MYTH.
Few urban legends have proven as durable as this one. Walt Disney — visionary, futurist, the man who built EPCOT as a monument to tomorrow — was frozen after his death in 1966, the story goes, and his body lies somewhere beneath Disneyland, awaiting the day science can bring him back. It is a perfect myth. It is also completely false.
Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966 from lung cancer. A private family funeral was held the following day, and on December 17 his body was cremated. Snopes has documented this exhaustively: his death certificate shows cremation, his ashes were interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, and his family has confirmed this repeatedly for over fifty years. His daughter Diane wrote in 1972: "There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that my father wished to be frozen. I doubt that my father had ever heard of cryonics."
Here's the detail that makes the myth even stranger: the first known human cryonic preservation didn't happen until January 1967 — a full month after Disney died. The organization that would have performed the procedure had its California incorporation papers approved on the exact same day Walt died. There was, quite literally, no facility capable of freezing him when he passed.
The myth appears to have originated with a tabloid journalist who claimed to have seen Disney's body in a cryogenic cylinder — a story that has never been corroborated by a single credible source. Disney's own biographers have dismissed it entirely.
Walt Disney spent his life building fantasies. It seems only fitting that the most enduring story about his death turned out to be one too.
