A former Disneyland Resort cast member turned stand-up comedian has shared one of the most chaotic ride evacuation stories you’ll ever hear from a Disney theme park. Unfortunately, this incident at the Haunted Mansion ended exactly as badly as the headline suggests.
The Evacuation That Spiraled
Ashley Lindsay, a former Disneyland Park cast member who now performs stand-up comedy, recently shared a clip from one of her shows on Instagram recounting an unforgettable Haunted Mansion evacuation. The story begins ordinarily enough: the Haunted Mansion had broken down, and Lindsay and her fellow cast members were working through each Doom Buggy in a specific order, unlocking restraints and guiding Disney Park guests to safety.
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Partway through the process, a woman a few Doom Buggys away flagged Lindsay down with an 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 started toward the woman’s Doom Buggy to let her out early. That’s when things fell apart.
Her supervisor, watching the evacuation via the attraction’s security cameras, spotted Lindsay going out of order and addressed her immediately over the PA system.
“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 an increasingly desperate attempt by Lindsay to communicate — through improvised hand signals — that the woman in that Doom Buggy had an urgent bathroom emergency. The supervisor’s response did not help things.
“She goes, ‘Ashley, stop dancing and go back to where you were.'”
Lindsay obeyed. And then came the announcement nobody wanted to hear.
“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 simply sit down on the Haunted Mansion floor.
“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 came down to assess the situation firsthand.
“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 consequences from Disneyland Resort is unknown. What is certain is that the Haunted Mansion shutdown lasted considerably longer than planned, and that a specialized custodial team almost certainly had a very memorable shift that day.
What is the strangest thing you’ve seen another Disney Park guest do? Tell Disney Dining about your experience in the comments!
