However, I have had people tell me, he was put under the dedication plaque on Main Street or directly in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle. Rumors still persist that Walt was put into cryogenic suspension and buried somewhere underneath Disneyland, in particular under the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, since it was still under construction when he died.
Walt Disney was not cryogenically frozen, but was cremated on December 17, 1966. That never happened again although gags about "Disney on Ice" with Walt frozen in a block of ice and skaters performing on top of him abound.Īn editorial cartoon jokingly referred to Disney on Ice as being Walt frozen in ice. When I lived in California, some California Institute of the Arts students as an art project raised some money by producing a limited amount of "Waltsickles" that featured a full-figured model of Walt Disney in a suit inside of a popsickle. What if someone said that about their parent? How would they feel?" She told me that one of the reasons she was so adamant about creating the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco was "Other little kids would say to my kids, 'Your grandfather is frozen, isn't he?' And I just couldn't let that stand. I remember her telling me with a mixture of sadness and anger in her face and voice about how upsetting it was to the Disney family over the years for this question to even be asked in the first place. The one image that sticks in my mind when someone asks me if Walt were frozen is the memory of his oldest daughter Diane Disney Miller. Second, just the mere mention of these falsehoods about Walt continues to give them additional life, with people claiming they saw this assertion in a book or heard it somewhere, like from a Disney cast member, so it must be true.įinally, there will be people who despite common sense and all the evidence to the contrary will condescendingly assume that where there is smoke, there must be fire, or that someone is trying to cover-up the real story. It is a question I keep getting asked not out of idle curiosity, but because the person often wants to prove that they know this "secret fact" and if I am simply a Disney apologist who only promotes the official Disney line.įirst, it is always challenging to try to prove a negative to the satisfaction of all people. I was even asked about this during a question-and-answer session after a presentation I did at the Walt Disney Family Museum a few years ago about Disney and outer space. During the question-and-answer session, I was asked if I actually believed Walt was cremated and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Glendale, because they had heard from a reliable source "that worked at Disney" that it was obvious he was frozen. I recently did a presentation at the Museum of Military History in Kissimmee, Florida, about Disney and World War II.