text: I worked as a Disneyland employee for 30 years. Disney is a pretty good employer, giving me a retirement package that’ll take care of me for the rest of my twilight years. It’s been many seasons since I pulled my last shift. They even had a retirement party for me at Club 33, which was very special. I started off as a suit back in the 70s, doing insurance adjustments for the park and all its new rides. It was a pretty good gig, but I barely got to spend any time in the park itself. I ended up taking a major pay cut when I saw that a Ride Operator position opened up for my favorite attraction: The Haunted Mansion. I walk my dog Pluto by those gates nearly every morning. We go up and down these streets for hours, taking in the familiar sights and smells of Anaheim. Sometimes I’ll see other retired members of the old guard and we’ll exchange some old stories. I like getting coffee at that mexican joint, they put cinnamon in it and don’t overcharge. Even with a nice pension, you gotta find all the good deals, you know? After coffee and walking Pluto around I’ll go home and open a clamshell or two, maybe heat up one of those TV dinners. That’s pretty much how the days go for me. The nights on the other hand, well, that’s a whole different story. For a guy whos worked in a Haunted Mansion his whole life, you’d think he’d get used to all the ghosts. Take it from me, you never do. I know the names and faces of all of them. I thought they’d start to go away over time, like memories. I can’t seem to shake them. You know the mirror bit with the hitchhikers? Its kinda like that. But when you’re a normal park guest, you just get these nice funny memories. When you’ve seen what I’ve seen, those ghosts ride with you all the way home. The first time I ever saw a dead body was on the job. Real religious guy had his ticker stop after seeing Madam Leota’s head talking to him in that crystal ball. I mean, normal people like you and I know this stuff aint real. But I think these old timers who get talked into it by their grandkids, I mean, they got scared of the mummy and the wolf guy in those black and white movies. Maybe it was just his time to go? He had slumped over in his pod, and I noticed pretty instantly on the cameras that he was in distress. I hit the kill switch, which stops the entire ride. From there, I exited the control booth and made my way into the ride. I was able to free him and lay him on his side. You see, back then we didn’t do CPR or any of that. I knew to check his breathing and his pulse, but I couldn’t really tell whether the old guy was still among the living. Turns out he wasn’t, and the doctors said he died pretty much instantly. The whole thing gave me quite the fright, and I was pretty jumpy for a couple of weeks there. One of my buddies from the insurance department got ahold of me one night and said that the old guy’s family was really putting the park through the wringer. I’m talking a damn near seven figure settlement. They paid it though, because if there’s anything the Disney company has, it’s a bottomless pit of dough. They’re used to throwing huge chunks of the stuff at every problem they encounter. Need a hard to get permit to expand the park into public property? Bam, done. Need to pay off a boatload of people who got sick during the Country Bear salmonella fiasco? Cha Ching, everyone’s happy. You get the picture. Money fixes everything... but you’d probably be shocked to find out the lengths Disney will go to save a buck. There was a kid who fell off Splash Mountain and got injured pretty badly. Like, the kinds of injuries that entire generations of Walt’s family would have to pay for. Treatments, surgeries, medications, all of it... and that’s AFTER the seven figure settlement. It really spooked my old department, as well as the shareholders. Who would’ve thought one lousy kid could cause such a fuss? I mean, at this point Disney was the largest and most successful company in the world. You’d think that they’d find some way to keep this sort of thing from happening again. Well, turns out they did. They called all of us loyal long haulers into a meeting one day. I thought the whole thing was a joke, like a prank or something. They were rolling out this parkwide program called “The Sleeping Beauty Protocol”. It was a type of contingency to make sure there weren’t any more situations which would cost the park any extra money. As it turns out, a dead guest is much more inexpensive than an injured guest. Well, despite my better judgement, I agreed to this whole Sleeping Beauty Protocol. This is what it entailed: Each ride and park section had a team of three Fairy Godmothers. I guess in my case, I’d be a Godfather. These were normal employees, like ride operators or cast members. They each had a key to a mini-fridge hidden in their section. Within this mini fridge were a series of discreet looking syringes, which we would administer to the occasional severely injured guest. We called this deadly injection the “Witches Apple”. I heard it didn’t hurt or nothing, it just put them to sleep. Pretty crazy, huh? We all had to sign nondisclosure agreements, but the pay increase was incredible. I was wearing a custom Rolex watch after my first year of being part of the Sleeping Beauty Protocol Team. Luckily I only had to give out three Witches Apples during my entire tenure at the park. The first one went pretty swell. A lighting fixture had come loose and fell on one of the guests in the Graveyard Jamboree section of the Haunted Mansion. I, of course, was working the booth. I hit the kill switch, but decided to leave the lights off. The insurance guys made the call within a minute or so, and they called a Code Sleeping Beauty on him. I grabbed my key, unlocked the fridge and shagged ass. We had to make sure to do this quick and efficiently, and make sure there were no witnesses. I was able to reach the guest, whose head looked like a split cantaloupe. I’ll never forget the gurgling sound they made as the blood ran out their mouth and nose. I pulled the cap off of the syringe, located their AC vein in their forearm, and then performed my first successful euthanasia. The gurgling stopped, and voila! Old man Walt Disney was smiling down on me that day, that’s for sure. The second time was when I was on my break outside Thunder Mountain Railroad, tucking into a delicious caramel covered apple. I like standing by the tracks and listening to the rail car roll by overhead. Its such a satisfying sound--so powerful. Well, as luck would have it, there was a loud mechanical snap that happened just as the train car sped by, and a piece of metal from the track came loose. Nobody on the ride itself got injured, but the metal shard plunged into a ladies chest right across from me. I mean, this thing hit her with so much force she slid across the ground several feet. My pager began buzzing immediately. I knew what the numbers stood for. It was time for us to clear the scene and let loose the Sleeping Beauty Protocol. We quickly ushered everyone out of the area, and I waited for the Adventure Land team to show up with the damn apple. They were taking too long, and I was starting to get nervous. They finally showed up after three minutes. The poor kid’s hands were shaking, looking at this barely alive woman with a metal shard stickin out of her chest. At this rate he was gonna drop the damn syringe, so I grabbed it and plunged it into the womans jugular. Another day, another dollar saved. The third one was the worst though, and I really didn’t get all the credit for it. Right before I retired this big fat guy fell out of the car on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. The car kept going, but he stayed there laying on the track. You see, those older rides don’t have such good cameras. I happened to be covering a shift that day, and I was dozing off at the controls. I woke up to a scream, which I found out came from the fat sonofabitch who got ran over by the next two cars. People were screaming to stop the ride, but the button was stuck. By the time I was able to unstick the piece of crap, all hell had broken loose. People were running, screaming, filming it all on their nifty new smartphones. I pushed my way through the many colorful sets which made up the frog ride, and the blood trail led me right to the guy. His legs were twisted in all sorts of mangled directions, chunks of flesh stuck in the chains and gears in the track. He was sitting up against a 2D cutout of wooden crates, looking at me with desperate eyes. He was wide awake and talking. “My legs! My goddamn legs! Look at them! Oh my god please help me!” he yelled. The code was called and my coworker came in with the magical cocktail that’d make this big fellas dreams come true. They let me do the honors. I pulled off the cap and stood over him. “What the hell is that thing? What are you giving me?!” He shouted accusingly. I told him it was for the pain while we waited for the EMTs. Well, I was half right. I administered the Witches Apple into his blood speckled arm, and he immediately started seizing. He didn’t die though. He just breathed hard, occasionally thrashing around and moaning. I got a call from the shot callers upstairs and they said videos from the smartphones had gained such attention on social media that the EMTs were actually on their way. This was bad. We had to improvise on this one. There was a new hire who wasn’t on the Sleeping Beauty Protocol team per se, but he was a suited cast member. Nobody would be able to really identify him coming in or out of the Mr. Toads ride. I knew he was on shift as Donald Duck, and I quickly coordinated with the suits to pull him aside for a favor. You see, there was one thing I knew about this new recruit. He was big, strong, and trained in brazilian jiu jitsu. I knew he would have what it takes to finish the job. Time was running out, and we got a suit on site to get the kid up to speed. They offered him a “Dreams Come True” package, which was a serious amount of up-front money, a pay raise, and of course, a nondisclosure agreement. The kid signed, pen held in his big white donald duck hand. They escorted him into the ride, and over to the portly liability, sitting up again wide awake. “What the hell? Donald Duck? Whats going on here? What did you shoot me up with? That stuff almost killed me! You’re all gonna pay for what you’re doing here!” He shouted, pointing at us accusingly with his weak semi-mangled gesture. Donald looked over at me, and I nodded approvingly. Donald moved in quick, positioning himself behind the fat man. He placed him in a rear naked chokehold, squeezing with all of his might. He even started singing in a perfect duck voice “A dream is a wish your heart makes... when you’re fast asleep” from Cinderella. He sang so gently and soothingly while he drained the life from the man’s body. His rubbery, brokens legs stopped thrashing and went limp. I’d like to say that the guest died with a smile on their face, given that they were gifted a top notch Disney quality experience in their last moments. But nope, it was a twisted, oxygen deprived grimace, frozen forever in my memory. His loss though, Disney really goes out of their way to deliver one-of-a-kind custom tailored experiences for all their guests. Especially special ones like this now blob of lifeless grey flesh. That was the last one I was ever part of. I don’t regret being part of the Sleeping Beauty Protocol. Disney was a good employer and they took great care of me. People die all the time, but how many people can say that they died at the Magic Kingdom? I’ll tell you, only the ones that wake me up at night. Only the ones who ride in the back seat of my car. Only the ones who look at me from behind the closed gates every morning. It’s not just the ones that I gave the Apple to; It’s all of them. To my understanding, the Apple has been given to more than a hundred guests over the years. I think one day I’ll end up joining them. Maybe someday when Pluto’s gone and my legs cant carry me through my daily walks anymore, I’ll have myself a little accident on my favorite ride. Maybe then you might find me dancing with all my friends in the ballroom, flying around the graveyard, or maybe even riding home with a guest in the backseat of a car.