Listen to the podcast for Part 3 here.

Part 3: Adventureland

THE JUNGLE CRUISE
 

The lush foliage surrounding you as you enter Adventureland is the legacy of one of Disney’s oldest and most popular attractions: The Jungle Cruise. The original Jungle Cruise in California’s Disneyland was such a hit, the Florida park had to have one as well. Even under mundane conditions, building an artificial waterway on top of man made tunnels would have been a challenge. What no Disney imagineer understood in 1970 was how dangerous the interaction between ungrounded water and esoteric energy in a ley line nexus mandala can be.
 
As some of you no doubt know, waterways absorb emanations from ley lines. In natural bodies like lakes and rivers, this effect gets diffused through the soil, creating a pervasive but low level of esoteric energy (as is prevalent throughout  the Kissimmee Ley Line Mandala). By creating an artificial waterway not connected to the local ecosystem, Disney unknowingly built an enormous uncontrolled battery that stored and discharged the energy in unpredictable ways. 
 
If you embark on the Jungle Cruise (as my associate Mel insists that you do) you can’t ignore the high density of jokes and puns coming from the boat’s skipper. Jokes had become integral to the ride at Disneyland in the 1960s, and were always part of the Florida attraction. It is well established that ungrounded esoteric energy takes on the characteristics of the psychic environment. In the case of the Jungle Cruise and its comedic patter, humor-related manifestations began in the 1980s, when the waterway had absorbed a critical mass of energy. The need to repeat and create jungle-themed puns became contagious.
 
Comedy club owner Curt Sampson first noted the trend, when he joked on a local Orlando radio show that dozens of amateur comics started showing up at open mic nights telling the same jokes they’d heard that day on the Jungle Cruise ride. My associate Mel followed up on this lead and discovered a notable uptick in comedians crediting the Jungle Cruise as their inspiration to quit their day jobs and pursue (and always fail) at professional comedy. 

Further investigations showed other comedy-related phenomena. University of Florida student Emily Hughes drank water from the ride on a dare and didn’t stop laughing for three months in 1991. Salvador Castillo from Columbia, who spoke no English before the ride, left it fluent in English, but only able to express himself in puns. Dozens more reported dramatic increases in their joke-telling habits, while at least three people who rode the attraction in 1996 never laughed again. 

In the summer of 1998 the Reedy Creek Esoteric Response unit finally decided to take action, after a poverty-stricken would-be comedian who called himself “The Zuke” hid in the park until after hours so he could swim the Jungle Cruise’s water course. He emerged shouting “The back side of water” at a volume impossible to achieve with human vocal chords, disabling park security and custodial personnel with uncontrollable laughter.  A RCER rapid response team rendered him unconscious through unknown means, and evacuated him from the park. 
 
The Zuke was restrained, tested, and released after nine days, and reportedly never told another joke. RCER shut the ride down for several weeks while they researched the problem. Ley energy grounding rods made from a meteorite alloy were incorporated into the robotic hippos and elephants to safely defuse the energy build up and the ride has remained relatively incident free since then, with only 0.007% of guests experiencing any humor-related psychic trauma in 2015. 
 
 

Skulls
 

The skulls of Adventureland deserve close scrutiny. For a family-oriented attraction, Disney World is rife with images of death, nowhere more so than in this section of the park. While most of the skulls are simple macabre scenery, there are three very special skulls that serve a secret purpose. You’ll find them mounted on the wall above the picnic tables adjacent to the Sunshine Terrace Cafe. They’re part of a display of “native” spears and shields that glower over guests as they consume their pineapple Dole Whip frozen treats.
 
My associate Dr. Tyree, although not enamored of Disney’s scenic motifs, finds these treats irresistible. The doctor’s unusually strong “ice cream headaches” while eating in the vicinity of the skulls aroused her suspicions and opened a new subject of inquiry. Detailed photographs combined with the doctor’s own psychic intuitions revealed that these skulls are in fact esoteric broadcasting apparati. They produce very low-powered negative vibrations that are almost undetectable by even the strongest psychics. It took someone of Dr. Tyree’s ingenuity and skill to positively identify them and determine their source and purpose.

These skulls are perfect replicas of the skulls of serial killers who operated in the Reedy Creek region over the past eighty years. Reedy Creek Esoteric Response exhumed the skulls and scanned them down to almost microscopic detail, creating resonance reservoirs of the malevolent memories of these evil men. Only one of them, Jackson Timmens, ever committed a crime on Disney property, but he was known to be a regular park attendee in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Police suspect he picked his targets while in the parks and then followed them home or to their hotels. He is known to have killed seven men and women, and suspected of twice as many more homicides.
 
Why enshrine such malevolence in the Magic Kingdom? The skulls serve much the same purpose as an animal marking its territory in order to warn off rival beasts. The psychic antipathy resonates with the evil that lurks inside other psychopaths, subliminally driving them away from the parks. They subconsciously feel that they are in the “territory” of a more powerful rival and so go elsewhere to commit their crimes. 
 
The skulls seem to be doing their job well.  One unforeseen but beneficial consequence was the arrest of Elias Ogilby, the so-called Suncoast Slayer. After visiting the park for the first time in 2013 with his family, he was overcome by unexplained feelings of guilt and remorse and turned himself in to the park’s security, confessing to five unsolved murders on Florida’s West coast. 
 
As a precaution, those with high psychic sensitivity or long criminal records are advised to consume their Dole Whips at a safe distance from the skulls or suffer increased likelihood trigeminal headaches. 
 
 
 

The Enchanted Tiki Room
 

Our expert in all things Disney, Mel, first came to my attention when he emailed me an analysis of the music in the Enchanted Tiki Room. A veteran park-goer and devotee of Disney lore, he has acquired an archive of audio recordings from the attraction’s decades-long history. The musical show first premiered at Disneyland in 1963 and was part of the Magic Kingdom when it opened in 1971. It’s notable for featuring the first audio-animatronic performers in a Disney theme park, the technology that would become their signature achievement. We shall return to audio-animatronics in Liberty Square. 
 
Mel made it a habit to listen to a different recording of the show every few days, working through them in chronological order. He noticed an unusual anomaly on recordings from 1979 to 1997. The anomaly only occurred on certain dates, which further research proved to be the vernal and autumnal equinoxes of each of those years. During those time periods, the movements of the animatronic beaks become desynchronized from the soundtrack.
 
As Mel explained via email, “One annoying thing about animatronics is you can hear the pieces of the robots clacking against each other. The beaks and flowers in Tiki make these flat, clicking sounds. You hear it in Small World too. But then they were different sometimes. Totally not clicking the way they’re supposed to, with the music.”
 

My own review of Mel’s recordings confirmed his finding. The clicks were different than the normal routine, which was strange enough. More intriguing, they were never different in the same pattern twice. Computer analysis determined a definite long-short interval which we at first thought was Morse Code, but the translation seemed gibberish. We later determined that the clicks were actually binary and correspond to computer code.
 
We’re certain it is computer code, as it bears many similarities to existing machine language protocols, but it also seems to be written for an unknown technology or operating system. The strings of code are not very long, and seem to be simple instructions of some sort. Experts have identified a handful of common software instructions such as function call and variables being defined, but no one we know of has determined how to compile the software. 
 
The coded clacking ceased when the attraction was refurbished in 1998 to include characters from Aladdin and The Lion King. A mysterious fire on January 12, 2011 damaged the refurbishments. The Tiki Room was repaired, the new characters removed, and the original show reinstated. The coded transmissions resumed on the next autumnal equinox. 
 
Our best analysis suggests that the code is sending instructions to someone, but we cannot determine who is receiving them. It is an astonishingly inefficient method of communication, not dissimilar from the mailboxes on Main Street. I suspect that whoever is responsible for the code is using the esoteric energy of the Adventureland environs to send the message some extraordinary distance through either space or time, perhaps both. 
 
 

The Blue Room
 

As you pass by the entrance to Pirate’s of the Caribbean on your way towards Frontierland, look to the left of the archway. You’ll see a blue, Spanish-style building in keeping with the plaza’s piratical theme, with a narrow set of stairs that lead up to a wooden door. This is the entrance to the so-called Blue Room.
 
My former assistant, before he or she disappeared, was planning to meet with a Reedy Creek Esoteric Response informant who promised information and possibly even entrance to the chamber behind the blue room’s door. It has been the subject of many wild rumors over the past decade, including baseless supposition that it is a portal to another dimension, the entrance to a secret prison, and a storage room for emergency weaponry to be used in the event of an esoteric invasion.
 
Dr. Tyree has confirmed that the area around the Blue Room is a psychic dead zone, suggesting that in addition to the lock on the door (and it is kept locked - Mel checked on several occasions) the room has esoteric barriers as well. Although the park’s security is very adept at finding and removing hidden cameras left to record events after hours, there’s not much they can do about a paying guest who chooses to innocently loiter in the area all day long. Mel did just that, keeping a camera constantly trained on the door for every hour the park was open in an eleven day period of September, 2015. 
 

Only cast members with blue name tags ever entered the door during this time. Each of them had their own key - a large, brass key in an antique style. Each blue badge cast member entered alone and no one ever exited from the door. Mel did get confirmation of one individual entering the room twice, once on a Wednesday morning and then again on a Friday evening. Clearly whatever is beyond that door has another exit, or those who enter stay there until the park closes.
 
On the twelfth day of his vigil, Mel was approached by another guest who spoke in a language that Mel did not recognize. He does not recall any distinguishing details about the guest, but the stranger showed him a map of the Magic Kingdom identical to those given out by the park, except that it had something resembling Nordic Runes instead of the Roman alphabet. The mystery guest seemed to be asking for directions. Mel was unable to help him, and the guest walked away towards Frontierland. 
 
Within an hour Mel began to suffer severe stomach cramps and was forced to leave the park. He did not recover from his food poisoning-like symptoms for five days. Now, whenever he returns to the Magic Kingdom, he has found that if he spends more than an hour within Adventureland, the stomach cramps return. The discomfort dissipates as soon as he enters Frontierland or the Castle hub area. For someone so enamored with the rides of Adventureland, this has been a severe blow, but Mel’s devotion to our research agenda remains undimmed in the face of this setback. 
 
We continue to pursue leads about what lies within the Blue Room. 
 
 

Pirate’s Apothecary
 

The Reedy Creek Esoteric Response service was formed sometime before 1975, when the first recorded instance of their intervention occurred. They were responsible for removing the glowing crabs that had begun to appear at noon in the waters of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. We know this because a guest named Ralph Schmigelski reported the crabs to a cast member and was subsequently questioned at length by three men he described in his unpublished memoir as “menacing, serious, and strange.” They seem to have suspected Mr. Schmigelski of causing the crab phenomenon, and they may have been right, since he was in fact an avid student of parapsychology and had recently joined the apocalyptic Sun’s Smite cult that was then thriving in central Florida.
 
The three men showed Mr. Schmigelski credentials that identified them as agents of a Reedy Creek Esoteric Response unit. Although RCER staff very rarely produce such credentials, we have found at least fourteen other instances between 1975 and 2013 when they did. In each case, they do so as part of a process of confiscating something from a guest. For Mr. Schmigelski, it was the reclaiming of a glowing crab, which he had plucked from the Pirates of the Caribbean water and hidden in his backpack. 
 
While most of the RCER’s job is trying to cover up or forestall esoteric phenomena, the so-called “Pirate Apothecary” beneath the Blue Room and near the restrooms is one of the unusual locations where esoterica is on public display. It is a small alcove stuffed with strange artifacts, jars of odd specimens, and various fetishes and treasures. Among them you can see a jar of crab claws, the very same ones that Ralph Schmigelski was questioned about in 1975. To most guests it’s simply a bit of flavor texture to the Caribbean Plaza area, perhaps associated with the Calypso character from the movies. 

We obtained an internal email describing the Pirate Apothecary’s purpose to a worried Disney executive. In most matters, Reedy Creek Esoteric Response operates outside of the purview of the park’s business executives, but in this case there was pushback when RCER insisted on adding the bizarre apothecary scenery. Why, the executive  asked, put actual esoterica on public display where it is exposed to thousands of guests each day? 
 
The unnamed RCER operative explained that the items had been drained of over 99% of their ley line energy, but that they wanted to retain them for potential future use. Displaying them in public lets their minute remaining energy dissipate into the environment, whereas sealing them would cause the energy to concentrate in the items. The RCER operative assured the executive that the “bleed-off” will produce only a very, very mild “frisson of excitement or passing danger” in most guests. 
 
He or she goes on to note that field tests have shown that guests exposed to such “bleed-off” report a 6% increase in satisfaction when interviewed as they leave the parks. This final statistic seems to be all the reassurance the executive needed, but I harbor suspicions that RCER has some secret purpose for the display. Investigations continue.
 
Now, let’s move on to the infamous environs of Frontierland, which contains one of the most terrifying and bizarre esoteric locations in the entire Reedy Creek Ley Line Nexus Mandala.