had actually taken place
two weeks earlier; November 21 was the
date of his original post-surgery
release from the hospital. So, given that relatives and studio
heads had to be notified before any
statements about Disney's death were
made to the press; that the media were
not on a "Disney death watch," busily
preparing obituaries and tributes; and
that communications in 1966 were
certainly slower than they are today, it
is not at all surprising that official
news of Disney's death did not reach the
public until a few hours later. Mosley's other statements, about
Disney's funeral and cremation, are just
further examples of sloppy research on
his part. Disney was not cremated until
two days after his death; no press
announcement made "hours after he was
declared dead" claimed that he had
already been cremated.
statement
is both inaccurate and irrelevant. The
cause of Disney's death was initially
announced as being "acute circulatory
collapse," which meant simply that his
heart had stopped beating. As facile as
the official announcement may seem to
those who know he "really" died of lung
cancer, it does reflect the proximate
cause of his death. This notion is borne
out by the official
death certificate, which lists
"cardiac arrest" as the primary cause of
death. The fact that cancer was what
caused Disney's heart to give out was,
medically, of secondary importance. Official statements released to the
press after Disney's surgery (and before
his death) had already revealed that a
tumor had been found, necessitating the
removal of a lung. Whether stated
"officially" or not, it was quite clear
to the public that Disney had died of
lung cancer. In any case, what possible
difference could it have made what
Walt Disney died of? How could
dissembling about the "real" cause of
his death possibly have facilitated the
goal of secretly storing his body in a
cryonic chamber?
Disney's funeral was in fact
conducted quickly and quietly None of this secrecy surrounding
Disney's funeral should be the least bit
surprising to anyone, however. In the
biography The Story of Walt Disney,
written a decade before Disney's death,
his daughter Diane had noted: Is it so remarkable that a man who
had an aversion to
And this is where the
mystery begins. It was
Walt himself who had
asked Roy Disney to keep
his illness secret, but
the manner in which the
world was apprised of
his death remains
surprising.
He never goes to a
funeral if he can help
it. If he had to go to
one it plunges him into
a reverie which lasts
for hours after he's
home. At such times he
says, 'When I'm dead I
don't want a funeral. I
want people to remember
me alive.'"
Again, this claim is not the least bit extraordinary. It is true that officials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park will not divulge the location of the Disney family plot. Many celebrities do request that the locations of their burial plots not be given out to visitors as a simple matter of privacy. The burial sites are not intended to be "secret," however; if they were, they wouldn't be marked and located on publicly-accessible grounds. Disney's plot was not, as Mosley claimed, "already filled with family ashes from which the public would always be barred." Disney's plot is far from obtrusive, but it is located in an unrestricted part of the park and marked with a plaque identifying its occupants; anyone who so desires is perfectly free to visit, leave flowers, take photographs, etc. The plot was certainly not "already filled with family ashes" at the time of Disney's interment; even today it holds the remains of only one other person: Ron Brown, a son-in-law who died the year after Disney. In fact, according to the book Wills of the Rich and Famous, the interment property was not even chosen until September 19, 1967, making it rather difficult to believe that it could have been "already filled with family ashes."
If Disney was not really frozen, then how and when did this rumor originate? The exact origins of the rumor are unknown, but at least one Disney publicist has suggested that the story was started by a group of Disney Studio animators who "had a bizarre sense of humor." The earliest known printed version of the rumor appeared in the magazine Ici Paris in 1969.
Even if the origins of the story are unknown, it is certainly easy to see why the rumor is so believable. In the years immediately preceding his death, Disney was involved in a number of projects which cemented his image as a technical innovator in the public's mind. Disneyland attractions such as the monorail, the House of the Future, the Voyage to the Moon; the introduction of audio-animatronic figures at the 1964 World's Fair, and Disney's plans for his "community of tomorrow" (EPCOT) in Florida made it easy to believe Walt Disney was ahead of everyone else in his planning, even when it came to his death. When you consider that the first cryonic suspension took place just a month after Disney's death (Dr. James Bedford, a 73-year-old psychologist from Glendale, was suspended on January 12, 1967), it's not so far-fetched to imagine that Disney might have made similar
arrangements.
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