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Rare footage shows ride where teenage Disneyland worker suffered one of the worst deaths imaginable
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Rare footage of a Disneyland ride that was shut down in 1988 has resurfaced, and the story behind it is one of the most disturbing things to ever happen inside a Disney theme park.
The ride was called America Sings. It was a rotating theatre at the Disneyland resort in Anaheim, California, where rows of animatronic animals performed songs from different periods of American history. It opened on June 29, 1974. Nine days later, an 18-year-old worker was crushed to death between its walls.
The audience sitting in the next section of the theatre reportedly mistook her screams for part of the performance.
What happened to Deborah Gail Stone
Deborah Gail Stone was 18. She had taken a summer job at Disneyland to earn money before going to college.
Her role was to greet visitors attending the new America Sings attraction, which had been brought in to replace the Carousel of Progress ride after it was moved to Magic Kingdom in Florida.
The ride worked on a rotation system.
At the end of each performance, the theatre would spin to reset while a host asked the departing audience to leave and welcomed the next group in.
There was a 45-second interval between shows during which the walls moved.
On the night of July 8, 1974, at approximately 11pm, Deborah got caught between a rotating wall and a stationary one as the theatre turned.
She was trapped in the gap between them and crushed.
The group of visitors being ushered in for the next performance heard her screaming.
They assumed it was part of the show. One person in the audience realised something was wrong and tried to raise the alarm, but by the time anyone reached her, it was too late.
She was 18 years old and had been working at the park for less than two weeks.
What Disney did afterwards
The ride was closed for three days.
It reopened on July 11 with new safety lights installed near the rotating walls and modifications to the wall design that were intended to give someone a better chance of escaping if they became trapped in the gap.
That's right - a teenager was crushed to death inside the attraction, and it reopened before the week was out.
Deborah's parents filed a lawsuit against Disney. They received what was described as a 'small settlement'. The terms were not made public.
The rare footage
Because America Sings closed in 1988, footage of the ride actually running is almost non-existent.
A clip filmed in 1987, a year before it shut down for good, was recorded by YouTuber Eric Denney and is one of the only known videos of the attraction in operation.
It shows rows of animatronic animals performing in themed scenes across different periods of American history.
One features what appears to be an animatronic being drunk and arrested.
The whole thing has the uncanny, slightly unsettling quality that ageing animatronics always have, made considerably worse by the knowledge of what happened there 13 years earlier.
After the ride closed, most of the animatronics were removed and relocated to Splash Mountain. The building itself was used as office space and storage for years before being redesigned in 2015 as the Star Wars Launch Bay, which is what occupies the space today.
Why the story keeps resurfacing
Every few months, someone on TikTok or Reddit discovers the Deborah Gail Stone story and it goes viral again.
The details are the kind that stay with you.
An 18-year-old working a summer job. A rotating wall she could not escape. An audience that heard her dying and thought it was entertainment.
The fact that Disney reopened the ride 72 hours later, with safety modifications that amounted to an admission that the original design was dangerous, and that the attraction then ran for another 14 years without being shut down permanently, is the part that tends to draw the most anger from people encountering the story for the first time.
Deborah Gail Stone would be 70 years old today.
The ride that killed her has been gone for 38 years.
The building it occupied is a Star Wars gift shop.
And the footage that keeps bringing the story back shows a cheerful, brightly lit room full of singing animals, which is about as far from what actually happened there as it is possible to get.