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

People look for Walt Disney under a ride at Disneyland.

His ashes are in this small garden.

Walter Elias Disney died on 15 December 1966 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank. Two days later, on 17 December, he was cremated.

The death certificate lists a Forest Lawn mortuary embalmer.

A private service followed. Immediate family only.

The marked garden sits in the Court of Freedom section of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale.

It is to the left of the entrance to the Freedom Mausoleum, in what cemetery maps call the Little Garden of Communion.

Snopes, working from the death certificate and later court papers, records that the Disney estate paid Forest Lawn for interment property and that the specific plot was not chosen until 19 September 1967. The plaque in the garden names him anyway.

Forest Lawn staff will not point visitors to celebrity graves. Guidebooks and Find a Grave do.

The garden is on public grounds, behind a low gate, with a small bronze and a mermaid figure that is not the 1989 film.

The cryonics story started in a tabloid weeks after the death.

Disney's daughter Diane wrote in 1972 that her father had not asked to be frozen and that she doubted he had heard of the practice.

James Bedford, the first person cryopreserved, was frozen in January 1967, after the cremation.

The hospital memory across the street from the studio covers the death. This pin is the place the family chose to put a name.

Walk quietly. Do not photograph other mourners. Posted hours apply.

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