Biography | Walt Disney — The Garden Left of the Freedom Mausoleum

The death is already pinned across Buena Vista Street. This pin is where the family put the ashes.

Walt Disney died on the morning of 15 December 1966 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank.

A private funeral was held the next afternoon, 16 December, at the Little Church of the Flowers on this grounds.

The death certificate records cremation on 17 December. Forest Lawn's own mortuary handled it.

The urn sits in a small private garden beside the Freedom Mausoleum, in the Court of Freedom section, on the Glendale park at 1712 South Glendale Avenue.

Find a Grave logs the plot as the Little Garden of Communion, map G43, to the left of the mausoleum entrance as you face it.

Lillian Disney was later placed here. So were other members of the immediate family.

The cryogenic story that attached itself to the death is a later invention. The first documented human cryopreservation was James Bedford in January 1967, weeks after this funeral.

Diane Disney Miller called the frozen-body tale a myth. The cemetery record is ordinary.

Forest Lawn asks visitors to keep to posted hours and to leave other graves alone. The garden gate is sometimes shut.

The pin is the garden by the Freedom Mausoleum, not the hospital and not the studio lot.

Photo: Arthur Dark, 19 April 2014, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Boy Scouts of America, 1946, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.