Disneyland’s New Orleans Square has been rumored to contain a secret for decades. A certain door, decorated with a large “33” on it, was believed to house a private club, called Club 33, with access only available to the rich and powerful. It was the only place in the park that served alcohol, and some darker conspiracy theories even claimed the club was home to a secret society, where strange and horrifying things sometimes occurred.

While this flew under the radar for many years, once the internet came about, it was hard to keep the secret any longer. Disney is now somewhat more open about Club 33’s existence, though it’s not strictly for the rich and powerful. It just has a limited number of members at a time, and they very rarely open up new applications, according to Snopes.

After Club 33 started to be publicly acknowledged, however, rumors of yet another club, this one even more secret and exclusive, began to appear. Allegedly, Disney World has a secret Club 21, and that’s where all the conspiratorial stuff claimed about Club 33 really happens. But, there is no Club 21 at Disney World. It seems the internet, disappointed Club 33 wasn’t a place where the President hung out with Bigfoot and Walt Disney’s frozen body, simply took all the old Club 33 myths and repurposed them for the imaginary Club 21.

Theme parks are not, despite appearances to the contrary, all fun and games. They can sometimes be dangerous. People can get injured, sick, or even die. No park wants that to happen; it’s bad for business. No one is going to want to go to the place where terrible things happen to people who visit. It could even get them shut down.

Rumor has it, Disney skirts this through a very morbid, yet clever, process. It is said Disney will never declare a guest dead in the park, instead transporting their body off of park property and only then having a physician declare them dead. That way, no one ever actually dies at Disney World/Disneyland. It’s foolproof!

Of course, this doesn’t really happen, according to Snopes. People do die at Disney World sometimes, typically due to circumstances far outside of Disney’s control, like prior health conditions, and the company has never made a secret about it, as they’re required by Florida state law to make quarterly reports on deaths and injuries at the park. Also, moving a corpse around is not exactly legal, as tampering with a body is a good way to get in way more trouble than from someone dying in the park. It’s hard to fathom any way such a scheme would go unnoticed or be quietly accepted by the law, even if Disney is a huge corporation with deep pockets.

Disney World’s first water park, River Country, opened in 1976, and is sometimes alleged to be the first water park ever. While water slides and similar things existed before River Country, it was certainly the first and biggest water park as we think of them today. It was an immediate hit, and attracted visitors from all over.

But just four years later, in 1980, an 11-year-old boy from New York died from amoebic meningoencephalitis, caused when a waterborne amoeba goes in through a subject’s nasal passages and enters the brain. He wasn’t the first boy to die in the state of Florida from the disease that season, either, but where he contracted it was big news — he was infected by swimming in the water at River Country, according to Yesterland.

Today, River Country is closed to the public. But not because of the child’s death. In fact, River Country didn’t close until 2001, two decades later, due to low attendance after 9/11, not any sort of health issue. It turns out, the amoeba that killed the unnamed River Country guest can be found in pretty much any freshwater source when it gets hot enough. It wasn’t anything Disney did, and authorities never indicated the company did anything wrong, though Disney did later ban swimming in lakes on their property, probably to prevent a potential repeat of the situation.

One of the oldest attractions at Disney World’s Epcot is The Living Seas (today known as The Seas with Nemo & Friends), which opened in 1986, promising to take visitors down to the ocean floor to visit Sea Base Alpha, where they could view marine life swimming all around them. This was achieved via the hydrolator, an underwater elevator that submerges guests far below the park.

According to legend, the hydrolator was the focal point of a lawsuit brought forth by a guest who claimed their eardrums were damaged due to the pressure change going from ground level to the ocean floor. Purportedly, Disney’s lawyers took the jury to Disney World and propped the doors on the hydrolator open while it ran, proving it was actually just an illusion and the hydrolator didn’t go anywhere at all, thus exposing the lawsuit as a frivolous claim.

While it is true the hydrolator is just an illusion (and not a terribly elaborate one, either) leading into an aquarium located on the park’s ground level, there’s just no evidence this lawsuit ever actually happened, according to Yesterland. There are no news reports or court documents showing a guest ever tried to sue Disney for purported injuries sustained on the hydrolator. What’s more likely is someone came up with a funny scenario, which later turned into a myth passed around for the last several decades.

When a loved one dies and is cremated, it’s common to sprinkle their ashes in a place they enjoyed. But what if the place they loved was the Happiest Place on Earth? You need permission to scatter ashes on private property, and Disney is not okay with that, for health reasons and publicity issues. So what do you do?

According to a common legend, you just do it anyway. Every few years, a story comes up about a person caught sprinkling a mysterious powder near a certain ride or attraction. Pirates of the Caribbean comes up a lot in these stories, like in 2007, when a woman sprinkling something shut down the ride for 45 minutes, or a similar incident in 2019. Both times, the substance was claimed to be baby powder, not human remains. Both times, Disney denied people scatter ashes at their parks.

But a 2018 Wall Street Journal article claimed anonymous Disney custodians said it happens way more than anyone would ever suspect, as reported by Gizmodo. For its part, Disney still denies this happens, so it’s not certain whether this is a myth or not. Disney, naturally, does not want people to worry about coming into contact with someone else’s ashes, so of course they would deny it. However, park employees do have a history of spreading park myths themselves, too. So which is the truth?