Biography | Walt Disney — He Died Across the Street From the Studio He Had Just Built

A durable rumor says he was frozen under a ride. He was not. Walt Disney died on the morning of 15 December 1966 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank. He was sixty-five. The New York Times reported the death from Los Angeles the same day. The hospital stands at 501 South Buena Vista Street, across that street from the Walt Disney Studios lot the company occupied after leaving Hyperion. The Sisters of Providence had opened the hospital in 1943. That autumn a tumor in his left lung had sent him back into this building for surgery. He returned to work briefly, then to the ward. The death certificate language circulated at the time was circulatory collapse after the cancer. He was cremated. The family interment is at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, in a private garden. This pin is the hospital, the documented place of death, not the grave. The building is now Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center, a working hospital. It is not a shrine. Photo: Florida Development Commission, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons and the State Archives of Florida. Walt Disney at a press conference in Orlando, 15 November 1965, a year before his death.