Biography | Walt Disney — The Hospital Across the Street From His Studio

People still repeat a tabloid story that Disney was frozen under a ride.

He died in this hospital, and he was cremated.

Walter Elias Disney died at 9:35 a.m. on 15 December 1966 at St. Joseph's Hospital, Burbank, at the age of sixty-five.

The building stands at 501 South Buena Vista Street, across the street from the studio the brothers occupied after they left Hyperion.

The Los Angeles Times the next morning reported acute circulatory collapse. A cardiologist was at the bedside. Studio and hospital spokesmen would not name a more specific cause that day.

He had entered the hospital in early November and undergone surgery to remove part of his left lung. He was sent home, then readmitted on 5 December, his sixty-fifth birthday, and did not leave again.

Funeral rites were private. An urn was placed in the family garden at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, in the Court of Freedom section.

The cryonics rumor began weeks later in a tabloid that claimed a reporter had seen a cylinder in a hospital storeroom. No evidence has ever supported it.

The hospital is now Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center. The campus has been rebuilt and expanded. The pin is the standing hospital, not a 1966 ward interior.

Disney had spent his last working months on the Florida project that became Walt Disney World. His brother Roy finished that park and dedicated it in 1971.

A visitor looking west from this block still faces the studio wall.

Photo: Junkyardsparkle, 16 February 2014, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.