A former Disneyland Park cast member recently shared a story about a broken-down Haunted Mansion, a desperate guest, a miscommunication over the PA system, and an outcome that nobody involved will ever forget.
How It All Went Wrong
Ashley Lindsay, a former Disneyland Resort cast member who now performs stand-up comedy, shared the story on Instagram as a clip from one of her shows. It begins during what should have been a routine ride evacuation.
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The Haunted Mansion had broken down, and Lindsay and her fellow cast members were working through the Doom Buggys one by one — unlocking restraints, gathering guests, and preparing to walk everyone out of the attraction in an orderly line. A few Doom Buggys into the process, a woman called out from further back in the ride with an increasingly urgent request.
“She goes, ‘Excuse me! I need to go to the bathroom. I really need to go to the bathroom,'” Lindsay recalled. “I'm like, okay, sure, that makes sense. I feel like there's some flexibility to these rules, right?”
Lindsay moved toward the woman's Doom Buggy to let her out ahead of schedule. Her supervisor, watching the evacuation unfold on the attraction's security cameras, had other ideas.
“My lead's watching me, and she yells, ‘Ashley, what are you doing? Go back to the regular order of how you're supposed to let people out,'” Lindsay explained. “While she can talk to me, I can't talk to her. A PA system only goes one way. So I have to sign to her what's going on.”
What followed was Lindsay's best attempt to pantomime a bathroom emergency to a supervisor watching through a security monitor. The result was not the intervention she was hoping for.
“She goes, ‘Ashley, stop dancing and go back to where you were.'”
Lindsay walked back to her position. And then a different announcement came.
“I'm walking back to where I'm supposed to go, and then I hear behind me the same woman who was stuck in the first Buggy go, ‘Well, I'm peeing. I'm peeing now. Well, I'm peeing. I'm sitting in a puddle of my own pee.'”
Lindsay's response was to sit directly down on the Haunted Mansion floor and put her head in her hands.
“I literally sat down on the floor of the Haunted Mansion,” she recalled. “…I just put my head in my hands, and I gave up. I couldn't do it anymore.”
Her supervisor eventually made her way down to the scene in person.
“At that point, my lead did come down to see for herself what was going on,” Lindsay continued. “I got sent on an early lunch, and I was never asked to evacuate the ride ever again.”
Whether the guest faced any formal consequences from Disneyland Resort wasn't shared. What's not in doubt is that the Haunted Mansion remained out of commission considerably longer than planned and that Disneyland Park's custodial team earned its pay that day.
What is the wildest thing you've witnessed at Disneyland Resort or Walt Disney World Resort? Disney Fanatic would love to hear from you in the comments!
