No One is Allowed to Die at Disneyland. Did You Ever Wonder How That's Possible?

Working at Disneyland is not all it's cracked up to be. There are things the general public is not privy to, although rumors circulate online about certain practices.

One of these rumors is true:

Nobody is allowed to die at Disneyland.

As part of the Anaheim Fire EMT Team, we are on site for more serious events. The park's staff - known as cast members - have their own team of trained personnel. They deal with everything from small cuts and scrapes to ride-induced sickness.

But every once in a while, somebody needs to take a trip to the hospital.

When that happens, two of us will prepare an ambulance and a nurse will be called in to assist. We transport the patient to a nearby hospital and treat them on the way there, within the short amount of time we have.

Starting an IV in the back of a moving vehicle can get pretty hairy, let me tell you. But I've done it on multiple occasions. Potholes can make things really interesting when you have a needle in someone's arm and you're fishing for a vein. The important thing is to make sure you don't hit an artery, or poke yourself with the bloody needle - especially if your patient looks like an IV drug user.

I've been assigned to the theme park for the past few months, and have come to enjoy working here for the most part, until today.

I'll tell you why.

As I've said before - nobody is allowed to die at Disneyland. And sometimes fate is not kind enough to comply with corporate policies.

This morning, I was called in to assist with an accident near the tea cup ride. It was still early and the park was quiet as visitors were just starting to file in. The weather was warm and sunny - a typical Anaheim day.

But there was a barrier setup near the entrance to the ride. Several people were being questioned and were complaining loudly about their phones being confiscated. A few were in tears, and looked borderline hysterical - these people were being taken behind closed doors by men in suits with Disneyland badges.

"It'll be given right back to you. Just a moment," a security guard was saying, and I saw him hit the delete button to get rid of the most recent video on a visitor's cell phone.

"Park policy," he said, giving the device back to the woman. "Thanks for your cooperation. Enjoy the rest of your day!"

She started to protest, looking at the deleted file, but her husband grabbed her arm and pulled her away, casting a nervous look at the barricade.

The woman eventually relented and the two of them walked off.

"Right this way," the security guard said, looking at me.

He directed me behind the barricade and I saw a very terrified teenager was doing CPR on a decapitated man.

With each thrust, blood spurted out from the place where his head should have been.

The sounds being made were… disturbing. Like a wet dog toy being stepped on over and over again. One of the squeaky ones.

"What are you doing!? Why!?"

I tried to get the words out but couldn't.

"We need you to take over for the kid. This man needs to be taken to a hospital."

I stared at the security guard, dumbstruck.

A hospital? This man needed to get to a funeral home for cremation. There would be no open casket for this one.

"You must be kidding…"

The security guard grabbed my arm and pushed me over towards the kid.

"Take over," he said. "The kid is tired. You need to do your job."

Another security guard joined him and the two of them gave me a stern look which indicated I'd better not argue with them.

I tried to explain to them, unsure how they weren't getting it. I tried to tell them CPR was not going to help a dead man with no head. But it was like talking to a brick wall.

And pretty soon they made it clear that if I didn't do what I was asked, I would be the one in need of a hospital visit.

As completely insane as it was, I got down on my knees and took over, doing CPR on the headless man.

Each time I pushed down on his chest, a fountain of partially coagulated blood shot out from the hole at the top of his neck.

"What happened to him," I asked the kid who I'd taken over for. I recognized him as the one who ran the ride.

"I don't know, man," he said, shaking and pale. "I just looked up and the dude's head was flying. Man, I don't even know where the damn thing ended up…"

I pressed down on his sternum again as hard as I could, repeating the same amount of pressure, the same depth, despite the fact that it was all pointless. A hundred compressions per minute. Two inches deep. Ensuring proper placement of the hands.

It was all so ingrained in me that I did it perfectly, despite the fact that this man would never breathe again.

Eventually someone who looked like a manager showed up. He was wearing a sharp-looking suit despite the warm weather and had cold blue eyes with no indication of any compassion.

"Hey, these guys wanted me to keep doing CPR," I told him, quickly sensing that he was in charge of this clown show. "Can I stop now? He's obviously dead."

The man in the dark suit shook his head.

"Keep going. Don't stop."

He had a look about him that I didn’t like. A cold, angry sort of feeling came off the man, like a dark aura. I decided not to argue with him.

"Get Bill from cryo up here," he told one of the security guards. "Tell him to bring the gurney."

The man looked around and then whispered under his breath.

"And someone get that damn head down from the tree before some kid sees it."

A strange black vehicle with mouse ears on top and an enclosed flatbed parked in front of us and I was forced inside, then made to continue doing CPR on what was essentially a headless corpse. The man’s terrified, gap-mouthed visage stared at me from the other end of the trunk, where one security guard held it on his lap, with his face looking outward.

The macabre scene was so surreal and horrifying that I had to keep telling myself I wasn’t in a nightmare. This was actually happening.

“WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME DO THIS!?” I yelled at the man in the suit, who sat in the front seat. “HE’S DEAD!”

The man just ignored me, as we pulled into a garage marked Authorized Personnel Only and the weird hearse vehicle continued travelling deeper and deeper into a dark warehouse-like space.

Eventually, after a few more minutes of driving deeper and deeper underground, using a series of ramps like you’d find in a parking garage, we came to another steel sliding door.

Reaching up to press a button on the ceiling, the man up front looked back at me and locked eyes with me.

“Almost there,” he said. “Just a few more minutes.”

Then he looked at the security guard and furrowed his brow.

“Jim… What did I tell you about the heads?”

The security guard’s face went red immediately, and he began to dig through a cabinet next to him. It sounded like a drawer full of ice.

Then he dropped the head inside. It landed with a loud CHUNK sound, as if he’d dropped a six pack into a cooler on a hot summer day at the lake.

He raised his thumb in an affirmative gesture, nodding at the man in the suit.

“Got it.”

I was dumbfounded, slowing down my compressions momentarily, and the security guard unclipped the gun from his holster.

“Don’t slow down,” he said. “Keep it going.”

I got the implied message.

But why did they care so much about perfusing the organs of a dead man with oxygenated blood? There was no head! And without a head, the body would be useless. The brain would be dead from lack of oxygen a while ago, and minus that control center the meat-sack I was pressing on with all of my force was essentially obsolete. It was all pointless.

Unless…

Memories came back to me of things I had heard in the past.

Hadn’t Walt Disney insisted on being cryogenically frozen?

No. That was insane. Those ideas were insane.

But then, as if confirming my worst fears, I saw the writing on the next steel sliding door read:

Disneyland Cryogenics Research Facility

CRF Authorized Cast Members ONLY past this point

The next area consisted of massive tanks filled with swirling blue fluid. I saw people suspended in the liquid, their faces frozen like Han Solo in carbonite - their mouths open in silent screams.

“It’s real…” I heard myself whisper silently, then refocused my efforts on CPR.

Suddenly it seemed as if there might be a purpose to all of this after all.

We pulled into one final, large room. It was filled with equipment that looked decades beyond anything I’d seen before. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the large hadron collider - massive, complex mechanical forms that I could never even begin to understand.

“Here we are,” said the man in the suit, getting out of the front seat.

He came around to the back and rolled us out on a gurney with the assistance of a few others. Meanwhile, I just continued doing compressions, too terrified to stop.

“It’s okay,” the man said, with a surprisingly gentle tone now. “You can take a rest now. Thanks for your hard work.”

Stunned, I got down from the gurney and felt the numbness and pain in my forearms, shoulders, and wrists. I had a lot of practice doing CPR, but that was exhausting even for me.

Feeling like I was in a daze, I looked around at the space I was in, taking in my surroundings.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Well,” the man said. “You’re gonna need to sign an NDA so we can let you out of here. I guess I can fill you in.”

I saw the headless man was being brought up onto a platform, and his head was being carried up there as well. Large machinery hung down from the ceiling, reminding me of Frankenstein’s lab, right before he brought the monster to life.

A man in a white lab coat was fiddling with items on cloth-covered tables and preparing instruments, like a doctor about to do surgery.

“You might have heard about how the man himself once wanted to be frozen, kept in cryogenics until the future, so that he could be brought back to life again. You’ve heard that right? Most people have.”

“Sure. I mean, I wasn’t sure if it was true or not.”

“Well, it is. And he’s kept down here in this laboratory. But what most people don’t know is that a large portion of the profits this corporation brings in goes towards fulfilling that goal. This equipment down here cost billions of dollars to build and install. And we’ve finally got everything setup, just the way we need it.”

I wasn’t really sure what to say. The man just continued on.

“The thing is, we don’t want to try it out on the boss first. What if it doesn’t work out? So we’ve been experimenting with other, ahem, volunteers. That’s why we had people frozen down here. That’s why nobody is allowed to die at Disneyland. We need to use every available resource we have. Those bodies you saw on the way in here? Those were people who suffered accidents in the park or who snuck in after hours - at least, they’re the ones who nobody would notice missing.”

“Like this guy?”

“Exactly like this guy. Do you know he has no family or extended relations? Robert Biggs, here is thirty four years old, lives alone, and his only real joy in life is coming to Disneyland.”

My throat felt tight, my stomach began to drop, and it was like there was a concrete block sitting inside my gut all of a sudden.

“What are you doing to him?” I asked, watching as the man in the lab coat skewered his head atop a shiny, sharp steel rod, as if he were a giant piece of barbeque meat.

A Shishka-Bob.

The wet, squelching sounds of blood and viscera being pushed aside could be heard as he slid it into place. Bob’s head wobbled back and forth slightly, and then was still.

“We’re going to help him,” the man said. “Just like we’ve been helping so many others who died in this park. Or should I say, almost died in this park.”

The world was turning dark around the edges as I tried to focus on staying conscious. I’d never felt so terrified and jarred as I did at that moment. I really felt as if I might pass out from the overwhelming nature of everything that was happening.

But I shook it off and told myself to snap out of it. Who knew what these people would do to me if my lights went out. I imagined myself waking up as a victim of their twisted experiments - a man with two different sets of arms, and a second head maybe?

I shuddered.

“Right this way,” the man in the suit said, leading me towards a small steel table.

For the first time when he spoke I saw something else in his eyes. Something hard and dark, like a second entity living within his gaze. A second pair of eyes looking back at me from inside.

“Here’s the agreement we’ll need you to sign,” he said, holding out a pen and pointing at a stack of papers three inches thick.

“Take your time and read through it all. You don’t want to sign something you don’t understand.”

His voice was amicable enough, but the look of the contract told me otherwise. Not only was it as thick as a book - it was typed in what appeared to be a four or maybe five point font - single spaced and written in complex legalize. The first sentence was three pages long.

I looked up at the dead man on the platform, and watched in horror as the man in the lab coat attached electrodes to his head and lowered a massive device that looked like a huge laser pointer, directing a beam of energy at his forehead.

The dead man began to convulse and shake, his eyes blinking open and closed. His arms started moving up and down, his legs pumping as if he were on a stationary bicycle.

“Holy shit,” I muttered, trying to tear my eyes away from the scene unfolding up there so that I could read the first sentence of the NDA again. Or try to. It was a brain buster.

The party heretofore referred to as THE VIEWER will be obligated to, on completion of this contract, and without prior understanding of the event heretofore referred to as THE DISTURBANCE, will…

I got to about the same part as before, then blinked my eyes as the words became fuzzy and I lost my place amidst the jumble of tiny letters. It was utterly unreadable.

“All set?” the man in the suit asked, flipping pages until we were at the back of the stack, at a spot marked signature.

My eyes drifted up to the platform again, and I saw the dead man was now actually beginning to sit up. He was looking around the room dully, like someone who has just woken from a long sleep.

“Impossible…” I whispered. “It’s impossible.”

With a shaky hand I signed the contract, my signature barely legible.

“Perfect! Now, I think you’ve deserved to have the rest of the day off, don’t you? To reflect.”

I nodded my head, giving the man his pen back.

“Jim, show this man out. And get him a ride home. He shouldn’t be driving after all he’s been through.”

He patted my shoulder in a condescending way.

“You’ve had such a busy day. Go home and get some sleep.”

I went with the security guard to a waiting vehicle, and the man in the suit called after me.

“Don’t forget about the NDA. You can’t tell anyone about this.”

I turned around, not saying anything.

I realized after I got home that I needed to tell people about this. The NDA be damned, I thought, typing this out to share with all of you.

It’s too important, I told myself. They’re stealing corpses and forcing them into undead servitude. That’s some evil shit. That’s like, end of the world, zombies taking over, apocalypse-level evil shit.

The man in the suit suddenly made me think of a necromancer - some evil sorcerer bent on keeping people alive against their will. I was starting to think that he wasn’t a man at all, but something else, as I thought back to the thing I had seen hiding in his gaze.

Who knows what endless tasks the dead of Disneyland are being forced into by that dark modern-day wizard?

Someone has to do something about it. And maybe this is the first step towards stopping him…

Edit 1: I got a weird email right after posting this. It was a highlighted portion of my contract. I’m trying to make it out, but it’s something about the consequences of breaking the NDA. Something about forfeiture of life and livelihood. I’m starting to get a little worried.

Edit 2: Okay, it’s only been a couple minutes but already I’m getting really freaked out. There’s somebody outside my window. They’ve been moaning and groaning and they’re walking around in my garden, scraping their fingernails against the window glass. I’ve tried calling the cops but it doesn’t go through. It’s like somebody messed with my phone and hacked it so I can’t call the emergency numbers. It just goes through to the Disney Plus Sales Department.

Edit 3: Somebody is trying to get in my front door. There’s more than one of them. I can hear them trampling through the garden and scratching at the wood. I need to get out of here. I’m gonna make a run for it. If you don’t hear from me again, stay away from Disneyland. And whatever you do - try not to die if you go there.

You might wake up as a soldier in the undead army of Walt Disney.

MAD

TCC

YT