Epcult

A guide to the occult secrets of the Disney World theme parks.

Stone Patches

Follow the ghostly hoofprints carved in the cement paths as they lead you out of Liberty Square and into the Tangled-themed rest area that marks the transition into Fantasyland, the historic heart and soul of the Magic Kingdom. When the park opened, Fantasyland contained many of the most popular attractions, including the saccharine It’s a Small World, the now demolished Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But for the moment fight nostalgia’s stultifying grasp and instead look to the ground beneath your feet. Look at the stones.

Most of Fantasyland, like most of the Magic Kingdom, has cement pathways. In Fantasyland these are interrupted by rough, circular patches of flagstones. Presumably these are a decorative gesture towards a medieval town, a bit of flavor without the unsteady footing and increased cost of a fully flagstoned walkway. It is, contrary to most Disney environmental design, a bit too gestural, too half-finished for my tastes. But now that I know the true cost and, more importantly, the true purpose of these stones, I understand and appreciate their role.

A trio of self-proclaimed Druids appeared in the Magic Kingdom on April 17, 2012. I have since unearthed reports of similar or perhaps the same Druids visiting the park five other times since it opened: 1977, 1984, 1992, 1995, and 2002. The 2012 appearance is the only one recorded on video and uploaded to Youtube. To be clear, the Druids did not, as far as I can ascertain, materialize in the park. They paid entry fees and, despite their strange behavior, are likely corporeal, human beings.

Reedy Creek Esoteric Response had an open file on the Druids, knew they were mapping the ley lines. They were listed as Inquisitive Class Entities of Interest in the RCER logs that I was able to see, which were made before the events of 2012.

“Save Our Stones! Not Your Land!” the trio started chanting in unison shortly after noon on April 17th. The video uploaded to Youtube begins at 12:04 pm, and it is clear that the protest had already begun. The three then shout a series of names, “Scorhill! Boscawen-Un! Lochbuie! Castlerigg! Severed Stones all!

The protest continues for another six minutes, the Druids shouting over the calm requests from park Cast Members for them to “please stop shouting.” Uniformed security arrives and orders them to stop at once, at which point the three Druids cease and allow themselves to be escorted out of the park. Reports indicate that they were ushered off property and not detained, and there’s no indication that RCER was aware of the event until after the fact. However, the Druids have not appeared again, and online forum activity from dozens of accounts claiming to be associated with them allege that the three disappeared after the incident and haven’t been heard from since.

The names the druids chanted correspond to famous standing stone circles in the British Isles that mark known ley line nexus points. Look closely at the stone patches, and you’ll see the variety of minerals within them. What you won’t see, unless you chip away a sample, immediately seal it in a psychically neutral leather vessel, and grind it to a powder and process it in an alembic within six hours, is that the flagstones are actually composites. They are the lithic equivalent of particle board.

As the protesting Druids discovered, it seems that RCER or corporate imagineers have secretly taken large amounts of stone from some of the more prominent ley line nexus standing stone circles and incorporated them into these stone patches throughout Fantasyland. The pulverized ancient stones, rich with esoteric energy, serve as grounding pads that dampen the ley lines that run through them. Dr. Tyree’s calculations suggest that their presence reduces apparitions, abnormal phenomena, psychic dysmorphia, and eerie dream syndrome among guests by as much as 17%, and over 22% for cast members.

This modest but measurable benefit comes at a cost, as those terrified by the Scorhill Spectre, the Panther of Lochbuie, and the Seven Sisters of Castlerigg can all testify to. Negative esoteric phenomena in the original locations of the stones has, by my rough estimates, increased on average sevenfold in the past decade, and seems to be rising. Clearly, RCER doesn’t view those occurrences as their problem.


 

Prince Charming Regal Carousel

The carousel is a staple of amusement parks and is a powerful symbol of childish delight dating back centuries. Wanting to incorporate some genuine history into its new Magic Kingdom, Disney acquired a very impressive specimen that is legitimately old. This carousel originally ran its endless circles in 1917 in Detroit’s Belle Island Park before eventually moving on to Olympic Park, New Jersey and then coming to serve out the remainder of its days when the Magic Kingdom opened in 1971.

Nostalgia is a powerful force and a key element in Disney’s stock and trade. Not only do the park’s decor and attractions leverage nostalgic intellectual property, the experiences on offer are designed to create lasting memories that are destined to become nostalgia-fodder for decades to come. Beyond its mild attractions as a ride, the carousel is in fact a literal nostalgia generator, thanks to the esoteric properties of the Kissimmee Ley Line Mandala.

Riding the carrousel creates an unfilled reservoir for fond memories in a person’s brain. Curiously, the older the rider, the more effective this psychic sculpting seems to be. Children under seven seem largely unchanged, while for adults over forty-five the ride can sometimes be overwhelming. This unfilled reservoir is like a dessicated sponge, ready to absorb any sentiment available and attach a feeling of wistful remembrance one might characterize as, “wasn’t that great? Why can’t now be like that?”

While in theory any experience could be thus transformed into a nostalgic lodestone, the carousel is in the middle of the Magic Kingdom and Disney World suffuses the very air with experience: sight, sound, sensation, smell. I’ve experimented with headphones and opaque glasses and was able to use the carousel's mind-altering properties to finally attune my affection of the writings of James Joyce to a level commensurate with academic expectations.

Mel maintains that this effect is one of the most benign phenomena in the park, and always makes a point of taking a few rides while there. Dr. Tyree warns that this jeopardizes his objectivity as a researcher and refuses to “taint” herself with what she calls, “The most insidious of social toxins, nostalgia.”

Their debate continues, but I should add that the effect on Disney Cast Members who work both at the ride and in the Utilidoor area beneath it do show long term Disneyphilia that extends into all aspects of their lives. In 2015 a duel broke out between two long-time cast members over the artistic merits of famed animator Ward Kimball, fought with prop weapons taken from the walls of Gaston’s Tavern. Both men were wounded, but curiously neither of them was fired. There seems to be some recognition on RCER’s part that such incidents are an inevitable side-effect of the carousel and thus not any victim’s fault.  
 

Be Our Guest and New Fantasyland

Proceed forward through the free-standing castle-like wings or walls the stand between the carousel and the more recent additions to Fantasyland, a section of the park often referred to by Disney enthusiasts as “New Fantasyland.” This area saw massive overhaul and redesign in from 2012 to 2014, with old and revered attractions wiped away and replaced with newer and more modern design elements that have transformed the very heart of the park.

Change has always been part of the Disney parks. Nothing, including the stones, is ever set in stone, and while many elements are considered “classic” or “fan favorites,” in truth nothing here is sacred. For cynics, these mercurial metamorphoses are symptomatic of corporate masters driven not by vision but the almighty dollar. And so it must seem, even to those who think they are making the decisions. They tell themselves, the park must not only keep pace with modern tastes, it must help set them. Disney World should define the future of themed entertainment venues, not rest on its laurels while newer theme parks like Universal Studios lure away their customers. All those business concerns are real, but they do not represent all of reality.

When you walk through those gestural walls, you are not just entering the newest additions to a famous theme park. You are entering the beachhead for an invasion of reality, the front lines of an esoteric undertaking of tremendous potential importance. Of this I have no doubt, the proof is everywhere (as you shall see). What remains uncertain is this: who is invading whom?

Ground zero for this new front in the struggle to shape reality is before you, just across the bridge. You’ll see what seems at first glance to be a castle high up on a mountain. This is the castle of The Beast, and of course it’s not far off and there is no mountain. There’s a model and a building sheathed in concrete made up to look like stone. This is the fun, obvious trick of the eye, the pleasant distraction of forced perspective that puts your mind at ease for more subtle manipulations.

The bridge leads to Be Our Guest, a fine dining restaurant themed to the hit animated film, Beauty and the Beast. It was the first place in the Magic Kingdom to sell alcohol and has been booked up solid ever since it opened in November, 2012. It has since added lunch and breakfast seatings as well, which are also very difficult to get reservations for.

Due to reasons of budget and time, I never was able to get a reservation for my Former Assistant (as far as my records show). Mel had been there twice before he joined our research group,but that was before he became aware of the park’s esoteric mysteries and was simply a former cast member turned fan-blogger. I was able to shift funds and make enough credit available for Mel and Dr. Tyree to have breakfast there with their scientific equipment ready, differences put aside, and investigatory eyes wide open.

What they found inside Be Our Guest demands a great deal of additional research. While neither of them judge the space esoterically dangerous in the same way as Tom Sawyer Island, the sheer density of minor manifestations inside the restaurant is startling. There are four discrete rooms or sections within, each distinct in both decor and esoteric energy.

The entrance hall and welcome area, where guests place their orders, is filled with talking suits of armor, touch screens, and other typical tricks of a Disney park queue. Each guest also receives a plastic puck with a rose design that tracks their seat and order via magic band technology. Having reverse engineered magic band technology, Mel has created his own device which looks like a cell phone but in fact detects magic band sensors and other RFID scanning technology. The entire building is full of such scanners. Guests are monitored from multiple angles and with a variety of invisible energies at all times. Every step, every bite, every word, every sip is tracked.

The Ballroom is the central dining area, and it recreates the splendor of the most famous sequence from the animated movie, where Beast and Belle danced beneath one of cinema’s first CGI creations: a curiously flat chandelier. That odd-looking piece of decor looks even odder recreated in real life, with arms and other elements just as flat and narrow as the movie version. Dr. Tyree experienced a “unaccustomed happiness” in the room, which she found “quite disturbing.”

To the right is a brightly-lit room with an enormous rotating statue of Beast and Belle in each other's arms, surrounded with paintings from their story on every wall. It is a pleasant chamber that celebrates their love. That is to say, it casts as triumph that joining of human and inhuman. Beast here is majestic, handsome, and powerful. He is, in short, aspirational. The well-coiffed and puissant humanoid we might all aspire to be. Mel’s sensing device detected strong broadcast signals of an unknown purpose coming from the base of the statue. His preliminary findings indicate that the signal is activating some hidden feature in magic bands and possibly other, hidden devices embedded in the room’s seating.

The final room, the west wing, is dark and foreboding. It represents the Beast’s dark side, where he lives in shame, his anger uncontrollable. But it is also the repository for two powerful esoteric artifacts: the magic mirror and the rose. These are recreated here in what amounts to a shrine, with impressive special effects and a thunder and lightning atmosphere. Although Dr. Tyree expected to feel dread or fear in the space, given the psychic signaling of the decor, instead she found herself flooded with an emotion she described as, “adrenaline enthused, ready for action.” Mel’s sensors detected a flood of signals so dense he couldn’t separate them.

While guests dine in only one room, almost all of them move into each of the three chambers, just to get a look. The combined array of electronic and psychic signals clearly shows careful design to have a calculated effect on visitors, but just what that effect is I cannot yet say. While much more research is needed, I have strong suspicions that Reedy Creek Esoteric Response had a firm hand in the design and construction of Be Our Guest. More than any other public space in the Magic Kingdom, this restaurant tames, channels, and exploits the esoteric energy of the Kissimmee Ley Line Mandala. Where Tom Sawyer Island represents a dangerous rift between worlds, Be Our Guest is a perfectly engineered oil rig designed to extract value from the primordial chaos seething beneath our feet.

But Be Our Guest is not the only Beauty and the Beast inspired attraction in the park, nor is it the most mysterious. For that we must spend some time with Belle herself, next door.

 

Enchanted Tales with Belle

Enchanted Tales with Belle hides itself away behind trees and wooden fences, enhancing the illusion of an inventor’s cottage tucked out in the woods, away from prying eyes. It is not a ride, nor is it exactly a character meet and greet with one of the park’s costumed “princesses.” There are complicated animatronics and stunning illusions within, all in the guise of recruiting children to act out a little fairy tale.

The Beauty and the Beast animated film from 1991 was an enormous critical and commercial success for Disney, and played a vital role in reviving the company’s sagging animation department. With multiple Academy Award nominations and wins for best score and best song, it brought Disney’s cartoons back into the realm of real artistic achievement that Walt Disney had originally yearned for in the 1930s and 40s. But Disney’s was not the first filmic version of this fairy tale to breathe new life into a crumbling cultural institution,

In 1946 surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau released La Belle et la Bête, a film created expressly to resuscitate the French film industry in the wake of war, collaboration, and Nazi occupation. Cocteau’s film was every bit as wondrous and successful in his era as the Disney movie was 45 years later. The most important difference is not one of style, animation, color, or song, but one of intent. The Disney creative team stumbled their way through scripting and production without a clear plan and with no firm grasp on the source material or what had come before. Cocteau was, according to my sources, creating a powerful esoteric working designed to conjure up the dormant imaginations of a bedraggled France, and launch it into a new era of creative prosperity no matter what occult forces he might release in the process. The results of Cocteau’s esoteric operation in France are better handled by experts in the field, but I am well-qualified to explicate their legacy in the Magic Kingdom.

Cocteau came out of the surrealist movement in pre-war France, where he had a tempestuous relationship with most of the other surrealists. As detailed in the relatively obscure text, Le Livre des Fourmis by poet Henri Salem, the Paris surrealists were enthralled by the esoteric power of dreams and their ability to affect this and other worlds. Cocteau’s explorations convinced him that he could tap into this dream world through his film and use the occult connection to reignite the dormant French cinematic imagination.

One of Cocteau’s most striking additions to the original fairytale is the concept of the Beast’s servants transformed into the castle’s furnishings. The talking, singing, dancing clocks, candles, and dishes of the Disney film are among its most endearing and memorable elements, an act of imagination with a direct line to the surrealist’s esoteric working. While the simple special effects in the 1946 movie are compelling because of the story and cinematography, the animated versions are lovable because of the art and the performances. It is not until “Enchanted Tales with Belle” opened in 2012 that the esoteric circuit connected and the true world-shifting potential of this imagery was unleashed.

All of Disney World revels in blurring the line between real and unreal, living and inanimate. Cocteau’s vision of animate furnishings raises the specter of objects that have feelings, things that express thoughts. It creates a world where the fabricated has as much claim to personhood as the born. For children, whose grasp on reality remains inchoate through their formative years, the concept of a talking candlestick is neither possible nor impossible, it’s just a part of the story. For adults who know better, assaults on the line between life and artifice can be much more disturbing.

There are three powerful effects in Enchanted Tales With Belle: a wondrous mirror that transforms into an open door that guests walk through. A talking, moving Madame Wardrobe that interacts with children to give them costumes for the story time sequence, and a candelabra-sized Lumiere animatronic that interacts with the guests and introduces the cast member playing Belle. These three mysteries usher guests forward through reality, drawing upon the psychic connections made first by Cocteau and then added to by Disney’s film. By the time Belle arrives in the library to guide the children through her story, the accompanying parents and adult cast members have established a connection to the collective dream psyche shared by all humans.

Cast members playing Belle have a well-documented propensity for developing what Reedy Creek Esoteric Response terms Audiotron Syndrome: the inability to discern at first glance the difference between living beings and simulacra such as statues, mannequins, or Disney's own audio animatronics. In most cases, this presents itself as merely a passing moment of confusion, but in rare instances the cast member comes to regard anything “with a face” as a living, sentient being. This delusion can actually be an asset when performing in the park, but can make normal life very complicated.

Guests, usually the parents of children in the story sequence with Belle, often develop a more mild version of this syndrome. RCER terms it Simulacrum Sensitivity. Those afflicted don’t consciously believe that man-made items with faces are alive, but they nevertheless develop strong emotional relationships with them, often responding almost as strongly to them as they do to living beings. Thus dolls, toys, stuffed animals, and various curios and tchotchkes become beloved and deserve protection and care. Repeat visitors to Enchanted Tales show a well-documented 39% increased likelihood of becoming collectors of Disney memorabilia and a 3% increased likelihood of become hoarders.

It is clear from the mere existence of the figures cited above that both RCER and Disney’s corporate side are well aware of this phenomenon. RCER harnesses the ley line mandala in Be Our Guest to power the connection to the dream world in Enchanted Tales With Belle. The two attractions together seem to justify a large portion of RCER’s operating budget to the corporate accountants. Perhaps RCER thus feels justified with blurring the borders between worlds in order to fund their other operations. Perhaps they think it is safe. I have grave concerns. 

It seems likely that they have traced the phenomenon back to the shared dream connection established by Cocteau in 1946. This may in part account for the new Beauty and the Beast film released in 2017. Other evidence, including sleep monitors secretly embedded in select Disney World resort hotel rooms, indicates that they are actively researching this shared dreamscape and seeking a way to repeat the esoteric working that Cocteau undertook in 1946. Worryingly, there is evidence that Cocteau was only able to achieve his connection in the wake of the massive psychic toll World War 2 took on France. One is left wondering what price RCER would be willing to pay to create such a connection if they thought they needed even more power and influence within the Disney corporate hierarchy.
 

Under the Sea - Journey of The Little Mermaid

It is by now well-established that the water elements in the Magic Kingdom are a source of esoteric instability throughout the park. So it comes as no surprise that the ride that once immersed guests completely beneath the waters of the Kissimmee Ley Line Mandala was long ago shut down for a variety of technical and occult reasons. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a crowd favorite and a significant attraction in the park’s esoteric history, and is covered in detail in Case File: Secrets of the Nautilus.

Mel laments the loss of the original ride, which was his favorite until it closed in 1994. Every visit he makes a point of waiting in line for the Little Mermaid ride so he can see the image of the Nautilus submarine carved into the rock wall that surrounds the small pool in the queue area. He has several times requested funding to take the Disney Cruise down to Disney’s Castaway Key, where one of the ride’s original submarines is kept in the lagoon for guests to appreciate while snorkeling. This is beyond our budget, and as we shall see, might not be a wise decision.

The waters of that submarine ride were drained long ago, replaced by several different attractions in the 3.4 acre area of Fantasyland where the ride once operated. Instead visitors can delight in one of the most Diseny of all suspensions of disbelief: an undersea adventure with no water in it at all. Under the Sea - Journey of The Little Mermaid is a dark ride in the classic Disney tradition, with conveyor belt seating much like the Haunted Mansion, an endless clamshell procession through a series of audio-animatronic set pieces that recreate moments from the popular animated film.

Esoterically speaking, the Journey of the Little Mermaid is a finely tuned amalgamation of theme, nostalgia, and subtle mind manipulation. As with all of the attractions in New Fantasyland, RCER seems to have played a role in the design. It uses subliminal sound techniques pioneered in Tomorrowland (see our next section) to inculcate an emotional connection to a specific idea: wetter is not in fact better, despite what the song “Under the Sea” would have you believe. This bone-dry undersea story valorizes the desire to leave the oceans for dry land, and in fact works to make guests wary of touching the water in the park’s other attractions, thus steering them clear of possible aqueous esoteric complications.

This subliminal messaging is still in the testing phase, and RCER has not yet perfected it. There are reports of guests who are old enough to have ridden both the current, benign ride and the original 20,000 Leagues ride experiencing vivid hallucinations during the scene with the animatronic Ursula. The waving of her tentacles evokes visions of the giant squid tentacles that “attacked” the submarine during the dramatic climax of the original ride. In 2014, a 45-year old woman named Tisha Washington, who had grown up coming to the park every summer, emerged from the ride in a state of agitated temporal delusion, and felt sure that the year was 1993 and that she was only 21 years old. She eventually recovered her memories, but only with the help of a specialist recommended and paid for by Reedy Creek Esoteric Response.

Ms. Washington’s file was one of many leaked to me recently by an informant who goes by the name “Rin.” It is unclear how Rin is acquiring the documents she sends me, but they are always in a digital format and her grammar, diction, and affect in encrypted internet relay chat leads me to believe she is young and an expert in computer security.

Among the leaked documents Rin provided us were Reedy Creek Esoteric Response’s files on me and my fellow researchers. Curiously, RCER seems to have no better idea who my former assistant was than I do. His or her fate is a mystery to them as well, according to the file. All of their surveillance photos of him or her have disappeared. Their file on me is largely accurate and nothing I am worried about or ashamed of, although they do not seem to have discovered anything about my life aside from my role as Researcher for this site. The same holds true for Dr. Tyree, who has never made a secret of her investigations. Mel’s file, however, contained an interesting fact. His job as a Disney Cast Member included driving the submarines in the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction.

Mel denied at first, even in the face of Rin’s leaked documents. He went so far as to question their validity. It is true, much of what the leaked files contain cannot yet be corroborated, but some of it does match up with information from other sources. Dr. Tyree was, in her words, “outraged and very concerned.” She demanded Mel allow her to hypnotize him and he reluctantly agreed.

Under hypnosis Mel recalled his time as a submarine driver on 20,000 Leagues, characterizing that year as “the happiest I’ve ever been.” He would sometimes even pick up extra shifts or swap with other cast members just so he could spend more time in the ride vehicles. Out of hypnosis Mel could not recall any of this, insisting that he remembers working in concessions selling ice cream in 1994. And yet upon seeing the video of his hypnotic statement, he admits that one of the two memories must be false. Thinking back, he remembers much less about selling ice cream than he does about other jobs he had at Disney World in subsequent years.

What is the truth of Mel’s time with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? We do not know yet. But it is clear that the old ride and the new Little Mermaid attraction both have the potential to esoterically alter memories and temporal perceptions. As to Dr. Tyree’s theory that the real Mel was replaced with a Mel from an alternate dimension or timeline, there is very little evidence for it. Slight variations in freckles and the hairline shown in pictures of Mel from before and after 1994 are not proof. Nor are periods of missing time in one’s memory. As we now know from Rin’s leaked files, alternate dimensions and time manipulation are key elements of the secret experiments being carried out in Tomorrowland, as we shall discuss in our next section.