Secrets and Other Fascinating Facts About Walt Disney World

I've written several articles previously about things most people never knew about Walt Disney World. I've gotten a lot of feedback on the articles so I thought I would put the five most popular facts and secrets of Walt Disney World into one list.

The Magic Kingdom is build one story above the ground

Disneyland opened in 1955, 16 years before Walt Disney World opened in 1971. In those years, there Walt Disney saw things he thought took away from the fantasy he wanted to create for park visitors. He didn't like seeing people in space suits heading for work in Tomorrowland by walking down Main Street USA, nor did he like seeing bags of trash being dragged across the park midday. His solution was to build service tunnels under his new Magic Kingdom to provide access to all areas of the park for employees, trash removal, and restocking of food and merchandise. The only problem was that if you dig just a few feet under the surface in Florida you hit water. The solution was to build the service tunnels on the ground level and build the park on top of the service tunnels; one story above ground.

John Lennon officially ended the Beatles at Walt Disney World

It was December 29, 1974 and John Lennon was vacationing at Walt Disney World when the paperwork he needed to sign to officially end the Beatles arrived at his room at the Polynesian Resort hotel. The other three members of the group had already signed the paperwork in New York, so when John signed it in his hotel room at The Polynesian Resort the Beatles officially came to an end.

Epcot is the Center of Walt Disney World... Just 300 feet off

At least, the center of Walt Disney World is marked in Epcot, sort of. In the plaza between Innoventions East and West there is a design of interconnecting circles that was to represent the center of Walt Disney World. The problem, it's 300 feet off!

The story is that during the design of Epcot, the marker of the physical center of Walt Disney World was to be the true center but all of Epcot was built 300 feet from the where it originally was to be built to protect the habitat of endangered woodpeckers.

The Contemporary Resort Hotel is a prefabricated hotel

The massive A-frame Contemporary Resort hotel at Walt Disney World is instantly recognizable to most visitors. But what most visitors don't know is that the hotel, build by U.S. Steel, is unique in that the rooms were meant to be removable. You see, the hotel's guest rooms were built off site and hoisted and slid into the hotel's A-frame during construction. The idea was that when it was time for an update to the guest rooms they would be slid out and replaced with a new, updated room. However, over the years, the rooms have settled and gotten permanently stuck within the hotel's frame so no rooms have been removed since the hotel's opening (they have, however, been updated the old fashion way; one room at a time and on-site).

Children never get "lost" at Walt Disney World. Really!

With millions of visitors a year, you'd think that there would be at least one lost child, right? But you'd be wrong. Why? It's simple, really, Walt Disney World only has lost parents. That's right, when a child is found alone, it's handled as a lost parent rather than a lost child. The reason is to help the child to feel better about the situation by stating they're not lost, it his or her parents.