Last one out, turn off the light

Image: Disney

The support for the belief involves lighting. Some people claim that the candle in the window of his apartment on Main Street at Disneyland occasionally turns itself off and on. Yes, that candle is always supposed to stay lit. Its flickering or turning off means a power disruption, not a supernatural event.

Despite the obvious explanation, there’s a wives tale about why Disney chose to leave this light on. A maid allegedly tried to turn off the light in Uncle Walt’s Disneyland apartment after his death. After exiting the residence, she noted it was still on. Presuming she had forgotten to turn it off, she went back in specifically to do so. To her shock, the instant she exited the building again, the lamp activated once more.

Image: Sam Howzit, Flickr (license)

The terrified cast member relayed the incident to others, and that’s how supposedly why Disney employees chose to leave a light on for Walt. Reading between the lines, someone else on the custodial staff played a fantastic prank on a co-worker, she took it seriously, and now Disney has to waste energy powering a lamp. This must be Ashton Kutcher’s favorite Disney myth.

To a larger point, if such a magic elixir existed, Disney’s Nine Old Men really could have used it. Why did Disney hog it all for himself and let the Imagineers who discovered its magical properties wither away via the natural aging process? He could have saved a fortune in training new Imagineers by keeping the old guard, the originals, instead. Despite the gaping logic flaws with the Immortal Walt rumors, it persists in many circles. To wit, if you google “Walt Disney still alive”, there are 73,000 results. People really want to believe that whether by head-in-a-jar or scientific witchcraft, Uncle Walt bested Father Time. If he does come back to life and all these rumors prove accurate, feel free to lord this article over me.

Ghosts in the Disney machine

Image: Disney

According to urban legend, the godfather of Disney theme parks isn’t the only spirit who walks the streets at night. Indeed, Walt Disney World and Disneyland are two of the greatest inspirations for ghost stories. It’s presumably because so many people try to spread the ashes of their loved ones at these two parks. With that many parts of the deceased floating in the air, someone’s going to do some haunting.

Rod Serling Meets the Ghostly Bellhop

Image: Disney

The most popular recent story involving spirits at Walt Disney World allegedly occurred at The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. A Disney cast member in full ride regalia as a bell hop tested one of the rides prior to opening. You probably know that there are multiple loading platforms for this ride, and they’re cleverly named Alpha, Beta, Charlie, and Delta. Echo and Foxtrot are the shafts directly below where the ride gets exciting.

The bell hop received the assignment of checking the Delta platform. That’s apparently the unlucky one, because story goes that this employee dropped dead of a heart attack while standing on the platform. Rather than leave the earthly realm behind, this dedicated Disney worker chose to remain on Delta forever. He now haunts the facility, providing a spookier ride experience for it than on the other three platforms.

Nobody loves this myth more than Disney cast members. It adds an element of excitement on dreary days where the lines are long and the customers are irritable. Plus, it’s much easier to get into character if you actually believe that people could die on the attraction. There’s a popular video supporting the notion that the ghost still stands watch over the Tower of Terror. He’ll even knock off the hat of any cast member who shirks their duties, apparently.

Room for 1000…

Image: Disney

The social media era has created an unfortunate byproduct of fake rumors, videos, and images. The idea is to build a story credible enough that it doesn’t fail the laugh test. If you can scare people enough to give them a chill or raise the hair on their arms, you’ll get a lot of attention.

The Haunted Mansion is a perfect candidate for this sort of behavior. The turbulent history of the attraction and its strong association to several Disney theme parks guarantees that fans of the macabre will always feel drawn to it. They tether their own mythologies to existing ones, pushing the boundaries toward the scarier side of an oftentimes humorous ride.

The most famous recent example is a ghost tale surrounding a pair of boys, one of whom laughs continuously while the other one cries. There isn’t a lot of backstory as to how or why the kids wound up trapped for eternity at a Disney theme park. The fact that one cries all the time is odd, because I’ve just described Heaven for a lot of children. Anyway, a surprised park guest relayed his encounter with one of the boys in this 2004 thread. A respected poster described his confusion when he studied a picture he’d taken while riding a Doombuggy:

“I took my 100 ft nightshot accessory to WDW with the specific purpose of taking ride photos of the Haunted Mansion for WDW Virtual Visit. Well, after documenting the ride, I put the camera away for the rest of the day. I went back to our place that evening and began to download the photos to my laptop. After doing so I scrolled through them to make sure I had all I needed, and low and behold, on one of the first shots of the attraction, I saw something that definitely WAS NOT there when I was on the ride itself. This photo was taken in the first hallway of the attraction with the eye-following portraits.

As you'll see in the photo after clicking the link, it appears as though a child is peeking his head out of the doombuggy and looking directly at me. Not only was he not there when I took the pic, there wasn't a child of this age within 20 people in front of me in line, and as you can see, he's only a few doombuggies in front of me. Not only that, what's he doing looking at me? There is NO flash, and NO visible light coming from me. It's all infrared, and invisible to the naked eye.”

You can view the image at WDWMagic. Warning: You may lose sleep afterward. Still, there’s no proof that this is anything more than a bored child he didn’t notice a couple of Doombuggies ahead of him. Because ghosts aren’t real, right? RIGHT???