Biography | Walt Disney — He Died Across the Street From His Own Studio

People repeat a cryonics story about Walt Disney that started in a tabloid a few weeks after he died.

The documented end is here, at St. Joseph's Hospital, 501 South Buena Vista Street in Burbank, on the morning of 15 December 1966.

The hospital sits directly across Buena Vista from the Walt Disney Studios. He was 65.

A chest X-ray that autumn found a tumor in his left lung. Surgeons operated at this hospital on 6 November 1966.

He came back to the studio, then returned to the same wards. The death certificate cause was circulatory collapse following lung cancer.

The New York Times dated Los Angeles, 15 December, reported the death the next morning on page one.

The cryonics rumor is later invention. He was not frozen here.

The campus across the street kept working. Roy O. Disney finished the Florida project and put his brother's name on it.

The hospital building the visitor sees is a later Providence campus on the same site the Sisters of Providence opened in 1943.

Photo: NASA, public domain, portrait of Walt Disney, 1954.