Deaths at Disney

It is a longstanding urban legend that no one ever dies at Disney parks not because no one has ever died there but because no one is ever pronounced dead at Disney parks. This is still not true. The numbers I have are limited to Disneyland and Walt Disney World, but nearly a hundred people have died in incidents at one park or the other, and many of them were indeed pronounced dead at the scene—and as for the rest, well, a lot of them didn’t die at a Disney park because they died in a hospital hours or even as long as months later. It’s hard to spin that as not dying in a Disney park because no one dies in a Disney park.

The first death at a Disney park was in 1964. A fifteen-year-old stood up on the Matterhorn, was thrown from the bobsled, and died. His seatbelt was unfastened by the person he was with. He also became the first person not to die at the park, as he died three days later. What’s more, he established a pretty common pattern of “died by doing something he shouldn’t have.” It’s not universally true, but for example there have been two deaths at Disneyland on the PeopleMover caused by climbing out of the ride vehicle and getting crushed. You really shouldn’t climb out of ride vehicles, friends.

Now, this is not intended to fully absolve Disney, either. Because let’s be clear—they are at fault in some cases. A man was killed by a cleat coming off the Columbia in a one-in-a-million incident that was at least partially caused by cost-cutting methods. The rope that doesn’t break away may have been cheaper, but was it worth it? There are also cases of insufficient signage or supervision and so forth. A woman given food with allergens despite being assured that her allergen wasn’t in it. Though that’s on the restaurant, which is not owned by Disney itself.

Also, frankly, there are no few examples of people riding strenuous rides despite having heart conditions and so forth. Now, I’ve known since childhood about the big signs talking about how you shouldn’t ride the rides with certain medical conditions, because my mom’s got bad knees, which means you notice such things. So it’s not surprising when among the people who have died at one or the other of the parks are, for example, an elderly woman with a history of ministrokes or a six-year-old terminal cancer patient there as part of a special program. It’s not hugely surprising, and no blame attaches to anyone.

Further, there are a number of things that just happen anywhere people gather. Car accidents, for example—while some of them have been with Disney vehicles, it’s hard to blame the company when a 69-year-old man, certainly old enough to know better, steps out in front of a moving bus. There are two plane crashes in park history—one that was part of a show and one that was a light plane trying to perform an emergency landing in a parking lot. Accidents happen, and while a family sued Disney for a ferry’s not noticing their speedboat, it was determined that the boat strayed into the ferry’s right-of-way and the ferry operator was not at fault.

Drownings are sad, true. Especially drownings of children. And it does seem the case that Disney pools have insufficient lifeguards, though I’ve only been in one once in my life, and I don’t remember how guarded it was. However, I’m not inclined to blame Disney for a child who drowns in the moat of the Cinderella Castle, because that’s not somewhere children are supposed to go in the water. Even in 1977, you were expected to keep a better eye on your kid than that in a place as crowded as the Magic Kingdom. I have even less sympathy for the guy who drowned swimming in the Rivers of America at Disneyland because he was drunk. Especially because it was Grad Nite and he was eighteen; the drinking age in California has been 21 since 1933.

There have been a couple murders in the parks, both at Disneyland. One was a stabbing in Tomorrowland; the company was actually sued for not summoning help quickly enough, which does seem to be a recurring problem in these deaths, as well as some of the incidents that didn’t result in death. The other was a shooting in the parking lot which doesn’t even seem to have been during park hours, back when it was a parking lot and not a parking structure.

Speaking of the parking structure, it seems the second-most common cause of death in the parks, after natural causes, is in fact suicide. Often off that structure, but sometimes off hotel balconies and so forth. Horrifically, one man came to the park in search of an ex-girlfriend who worked there, took two guards hostage, and ended up shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. I’m not sure how suicide was determined in several cases, but still. A total of thirteen of the deaths were determined to be suicide one way or another.

As alluded to earlier, not all the deaths have been of guests. The first cast member killed was eighteen-year-old Deborah Gail Stone, crushed between a revolving wall and a stationary platform on America Sings a mere week after its opening in 1974. Construction workers have been killed; a stage tech fell from a catwalk. An off-duty cast member had an unfortunate encounter with a swarm of wasps while on a ledge twelve stories up. Glue exploded and killed a construction worker. A cast member dressed as Pluto was run over by the Beauty and the Beast float of a parade, in one of those “this series of words has never been assembled this way before” moments.

Disney’s liability ranges from none to considerable. You can’t blame the company for the guy who kept trying to break in by climbing the monorail track even after a cop yelled at him not to, and when a monorail driver was killed, that turned out to be due to employee error as much as the company. When a four-year-old was killed because of a failed lap bar, being placed too close to the edge, and frankly being allowed to ride at all given he was too short, that’s hard to call an accident. It’s also hard to blame the company for the sheer number of heart failures over the decades.

There is now a memorial in the name of poor Lane Graves, the two-year-old killed by an alligator at the Seven Seas Lagoon at the Grand Floridian. He may be one of the best-known of the deaths to take place in Disneyland and Walt Disney World since 1964. Some have been accidents. Many have been natural causes. The majority have been preventable in one way or another. Don’t go into off-limits places, even to stay on Tom Sawyer Island after it closes for the night. Likewise, Disney should’ve kept up maintenance on Big Thunder Mountain better. People would be alive if everyone were more careful.