It’s been a grim October for the so-called Happiest Place on Earth.
In a TikTok video posted Thursday morning, you can see a heavy police presence near a taped-off pool at Bay Lake Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Resort in Florida. The user who posted the video wrote, “We were told it was a medical emergency. Prayers to the family & those involved.”
Later, the Orange County Medical Examiner’s Office in Orlando confirmed the death to TMZ, saying, “We are still in the process of completing our exams” on the deceased.
This marks the third death on Disney property in just over a week — following a reported suicide on October 14, also at the Contemporary Resort, and another body discovered at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort and Campground on October 21.
And if that wasn’t unsettling enough, back in early October, a person was found unresponsive inside the Haunted Mansion ride and was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
It’s safe to say that this has not been a magical October for Disney.
But this is not the first dark time for the park..
For a park that gets so many a year, it would be inevitable that some not such great things happen from time to time..
The park’s first death happened three years after its grand opening in 1974 when a light bulb filament ignited fumes from glue being used by a 49-year-old carpenter Robert Marshall as he was repairing a boat, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Four-year-old Joel Goode tragically drowned in 1977 after falling into the moat that surrounds Disney’s iconic Cinderella’s Castle.The boy’s parents successfully sued Disney for $4 million, but jurors determined Goode’s parents were partially liable and halved the payout o $2 million, according to the Tampa Times.
11-year-old Long Island boy Robert Johnson Jr., contracted a brain-eating amoebic infection after swimming in the lukewarm, unchlorinated River Country water park.
River Country — permanently closed in 2001 — claimed two others by drowning, one of the park’s most common causes of death.
In 1987, a 6-year-old boy drowned in a crowded swimming pool at the park. The family later sued, claiming there should have been more lifeguards on duty, and Disney settled for $250,000, according to reports.
Lane Graves, 2, was attacked by an alligator on the shore of the Seven Seas Lagoon. The gator pulled the boy into the water, and his body was recovered the following day.
Perhaps the most bizarre death: when Javier Cruz, a cast member wearing a Pluto costume, was run over by the “Beauty and the Beast” float during the Share a Dream Come True Parade in 2014.
One of the deadliest years was 1982, when a 2-year-old girl was hit in the head with a hanging menu board; a 36-year-old woman collapsed at the Polynesian Village Resort; and a 1-year-old girl fell from a moving tram.
In 1989, Long Island woman Patricia Schenck, 33, was killed when the small speed boat she was piloting broadsided a ferry in the Seven Seas Lagoon.
In 1984, South Carolina’s Gary and Dorine Newell, and their infant daughter, Stephanie, died when the single-engine Piper plane they were flying in crashed while attempting an emergency landing in the EPCOT Center parking lot. Then, in 1987, Rick Harper, a 27-year-old cast member, died when the ultralight plane he was piloting crashed during a rehearsal for EPCOT’s “Skyleidoscope” show.
In 2000, a 37-year-old man was struck and killed by the Magic Kingdom Skyway. Ten years later, Massachusetts man Robert Krueger, 69, stepped in front of a Disney bus in the parking lot of Port Orleans Resort.
All of these past heartbreaking moments have us revisiting an old REDDIT thread that asks if people think Disney is a really eerie place..
But.. it is a scary world after all..
