These are the ones I remember.
People jumped out of the skyway.
A CM fixing the skyway was knocked down when someone accidnetly turned on the ride.
A CM was hit by a parade float before the parade.
A girl got snuck into Space Mountain and fell out on a curve because she was too small.
People drown in the river around Tom Sawyer Island.
These are off of snopes.
Claim: Several guests have lost their lives on various
Disneyland attractions.
Status: True.
Origins: Nine
guests have been killed on Disneyland attractions since the park's opening in 1955. All the deaths (save the most recent) were the result of guests who apparently ignored safety instructions and/or defeated rides' safety mechanisms.
May 1964: Mark Maples, a 15-year-old Long Beach, CA, resident, was killed when he tried to stand up on the Matterhorn Bobsleds. Maples (or his companion) foolishly unbuckled his seatbeat and attempted to stand up as their bobsled neared the peak of the mountain. Maples lost his balance and was thrown from the sled to the track below, fracturing his skull and ribs and causing internal injuries. He died three days later.
June 1966: Thomas Guy Cleveland, a 19-year-old Northridge, CA, resident, was killed when he attempted to sneak into Disneyland along the Monorail track. Cleveland scaled the park's sixteen-foot high outer fence on a Grad Nite and climbed onto the Monorail track, intending to jump or climb down once inside the park. Cleveland ignored a security guard's shouted warnings of an approaching Monorail train and failed to leap clear of the track. He finally climbed down onto a fiberglass canopy beneath the track, but the clearance wasn't enough -- the oncoming train struck and killed him, dragging his body 30 to 40 feet down the track.
August 1967: Ricky Lee Yama, a 17-year-old Hawthorne, CA, resident, was killed when he disregarded safety instructions and exited his People Mover car as the ride was passing through a tunnel. Yama slipped as he was jumping from car to car and was crushed to death beneath the wheels of oncoming cars.
June 1973: Bogden Delaurot, an 18-year-old Brooklyn resident, drowned trying to swim across the Rivers of America. Delaurot and his 10-year-old brother managed to stay on Tom Sawyer Island past its dusk closing time by climbing the fence separating the island from the burning settlers' cabin. When they decided to leave the island a few hours later, they chose to swim across the river rather than call attention to their rule-breaking by appealing to cast members for help. Because the younger brother did not know how to swim, Delaurot tried to carry him on his back as he swam to shore. Bogden Delaurot went down about halfway across the river. The younger boy remained afloat by dogpaddling until a ride operator hauled him aboard a boat, but Bogden was nowhere to be found. His body was not located by searchers until the next morning.
7 June 1980: Gerardo Gonzales, a recent San Diego high school graduate, was killed on the People Mover in an accident much like the one that had befallen Ricky Lee Yama thirteen years earlier. Gonzales, in the early morning hours of a Grad Nite celebration, was climbing from car to car as the People Mover entered the SuperSpeed Tunnel adjacent to the former America Sings building. Gonzales stumbled and fell onto the track, where an oncoming train of cars crushed him beneath its wheels and dragged his body a few hundred feet before being stopped by a ride operator.
4 June 1983: Philip Straughan, an 18-year-old Albuquerque, New Mexico, resident, also drowned in the Rivers of America in yet another Grad Nite incident. Straughan and a friend -- celebrating both their graduations and Straughan's eighteenth birthday -- had been drinking quite heavily that evening. They sneaked into a "Cast Members Only" area along the river and untied an inflatable rubber maintenance motorboat, deciding to take it for a joyride around the river. Unable to adequately control the boat, they struck a rock near Tom Sawyer Island, and Straughan was thrown into the water. His friend travelled back to shore to seek help, but Straughan drowned long before his body was finally located an hour later.
3 January 1984: Dolly Regene Young, a 48-year-old Fremont, CA, resident, was killed on the Matterhorn in an incident remarkably similar to the first Disneyland guest death nearly twenty years earlier. About two-thirds of the way down the mountain Young was thrown from her seat into the path of an oncoming bobsled, her head and chest becoming pinned beneath its wheels. An examination of Young's sled revealed that her seatbelt was not fastened at the time of the accident, but because she was riding alone in the rear car of a sled no one could determine whether or not she had deliberately unfastened her belt.
24 December 1998: In a tragic Christmas Eve accident, one Disneyland cast member and two guests were injured (one fatally) when a rope used to secure the sailing ship Columbia as it docked on the Rivers of America tore loose the metal cleat to which it was attached. The cleat sailed through air and struck the heads of two guests who were waiting to board the ship, Luan Phi Dawson, 33, of Duvall, Washington, and his wife, Lieu Thuy Vuong, 43. Dawson was declared brain dead two days later and died when his life support system was disconnected.
This accident resulted in the first guest death in Disneyland's history that was not attributable to any negligence on the part of the guest (it was the result of a combination of insufficiently rigorous ride maintenance and an insufficiently experienced supervisor's assuming an attraction operator's role) and prompted a movement for greater government oversight of theme park operations and safety procedures.
5 September 2003: A 22-year-old man, Marcelo Torres of Gardena, California, died, and several other guests were injured, when a locomotive separated from its train along a tunnel section of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Torres bled to death after suffering blunt force trauma of the chest.
Claim: A hostess working the America Sings attraction was crushed to death by a rotating wall.
Status: True.
Origins: A
little more than a week after Disneyland's refurbished Carousel of Progress theater reopened as America Sings in 1974, an 18-year-old cast member was killed when she became caught between a rotating wall and a stationary one. The Carousel of Progress had been shut down and its animatronic workings shipped to Florida's Walt Disney World in 1973; the Disneyland attraction was then revamped and debuted on 29 June 1974 as America Sings. Like its predecessor, the attraction featured an outer ring of six seating areas which rotated around a stationary center housing multiple stages.
On the evening of 8 July 1974, a 18-year-old woman from Santa Ana named Deborah Gail Stone was working the attraction as a hostess. Her job was to greet each new audience as they settled into the seating area. Standing to the left of the stage, she welcomed the guests over a microphone before the outer ring rotated and carried the audience to the first scene of the carousel. About 11:00 PM that evening, Stone approached too closely to the area between the rotating theater wall and the non-moving stage wall and was crushed to death between them. Ride operators were notified by a guest who heard Stone's screams from an adjacent theater.
Immediately after the accident, America Sings was closed for two days while a safety light that alerted the attraction's operator whenever someone got too close to the danger area was installed. Eventually the solid walls were replaced with breakaway ones to prevent similar accidents from occurring.
Claim: A four-year-old girl died while riding the Body Wars attraction at EPCOT.
Status: True.
Origins: Four-year-old
Linda Elaine Baker from Galveston, Texas, slumped over in her seat, unconscious, three minutes into riding the Body Wars attraction in EPCOT's Wonders of Life pavilion on 16 May 1995. A cast member monitoring the attraction stopped the ride and summoned paramedics while two nurses who were also riding Body Wars performed CPR, but Linda was pronounced dead after being airlifted to Orlando Regional Medical Center.
Although an autopsy was unable to provide conclusive evidence for the cause of death, samples of Linda's heart tissues analyzed by medical laboratories indicated that she had probably died from a congenital heart condition known as cardiac conduction defect, which causes disturbances in the electrical signals that regulate the heart's beating. There was no evidence that the motion of the ride had triggered or exacerbated this condition.
Guests with medical conditions are warned against riding Body Wars (and all other attractions featuring sudden or violent motions), but Mrs. Baker told investigators that her daughter had no history of health problems. However, Baker's relatives said that the girl did have a heart ailment, and Linda was apparently being treated at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston for reasons undisclosed by her doctors.
Claims: Disney
can legitmately claim that no one has ever died at one of their theme parks, because they always ensure that accident victims are removed from park property before being declared dead.
Status: False.
Origins: This legend is a tricky subject to tackle, because it's based upon the fine (and often confusing) distinction between actual death and declared death. For example, if a seriously-injured victim of an automobile accident were loaded into a ambulance and died en route to the hospital, generally would not be officially declared dead until he arrived at the hospital and was examined by a doctor. The difference in time between the actual physical death of the patient and the declaration of death by the doctor is the discrepancy on which this legend turns.
So, the claim here is not that no one has ever actually died on Disney theme park property, but whether Disney can legitimately make the claim that "no one has ever died at a Disney park" because they ensure that any declaration of death takes place outside of park property.
As such, there are really two questions which must be answered:
Does Disney really attempt to get injured (or already-dead) persons off their property before any declaration of death occurs?
Has Disney always been successful in this effort?
The first question is difficult to answer, because obviously Disney isn't going to discuss such a sensitive issue. Some former Disney employees have reported that the "no one dies on Disney property" maxim is indeed a company policy; that, as suggested in the book Inside the Mouse, "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":
We had a guy last summer who went to EPCOT, stood in front of the golf ball, took a gun, and blew his head off. But he didn't die. He stood right there in front of all those tourists and went "cluck" and brains blew everywhere. But he didn't die there. The medic told me that they are not allowed to let them die there. Keep them alive by artificial means until they're off Disney property, like there's an imaginary line in the road and they go, "He's alive, he's alive, he's dead."
In all fairness, however, it should be noted that in some jurisdictions once paramedics begin life-saving efforts they cannot discontinue those efforts until the patient has been transported to a medical facility, even if the patient is obviously dead; therefore, what someone might interpret as "flogging a dead body" to delay a determination of death could actually be a legally required procedure. Moreover, the sprawling size and relative isolation of the Walt Disney World complex in Florida make it imperative that persons in need of urgent medical attention be loaded into helicopters and transported to hospitals as quickly as possible. The combination of these two factors makes it rather unlikely that anyone would actually be declared dead on Walt Disney World property, regardless of how The Walt Disney Company felt about the matter.
Declared deaths on Disney property apparently have happened before, however, as reported by The New York Times in an article about a 1984 plane crash in the EPCOT parking lot:
A man was pronounced dead at the scene. A woman and a 2-year-old child died after being taken to a hospitals. The two survivors, a 3-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, were listed in critical condition at Orlando Regional Medical Center.
In California as well, news accounts have mentioned instances while accident victims were declared dead while on Disneyland property, as in this 1985 Los Angeles Times report of a girl who was crushed to death under the wheels of a tour bus in the Disneyland parking lot:
The identity of the girl, who was pronounced dead at the scene, was not released pending notification of her parents, according to Sgt. Larry Kurtz. The driver of the bus was not held.
(The recent case of a man's dying on Big Thunder Mountain railroad might be another example of a declared death on Disneyland property, but sufficient details about that incident are not yet available.)
Disney is, of course, well known for their image consciousness. They have been criticized in the past for policies such not allowing marked emergency vehicles into their parks (so as not to upset park guests), and so many people perceive them as being willing and overzealous enough to stretch a semantic point for a minor public relations advantage.
Claim: The closure and removal of Disneyland's Skyway in November of 1994 was prompted by a guest's having fallen from the ride several months earlier.
Status: False.
Origins: The reasons
behind the decision to permanently close Disneyland's Skyway were strictly economic ones that had no connection to the incident earlier in the year in which a man had "fallen" (i.e., jumped) from one of the Skyway cabins.
On Sunday morning, 17 April 1994, a 30-year-old man named Randle Charles fell approximately 20 feet from one of the Skyway cabins and landed in a tree near the "Alice in Wonderland" attraction. He was helped out of the tree by paramedics and taken to nearby Western Medical Center, where he was treated for minor injuries and released. Charles later filed a $25,000 negligence lawsuit against Disney, claiming that he had suffered permanent neck and back injuries as a result of his fall.
Despite the initial assertion of Mr. Charles' attorney that Randle "wasn't doing anything improper, and he certainly wasn't trying to get out of the ride," Charles indeed jumped, not fell, from his Skyway cabin. Charles' lawsuit was dismissed just before it was to go to trial on 23 September 1996; at that time he admitted that he "came out" of his Skyway cabin and that his lawsuit against Disney was "ill-advised."
The unblemished safety record of the Skyway (the 1994 "accident" was the first in the 38-year history of the ride), the obvious dubiousness of Charles' claim, and the relatively small amount of damages requested in his lawsuit all made this single incident extremely improbable as the reason for the Skyway's closure on 9 November 1994. The Skyway was not dismantled out of a fear of similar incidents, but for a variety of economic factors, including the attraction's age and carrying capacity, staffing requirements, maintenance costs, and the expense required to upgrade the Skyway to conform to newer safety and access standards.
Events seemingly repeated themselves five years later. In February 1999, a park custodian at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom was killed when the skyway started up unexpectedly while he was cleaning one of its platforms. Raymond Barlow, 65, was sweeping off a narrow skyway platform inaccessible to park guests an hour after the park's 9:00 A.M. opening when other cast members, unaware of his presence, started up the ride. Barlow, startled by the approaching gondola, grabbed onto it and tried to climb inside; he fell 40 feet into a flower bed, hitting a tree on the way down, and died. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration later ruled that the area in which Barlow had been working violated federal safety codes and fined Walt Disney World $4,500 for a "serious" violation of safety standards. Several months later, in November 1999, the Magic Kingdom's skyway was also permanently closed. Once again, the decision to close the attraction was based on factors other than its being involved in a recent accidental death.
whoops, i guess this has nothing to do with deaths, but im sure it still hurt.
