18: Disney Deaths: Tragedy in the Happiest Place on Earth
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If guests have the nerve to die, they wait, like unwanted calories, until they've crossed the line and can do so safely off the property. The book is suggesting the common misconception that no one dies at Disney. Legend has it that Disney makes first responders wait until people are far away from the property to pronounce them dead. This is so they can keep the reputation that no one has died in the park. But that's not true.

People have died at Disney. People have gotten horribly injured at Disney. And these events are on record and deliberated publicly. Actually, in 1985, Time magazine reported that there are 100 lawsuits for various incidents filed against Disney each year. It's no surprise that Disney works hard to maintain their image as the happiest place on earth.

I mean, they even meticulously map out where to put trash cans to make sure no one ever throws trash on the ground. But behind every facade, every shining, shimmering, splendid veneer, there's usually a dark underbelly. Something swept under the rug to not spoil the image as a whole. Today, we're going to talk about some of those stories.

Listener discretion is advised. It's that feeling. When the energy in the room shifts. When the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing. It's when your heart starts pounding. It's when your heart starts pounding.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore.

This is a community of people who follow their dark curiosity wherever it leads them. And we release episodes every Thursday. If you'd like to get deeper into the community, you can follow the podcast on Instagram and TikTok at Heart Starts Pounding or join our Patreon called the Rogue Detecting Society, where you'll have access to some bonus content for just $3 a month. Shout out to everyone who's already there. Starting next week, I'll be thanking people by name in the episodes.

Today, we're going to be talking about times that tragedy struck at Disney. But to start us off, I want to tell you about the most terrifying experience I had working in fast food.

When I was 16, I would work the closing shift at a fast food place near me. I'd get there right after school and one by one I would watch as my coworkers clocked out until it was just me, one person in the kitchen, and my manager, standing in a dimly lit and mostly empty restaurant late into the night. The restaurant had a big walk-in fridge, stainless steel, size of a bedroom with a low ceiling, and it was fully stocked with produce.

I still remember the sterile, dim hospital lighting inside. In the back right corner of the big fridge was a door that was latched shut. That was the freezer. The fridge was creepy. The freezer was terrifying. It was a tiny, even more dimly lit room the size of a closet, and it was always set to between -4 and -9 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once you'd go in, you could feel the cold racing through your skin towards your bones. Your breath would fog in front of you and you'd just grab fries as fast as you could before your arms lost feeling. It was miserable being in there. And I had heard a rumor that years prior, a woman accidentally locked herself in the freezer one day. It was 45 minutes before anyone realized she was missing.

And this was in the middle of the day when they were fully staffed, tons of people to notice. By the time they found her, she was curled up in the corner trying to keep warm and had to be rushed to the hospital and treated for hypothermia. It seemed obvious to me that that had happened. The door was janky at best.

To prevent myself from freezing to death while closing, I always kept the freezer door propped open with a bucket of lettuce. I would race in, grab the breakfast goods we needed for the morning, and then race back out. One night, it was just me and my manager closing. He was inside the office with the door closed, counting up the registers from the day.

I passed his closed door and walked all the way down the long hall to the fridge entrance to do my final task for the night. There, I unlatched the freezer door, took a box of produce down off a tower of other boxes, propped the door open, and went inside. I was trying to move as quickly as possible, but once inside, I heard a creaking noise behind me.

The weight of the freezer door had pushed the small box I placed down out of the way, and I turned around to the door slamming shut. And then, cherry on top, I heard the sound of the tower of boxes cascading down in front of the door. Uh-oh. I pushed on the door, but the weight of the boxes pushed back. Hey! Hello?!

I yelled, hoping my manager would hear me, but there were two heavy steel doors in between me and the outside world. And now I'm thinking to myself, maybe my manager wasn't in the office counting registers. Maybe he had actually gone home. I pushed the freezer door again, but nope, it wasn't giving an inch. Who the hell designed this door to not open inward in case something like this ever happened?

At this point, I'm so scared I'm starting to tear up, and the wetness on my face is turning frosty. Negative four, the temperature read. I knew I had to get out of there. Oh god, don't let me die at my minimum wage job. A job that, let's be real, I wasn't very good at to begin with. I was going to be remembered as the girl who broke the ice cream machine like every shift.

So, I did the only thing I could think of. I went to the other side of the tiny freezer and just started running, as fast as I could, at the door, hoping my body weight would be enough against the boxes of cheese and onions on the other side. And on the second try, I hit it hard enough to spill out. I ran to finish closing. I needed to warm up and I just wanted to get out of there. And as I was leaving, my manager came out of the back office.

What happened to you? He asked, probably noticing my runny mascara. I just got locked in the back freezer. I whimpered. Oh yeah, I meant to tell you to be careful because someone almost died in there last year. I tell you this story because I'm a big believer in social contracts, agreements based on basic human decency. And I get really mad when they're broken.

When you agree to work at a place, you're signing up to show up on time and do a good job, and your employer is agreeing to pay you for that work, but also make sure that you'll be safe on the job. They're agreeing that standard safety measures have been put in place and will be upheld.

This idea extends into every area of our lives. When you buy a plane ticket, the airline is agreeing to take you to your destination safely. And you're agreeing to not drink five whiskey Cokes and try to fight a flight attendant. And for the most part, that contract is upheld. But what about when this contract is broken? What are the consequences?

Well, let's look into some of those times where that happened, specifically at Disney, a place that hasn't always been forthcoming with their role in breaking safety measures. Some of these stories are about people that embark on unsafe measures within the park, and some of them are about Disney not making sure that everyone will be safe. The first death to occur in a Disney park happened in Disneyland in 1964, 11 years after the park first opened.

It was grad night for Stanford Junior High School, and to celebrate, the school had rented out a part of the park after it closed. This is a common thing for schools in Southern California to do, which still blows my mind. My grad night was in my cafeteria. Mark Maples was 15 years old, and that night he mostly hung out with his girlfriend and a few friends. At least one person remembered seeing him spinning around on the teacups.

At one point in the night, Mark and his friends wanted to ride on the Matterhorn, a 147-foot alpine coaster in the center of the park.

The Matterhorn was originally a decoration in Disneyland. When digging to build Sleeping Beauty's castle, the dirt from the dig was piled up and decorated with fake snow. But when Walt Disney visited Switzerland in 1958, he fell in love with the real Matterhorn Mountain. And when he came back, he had the dirt pile removed. And in its place, he built a giant replica mountain covered in snow that had a toboggan coaster running through the middle.

In 1964, it was also still the only thrill ride at Disney, so of course all the kids were eager to line up for it. And on top of that, Mark had just been grounded for a couple of weeks, so this was really his first night of freedom in a while. The ride isn't like a typical coaster with ups and downs. It slowly ascends to the top of the mountain and then releases, letting riders cascade down as if on a bobsled.

Mark loaded into the Matterhorn around midnight with two of his best friends on either side of him in a three-person seat. And then they started ascending through the dark, snowy mountain. The ride didn't offer great lighting, so Mark's friends didn't see exactly what was happening as the coaster reached the top and started its quick descent. But at one point,

Mark's friend can feel him bumping into him in a way that's not consistent with how the coaster is moving. So he looks over to Mark, but all he can see is Mark's sweater hurtling over the side of the coaster.

When they finally got to the bottom, the boys were panicking and trying to get an attendant. They told someone working the coaster that their friend had fallen out, that he was still in the ride. But the attendant didn't believe them. So it took a while for the emergency services to be called. When EMT services were finally able to summit the ride, they found Mark lying on a ledge off to the side of the track with a fractured skull and broken ribs.

He was rushed to the hospital, where he passed away a few days later due to blunt force trauma to the head.

Disney put out an official statement saying that Mark, quote, But his classmates had other memories of what happened that night.

Some thought that Mark was trying to impress his girlfriend. Others thought that one of his friends undid his seatbelt as a prank. The chief deputy said that he had received calls claiming that this was a hazing incident. In the end, his death was ruled purely accidental with the weight of the responsibility being put on Mark, not the ride. How a 15-year-old boy could simply become unbuckled during the ride was never questioned.

and the case was closed. This story would be tragic if it were the only time it happened on the Matterhorn ride, but it starts to verge on suspicious when you learn what happened exactly 20 years later on the same exact ride.

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On January 3rd, 1984, Dolly Regina Young and four of her friends loaded onto the Matterhorn ride at around 3 p.m. She had come in from Fremont, about an hour flight away in Northern California, where Dolly had been a well-liked Avon representative. As they loaded into the sled, Dolly sat by herself in the last seat all the way in the back. The ride then started climbing and made its initial descent without incident.

At the time, there was a large hole cut into the side of the mountain, where the Skyway gondola would carry guests in through the mountain and out the other side to get them across the park. The sides of the gondola were glass, so as people entered Matterhorn Mountain, they could see the sled scurrying down the tracks, even wave at riders. On this day, a father and his two teenage daughters sat inside one of the gondolas as it entered the side of the mountain.

They were looking down at the bobsleds zooming full speed towards the exit, when all of a sudden, the 19-year-old daughter, Helen, screamed. From Helen's perspective, she watched as Dolly fell backward out of the coaster onto the tracks. The impact must have hit her hard because she wasn't able to get herself up at first. Multiple cars ride down the mountain at the same time, but there's about a 30-second gap in between them.

It took a few seconds, but it did look to Helen like Dolly started stirring, and she was attempting to get herself off of the tracks, when all of a sudden, Helen saw another sled barreling towards Dolly. She didn't see what happened next because her father screamed for her to cover her eyes. But a family from Canada who was in the oncoming bobsled did see what followed.

They reported that at first they thought the body on the tracks was a prop, but they quickly realized that they were wrong.

The bobsled made impact with Dolly, striking her on her chest and torso and caused the vessel to come to a screeching halt. The sensors went off indicating that a bobsled was stuck, which caused all of the other bobsleds to stop in their tracks. A worker at the bottom of the ride immediately noticed that the ride had halted, and he could hear what sounded like sharp, panicked screams radiating out of the mountain.

He abandoned his station and ran to the source, but was horrified at the sight of what the sled had done to Dolly's body. When he came back down, he saw other attendants trying to run up and help, but he stopped them. "Whatever you do, don't look," he said. The police arrived to inspect the scene and noticed that in the seat that Dolly was sitting in, the seatbelt was in perfect condition but was unbuckled, as if she had unfastened it mid-ride.

The detective claimed that either she stood up and the seatbelt fell off, or she had been sitting on her seatbelt the entire time. But Disney thought the latter was impossible. They made sure every guest's seatbelt was checked twice and denied any wrongdoing in the death. So Dolly's family fought back, hard. They took Disney to court, claiming that the young male attendant was distracted by two pretty female passengers and didn't inspect Dolly's seatbelt correctly.

Dolly's husband claimed that she was not frivolous or daring, and it was unlikely that she tried to stand up on the ride or unbuckled her seat knowingly. Disney ended up settling with her family for an undisclosed amount. It's interesting here to note that Disney changed the seatbelts used on the ride shortly after Dolly's death. They claimed that it had nothing to do with safety, it was simply because the other seatbelt manufacturer had gone out of business.

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Growing up, I noticed my father had a visceral aversion to the song It's a Small World. I mean, I get it, that song is annoying. But I always got the feeling there was more to it with my father. If anyone around him even started humming it, he would get this look in his face like he had a killer headache and he would ask them to stop.

What I eventually found out was when my dad was about six years old, his mother took him to the debut of the It's a Small World ride in New York. They loaded their little boat excited to drift down the lazy river into the ride. Only just as my dad's boat entered the ride, it got stuck.

For the next two hours, a chorus of multicultural animatronic children screamed saying, "It's a small world" at my father. Eventually, firemen came in to rescue the children and parents stuck on the ride.

People remembered seeing the kids emerging from the dark with glassy-eyed stares, the choir from hell forever echoing in their minds. And that's not even the only time that's happened on that specific ride. In 2009, Jose Martinez was on the It's a Small World ride in Disneyland when all of a sudden the ride broke down. He was in the ride's goodbye room, which is the last room before you exit, when he noticed all the boats had stopped.

Ride attendants were quick to evacuate the other guests, but Martinez was quadriplegic, and attendants weren't able to remove him from the ride. Rather than call for assistance, attendants decided to let him wait it out. But Martinez needed to use the bathroom, which, that's a very annoying inconvenience for most people, but it can be a true emergency for people with spinal cord injuries, like Martinez.

His blood pressure skyrocketed. And though he was only on the ride for 30 minutes, it took three hours for medical staff to be able to stabilize him. He won a settlement of $8,000 for the event. We've heard about disasters striking guests within the park, but what about when it strikes employees? Because the truth is, one out of every five deaths that happen within the park is of someone who is on their shift.

Take, for instance, Javier Cruz, who in 2004 was a cast member playing Pluto at Disney World when he was struck by a float. Javier was 38 at the time and he had been working at the park for eight years. He was very familiar with the share a dream come true parade that went through the park every afternoon. So we're not really sure how this one time went so wrong.

The part of the parade line that Javier was in was actually in an area that was mostly hidden from guests. It was almost the end of the parade, and he was walking in front of the Beauty and the Beast float, about to enter another populated area of guests. But before he got there, he tripped in front of the float. And then as he was trying to get out of the way, the float struck and killed him. For as horrible as that was, it is believed that no children witnessed the event.

In the end, the entertainment giant was fined $6,300 and was issued a citation for having employees in restricted areas. And that was it. But the history of employees dying in the park is a long one. It spans 50 years. The first one was the tragic death of Deborah Gail Stone.

Debra was 18 years old in 1974 when she started working for the America Sings ride at Disneyland. She had just graduated high school and the ride had just opened within the park. The timing seemed perfect.

For those unfamiliar with the America Sings ride, it was a largely unliked and mostly forgotten ride in Disneyland from the 70s and 80s. It actually wasn't a ride so much as an experience. Guests would walk into a small, dark auditorium and watch animatronic bayou animals sing songs about America. It sounds weird, and it was, but it actually paved the way for a much more beloved ride, Splash Mountain.

For most, though, America Sings was a chance to get out of the sun and sit down for 20 minutes. Probably strangest of all were the actual mechanics of the ride. The whole thing was composed of a series of walls, some stationary and some rotating. The audience would sit in one of six auditoriums that rotated around a stage that had six chambers.

That seemed to be the gimmick: instead of the stage rotating to a new exhibit, the audience would rotate around the stage. Each chamber featured a different set of truly horrifying creatures that sang old-timey patriotic songs. And the whole show was hosted by a creepy-looking owl with an adult man's voice. It was also in Tomorrowland, which was supposed to be futuristic. I don't know. The ride was really confusing.

Debra was the hostess for the ride, so she was in charge of greeting the guests and making sure they didn't get out of their seats during the experience. She was stationed in the front left of the auditorium near a small microphone that she could speak into to make announcements.

Around where Debra needed to be stationed, there was a gap in between the stage and the rotating room that the guests were in. A gap that didn't look wide or dangerous at first glance, but Debra was 5'2 and pretty slim. Next to her, the gap appeared to be much larger.

On July 9th, 1974, Debra was hosting the last ride of the night, which started at about 10:30. The park was closing soon after everyone was set to exit the experience. At 11:00 PM, her auditorium finished, and all of the guests exited the ride. After they left, there was a 45-second reset that the ride would do, rolling the auditorium from the last chamber back to the first to start again.

No one was in Deborah's auditorium to witness what happened next, but there were people in the auditorium next to Deborah's that were still in the fifth chamber and moving to the sixth. According to one witness, they saw a leg appear out of nowhere in the right corner of the auditorium between the auditorium and the stage, right in that gap that I mentioned earlier.

Another witness said that it looked like a child was being pulled between the stage platform and right wall. Visual accounts differ, probably because it was dark and people couldn't tell if what was happening was part of the ride or not. Everyone, however, heard the same guttural scream.

Someone alerted another attendant who called emergency services, but it was too late for Debra. She had been crushed quickly inside the mechanism of the ride, and first responders needed to use torches to cut her out. After Debra's tragedy, the ride was closed for two days and safety lights were added to the ride. The gap was not closed, but eventually, breakaway walls were placed in between auditoriums to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again.

In a public statement, Disney recognized that this was the first death of an employee in the park's 19-year history. But as we now know, it definitely wasn't the last. It's easy to hear these stories and be scared for your safety, but at the end of the day, the rides at Disney are still incredibly safe. You have a much higher chance of getting hit by lightning than you do of dying on the Matterhorn ride.

In fact, 5 million people ride the Matterhorn per year, and there's only been those two recorded incidents on it, ever. But we can still talk about these events because it's important to remember that when your judgment lapses, that's when tragedy can strike. When a ride that just opened doesn't think to install safety measures, when someone tries to stand up on a ride, or conversely, when a ride isn't making sure seatbelts are functioning and properly fastened.

When someone almost dies in a fast food freezer and no one thinks to, I don't know, maybe look into it? Disney has been quick to course correct after these incidents. They really can't afford for their reputation as the happiest place on earth to be tarnished. But the next time you sign up for one of these contracts that put your safety in the hands of someone else, really take a second to think, is everyone holding up their end of the bargain?

This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kaylin Moore. Music by Artlist. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart-pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious. With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.

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