How Walt Disney Died

By the mid-1960s, Walt Disney seemed immortal to many. The man known to millions as “Uncle Walt” had been the public face of the studio that bore his name for nearly four decades, from the earliest Mickey Mouse shorts through the growth of the studio into feature films.

By the time he began hosting the Disneyland television series that partially served as documentation of the park’s construction, Walt had been elevated to almost mythic status in American culture. All of which explains why Walt Disney’s death on December 15, 1966 at the all-too-young age of 65 shocked the world.

In the decades since, countless myths have popped up about how Walt Disney died and what happened afterwards. We’re here to separate reality from fiction and set the record straight.

To understand how Walt Disney died, we must first understand two major things about Walt Disney’s life. The first is that Disney was a smoker for the vast majority of his adult life, dating back to his service in the Red Cross at the end of World War I, if not earlier.

According to those who knew him, Walt smoked somewhere around three packs of cigarettes a day, and could rarely be seen without one in hand (though he tried to avoid being photographed with them, once saying “Walt Disney doesn’t smoke, I smoke,” and in later years the Disney company has edited out cigarettes from photos of Walt where they are visible).

By the final years of his life, Disney had a severe hacking, dry cough. In fact, said cough was so persistent that employees at the studio as well as Imagineering came to use hearing it or not as a way to determine if Walt was in the building.

The second major ailment of Walt’s life needed to understand his death occurred in the 1930s. During that period, Disney had taken up the sport of polo as a stress reliever tool, often playing in sold-out matches against other Hollywood elites.

However, Walt’s amatuer polo career came to devastating end in a late 1930s match. Disney was hit by a ball, which led to him falling off his horse and shattering four of his vertebrae. The injury caused Walt excruciating back pain for the rest of his life, leading to a need to for daily massages and a habit of drinking a few daily cocktails to dull the pain.

By the fall of 1966, Walt’s years of smoking and pain from his polo injury — combined with his workaholic schedule, including working on the original concept of the “Florida Project” and E.P.C.O.T. at the time — had taken a massive toll on Walt. Early that November, Disney, tired of the excruciating neck and back pain that was only exacerbated by his cough, agreed to have surgery on his spine. However, during routine surgery prep, an X-Ray on his chest found a tumor on his left lung.

Disney had surgery on November 6th to remove the tumor along with a majority of his left lung. Initially, Disney’s concern over his surgery was how the removal of most of his left lung would affect his breathing. However, the truth was far more severe, as Walt’s doctors confided to Walt’s wife Lillian Disney that the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes and and other areas of his body, becoming terminal.

Despite his diagnosis, doctors did begin cobalt therapy on Walt that November in an attempt to curb the speed and spread of his cancer. However, the treatments left Walt severely weakened, hampering his attempts to return to the studio or even enjoy Thanksgiving with his family.

By the end of November, Walt was back in St. Joseph’s Hospital. Over the first two weeks of December, Walt’s physical and in-turn mental condition continued to deteriorate. Despite the dire situation, according to those who were there, Walt continued planning his E.P.C.O.T. to the very end, allegedly “sketching” the layout of the city to his brother and business parter Roy on the hospital ceiling tiles.

Finally, on the morning of December 15, 1966, Walt Disney passed away due to “circulatory collapse” caused by the cancer that had ravaged his body. Disney’s death sent the world into mourning and the company he’d built into a period of uncertainty. The company would eventually rebound, mostly thanks to Roy Disney pushing through the construction of the renamed Walt Disney World as a lasting tribute to his brother. While Disney the company proved it could remain successful without Disney the man, Walt’s death would continue to cast a long and strange shadow as the years went on.

Shortly after Walt’s passing, rumors began to spread, rumors began to spread that Disney had actually been “frozen” through the process of cryonics, with the idea being that he would be “thawed” out once a cure for his cancer had been found.

According to PBS, the rumors began when:

“In early 1967, a few weeks after Disney’s death on Dec. 15, 1966, a reporter for a tabloid newspaper called The National Spotlite claimed he had snuck into St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, directly across the street from the Disney studios and where he was treated during his final illness. As the story went, the reporter disguised himself as an orderly, broke into a storage room, and saw the deceased Disney suspended in a cryogenic metal cylinder!”

As stories of Disney supposedly being “frozen” continued to spread, they became more ostentatious, with claims that Disney was being kept in tube underneath the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland. In actuality, Walt was cremated and interred at the Disney family mausoleum at Forrest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California.

In 1974, Disney’s daughter Diane flatly stated, “There is absolutely no truth that my father, Walt Disney, wished to be frozen. I doubt that my father had ever heard of cryonics.” However, despite these continued family denials as well as all evidence to the contrary, there are still some who believe Disney is cryogenically frozen somewhere in Disneyland.

Are you old enough to remember where you were when Walt Disney passed away? Have you heard the disproven rumors about his death? Let us know in the comments below.

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