Creepy - Abandoned by Disney

Episode Date: June 5, 2017

Anyone remember Mowgli's Palace?***Credited to Slimebeast***Licensed by CC-by-NC-SAPresented by A Scottish Podcast (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a-scottish-podcast-the-audio-drama-series/id1134637518?mt=2)***Sound design by Rick Coste***Intro/Outro by Joe Stofko***Music by Alex Aldea Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastures and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or our simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. The discretion is advised. Abandoned by Disney. Some of you may have heard that the Disney Corporation is responsible for at least one real live ghost town. Disney built a Treasure Island resort and Baker's Island in the Bahamas.

It didn't start as a ghost town. Disney's cruise ships would actually stop at the resort and leave tourists there to relax and luxury. This is a fact. Look it up. Disney blew 30 million on the place. Yes, 30 million. dollars. And they abandoned it. Disney blamed the shallow waters, too shallow for their ships to safely operate, and there

was even blamed cast on the workers, saying that since they were from the Bahamas, they were too lazy to work a regular schedule. That's where the factual nature of their story ends. It wasn't because of sand, and it obviously wasn't because foreigners are lazy. Both are convenient excuses. No, I sincerely doubt those reasons. We're legitimate. Why don't I buy the official story?

because of Mowgli's Palace. Near the beachside city of Emerald Island, North Carolina, Disney began the construction of Mowgli's Palace in the late 1990s. The concept was a jungle-themed resort with a large, you guessed it, palace in the center of the whole thing. If you're unfamiliar with the character of Mowgli, then you might better remember the story of the jungle book. If you haven't seen it anywhere else,

you know it as the Disney cartoon from decades past. Mowgli's an abandoned child, in the jungle, essentially raised by animals and simultaneously threatened and pursued by other animals. Muglu's Palace was a controversial undertaking from the start. Disney bought up a ton of high-priced land for the project, and there was actually a scandal surrounding some of the purchases. The local government claimed eminent domain on people's homes, then turned around and sold the properties to Disney.

At one point a home that had just been constructed was immediately condemned with little to no explanation. The land grabbed by the government was, supposedly for some fictional highway project. Knowing full well what was going on, people started calling it at Mickey Mouse Highway. Then there was a concept art. A group of stuffed shirts from Disney Co. actually held a city meeting. They intended to sell everyone on how lucrative this project was going to be for everyone.

When they showed the concept art, this gigantic Indian palace, surrounded by jungle, staffed with men and women in loincloths and tribal gear? Wow. Suffice it to say everyone flipped their shit. We're talking about a large Indian palace, jungle, and loincloths, not only in the center of a relatively wealthy area, but also a somewhat xenophobic area of the southern USA. It was a questionable mix at that point in history.

One member of the crowd tried to storm the stage, but he was quickly to do with his security after he managed to break one of the presentation boards over his knee. Disney took that community and essentially broke it over its knee as well. The houses were razed, the land was clear, and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do or say about it. Local TV and newspapers were against resort at the beginning, but some insane connection between Disney's media holdings and local venues came into play

and their options turned on and died. So anyway, Treasure Island, the Bahamas, Disney sunk those millions in and then split. Same thing happened with Moga's Palace. Construction was complete. Visitors actually stayed at the resort. The surrounding communities were flooded with traffic and the usual annoyances associated with an influx of lost and irate tourists.

Then it all just stopped. Disney shut it down and no one knew what the hell to think. But they were pretty happy about it. Disney's loss was pretty hilarious and wonderful to a large group of folks who didn't want this in the first place. I honestly didn't give the place another thought since hearing it closed over a decade ago. I live maybe four hours from Emerald Isle. So I really only heard the rumblings and didn't experience any of it firsthand.

Then I read this article from someone who'd explore the Treasure Island Resort and posted a whole blog about all the crazy shit he found there. Stuff just left behind. Things smashed defaced, probably ruined by the disgruntled former employees who lost their jobs. Hell, the locals from all around probably had a hand in wrecking that place. people there felt just as angry about Treasure Island as folks here did about Mogulay's palace. Plus, there were rumors that Disney had released their aquarium stock into local waters when they closed, including sharks. Who wouldn't want to take a few swings at some merchandise after that?

Well, what I'm getting at is that this blog about Treasure Island got me thinking. Even though many years of past since it's closing, I figured it might be cool to do some urban exploration at Mogulay's Palace. Take some photos, write about my experience, probably see if there was anything I could take home as momentum. I'm not going to say I wasted no time in getting there. Because honestly, it took me another year after I first fell in that Treasure Island article to get around to going up to Emerald Isle. Over the course of that year, I did a lot of research on the Palace Resort, or rather I tried. Naturally, no official Disney site or resource made any mention of the place. That had been scrubbed clean.

Even otter, however, was that nobody before myself had apparently thought to blog about the place or even post a photo. None of the local TV or newspaper sites had one word about the place, though that was to be expected since they had all swung Disney's way. It wouldn't be out there lauding their embarrassments, you know? Recently, I learned that corporations can actually ask Google, for example, to remove links from search results, basically for no good reason. Looking back, it's probably not that nobody's...

spoke of the resort, but rather their words were made and accessible. So in the end, I could barely find the place. All I had to go on was an old-as-hell map I'd received in the mail back in the 90s. It was a promotional item sent out to people who'd recently been to Disney World, and I guess since I'd been there in the late 80s, that was recent. I didn't really intend to hang on to it. It got shoved in with my books and comics from my childhood. I only remembered it a couple months into my research.

Even then, it took me another few weeks to locate the storage, and my parents had shoved it all into. But I did find it. Locals were no help, as most were transplants who had moved to the beach in recent years, or old residents who just sneered at me and made rude gestures the second I managed to say, where would I find Mowgli's? The drive took me through an inordinately long corridor of orpah growth. Tropical plants had run rampant and overpopulated the area mixed with a native species of

floor that actually belonged there and had tried to reclaim the land. I was in awe when I reached the front gates of the resort. Tremendous, monolithic wooden gates whose supports to either side look like they must have been cut from giant sequoias. The gate itself had been gouged in several places by woodpackers and eaten away at the base by browing insects. Hanging on the gate was a sheet of metal, some random scrap, with hand-painted letters scrawled in black, abandoned by Disney. clearly the handy work of some past local or an employee wanted to make some local protest. The gates were open enough to walk through but not drive, so grabbing my digital camera on the map,

whose flipside showed a layout of the resort, I sat off on foot. The inner grounds of the place were just as overgrown as the entryway. Palm trees stood untended and ragged among piles of their own coconuts. Banana plants similarly stood in their own stinking bug riddled refuse. There was this sort of clash between order and chaos, carefully planted rose of perennial flowers mixed with obnoxious tall weeds and stinking blackened mushrooms. All the remained of any outdoor structures were broken,

rotting wood and various charred bits of unidentifiable material. What was most likely an information booth or an outdoor bar was now simply a pile of assorted debris chopped up by past vandalisms and ravaged by weather. The most interesting thing on the grounds was a statue of Baloo, the friendly bear from the jungle book, which stood in a sort of courtyard in front of the main building. He was frozen in a jovial wave toward no one, staring into empty space with a silly, toothy grin

as bird shit covered whole swaths of his fur and vines and snared his platform. I poached the main building, the palace, only to find the outside of the building was covered in graffiti where the original painted and peeled and chipped away. Front doors weren't just open, they'd been taken off their hinges or stolen. Above the front doors, or the gaping mall where they had been, someone had once again painted, abandoned by Disney. I wish I could tell you about all the awesome stuff I saw inside the palace, forgotten statues, abandoned cash registers, a full-fledged secret society of homeless bums.

But no. The inside of the building was so stark, so bare, but I actually think people had stolen the molding off the walls. Anything that was too big to steal, counters desks, giant fake trees, they're all resting amid this empty echo chamber that amplified my every step like a slow rat-tat-tat of a machine gun. I checked the floor plan and headed all the locations

that might seem in any way interesting. The kitchen was, as you'd imagine. An industrial food prep area with all the appliances in space, no expense spared. Every glass surface was broken, every door knocked off its hinges, every metal surface kicked and dented. The whole place smelled like very old piss.

The huge freezer, not even remotely cool now, had row upon row of empty shelf space. Hooks hung from the ceiling, probably for hanging cuts of meat. And as I stood inside for a moment, I noticed they were swinging. Each hook swung in a random direction, but their movements were so slow and small that it was almost impossible to see.

I figured it had been caused by my footstep, so I stopped one from swinging by clutching it in my fist. Then, carefully letting go. But within seconds, it started to swing once more. The bathrooms were in much the same state as the rest of the place. Just like Treasure Island Resort, someone had methodically smashed each porcelain commode with coconuts and other implements. It was about a half inch of rancid, stinking, stagnant water on the floor,

so I didn't stay there very long. What's odd is that the toilets and the sinks and the badeas in the ladies' room. Yes, I went there. All dripped, leaked, or just ran freely. It seemed to me they should have shut the water off long, long ago. There were plenty of rooms in the resort, but naturally I didn't have time to look through them all.

The few I did peer into were similarly wrecked, and I didn't expect to find anything there. I thought there was actually a television or radio in one room, and I really think I heard a quiet conversation coming off. though it was like a whisper probably my own breathing echoing in the silence or just another case of the sound of flowing water playing tricks on my mind this is what it sounded like

I didn't believe I don't know that I didn't know that your father told you I know that sounds ridiculous I'm just telling you what I experienced why I thought there might have been something running in that room or or some vagrant who would hold up there and probably would have knifed me. At the front doors of the palace,

I figured I hadn't found anything of note and wasted a trip. As I looked out the door, I noticed something interesting in the courtyard that I'd apparently missed, something that would give me at least one thing to show for all my trouble, even if it was just a photograph. There was a lifelike statue of a python,

maybe 80 feet long, coiled up and sunning itself on a pedestal right in the center of the area. It was almost time for the sun to start, setting, so the light fell onto the object in the perfect way for photograph. I approached the python and snapped a photo. Then I stood on my toes and snapped another. I moved closer again to get the detail of its face.

Slowly, casually, the python lifted its head and looked directly into my eyes. Turned and slithered off the pedestal across the grass and into the trees. All 80 feet of it. It's had long disappeared in the woods before its tail even left the sunning spot. Disney had released all their exotic animals onto the grounds. Right there on my floor plan map was the reptile house. I should have known. I'd read about the sharks at Treasure Island, and I should have known they'd done this.

I was dumbfounded, just utterly stupefied. My mouth must have been hanging open for the longest time before I'd. I came back down to Earth and snapped it shut. I blinked a few times and backed away from where the snake had been back toward the palace. Even though it was totally gone, I still wasn't taking any chances and backed my way into the building. I took a few deep breaths and slapped my own face to get myself right in the head again after that. I looked for a place to sit down, as my legs are feeling a bit like jelly at this point. Of course, there was no place to sit down unless I wanted to recline in the broken glass and dead leaf carpet or haul my seat.

cell phone to a desk of questionable reliability. I'd seen some stairs near the palace lobby and decided to go have a seat there until I felt better. The staircase was far enough away from the front of the building to be relatively clean, save for a startling accumulation of dust. I pulled a wedge of metal off the wall, once again painted with the abandoned by Disney motto, I had become accustomed to, I placed the wedge on the stairs and sat on it to keep at least somewhat clean. The stairway led downward, below ground level.

Using my camera flash as a sort of improvised flashlight, I could see the staircase ended in a metal meshed door with a padlock. A sign onto the door. A real sign. Read, Mascots only. Thank you. This perked up my spirits a little bit for two reasons.

One, a mascots only area would have definitely had some interesting stuff back in the day. Two, the padlock was still in place. Nobody'd gone down there. Not the vandals, not the looters, nobody. This was the one place I could actually explore and perhaps find something interesting to photograph or wantonly steal. I'd come to the palace essentially agreeing with myself that it was okay to take anything I wanted because, hey, abandoned.

It didn't take much to bust a lock. Well, that's wrong. It didn't take much to bust the metal plate down the wall that the padlock was hooked to. time and decay had done most of the work for me, and I was able to bend the metal plate enough to pull the screws out of the wall, something nobody else had apparently thought of or hadn't been able to do at the time. The mascot only area was a startling and very welcome change from the rest of the building I'd seen. For one, every second or third fluorescent light overhead was illuminated,

even though they flickered and faded randomly. Also, nothing had been stolen or broken, even if age and exposure were definitely taking their toll. Tables had notepads and pens, there were clocks, even a punching clock on the wall complete with filled out time cards. Chairs were scattered around and there was even a small break room with an old static-filled television and long rotted out food and drinks on the counter. It was like one of those post-apocalyptic movies

where everything is left in the state of evacuation. As I walked in maze-like sub-basement hallways of the mascots-only area, sight just became more and more interesting. As I went further, desks and tables were knocked over. Papers scattered and almost melded with the damp floor. A large carpet of mold was slowly overtaking the real rotting crimson floor covering. Everything was just sort of squishy. Anything wood disintegrated into mush when I applied even the least amount of force,

and clothing items hanging on hooks in one of the rooms simply fell to moist threads if I tried to unhooked them. One thing that annoyed me was that the light was becoming more sparse than reliable as I went further into the dank suffocating depths of the place. Eventually, I reached a black and yellow striped door at the words, Character Prep 1, stenciled on it. The door wouldn't open at first. I figured this was probably where the costumes were kept, and I definitely wanted to photograph that twisted, stinking mess.

Tries I might, whatever angle or trick I tried, the door wouldn't budge. That is, until I gave up and started to walk away. That was when there was a slight popping sound and the door creaked open slowly. Inside the room was completely dark, pitch black. I used the camera flash to look for a light switch in the wall by the door, but there was nothing. As I made my search, I was jarred out of my sense of excitement by a loud electrical buzz. Rows of lights overhead suddenly flashed to life, flickering and fading in and out like the rest I'd passed. I took a second for my eyes to adjust and it seemed like the light was going to just keep getting brighter until all the bulbs exploded.

But just when I thought it would reach that critical stage, the light stemmed a bit and steadied. The room was exactly as I'd pictured it. Various Disney costumes hung on the wall, fully put together like strange cartoon cadaver as hung from invisible nooses. There's an entire rack of loincloths and native clothes on hangers towards the back. What I found odd, and what I wanted to photograph right away, was a Mickey Mouse costume at the center of the room. Unlike the other costumes, it was lying on its back in the center of the floor like a murder victim. The fur in the costume was rotten and shedding, creating bare patches.

What was even odder, however, was the coloring of the costume. It was like a photo negative of the actual Mickey Mouse, black where you should be white and white where you should be black. He's normally red overalls were light. blue. The site was off-putting enough that I actually put out photographing the thing until last. I took a picture of the costumes hanging on the walls, upward angles, downward angles, side shots to show an entire row of frozen putrid cartoon faces, some with plastic eyes missing, then I decided to stage a shot. Just one of the bedraggled character heads on the slick,

grimy floor. I reached the headpiece of a Donald Duck costume and carefully removed it so the thing wouldn't fall apart in my hands. As I looked into the face of the wide-eye, mouldering head, a loud clattering cell made me jump with fright. I looked down at my feet and there between my shoes was a human skull. It had fallen out of the mascot head and shattered into pieces at my feet, only the empty face and lower jaw remained, staring up at me. I dropped the duckhead immediately, as you'd expect, and moved to the door.

As I stood in the doorway, I looked back at the skull on the floor. I had to take a picture of it, you know? I had to, for any number of reasons that may seem silly, but only if you don't think it through. I need proof of what happened, especially if Disney was going to somehow make this go away. I had no doubt in my mind right from the start that even if this was just gross negligence, Disney was responsible for this. That's when Mickey, that photo-negative opposite Mickey in the middle of the floor. started to get up. First sitting up, then climbing to its feet, the Mickey costume, or whoever was inside of it, stood there in the center of the room,

its fake face just staring directly at me as I mumbled no over and over and over. With shaking hands of violently thrashing heart and legs that had just once again turned to jelly, I managed to lift the camera and aim at the opposite creature, now quietly sizing me up. The digital camera screen displayed only dead pixels in the shape of the thing. It was a perfect silhouette of the Mickey costume. As a camera moved in my unsteady hands, the dead pixels spread, marring the screen where every Mickey's outline moved to. Then the camera died.

Went blank and quiet and broken. I raised my eyes once again to the Mickey Mouse costume. It started to pull at its own head, working at clumsily, glove-clad fingers around its neck with clawing impatient movements similar to a wounded man trying to pull himself free of a predator's jaws. It worked its digits into its neck. So much blood. So much thick, chunky yellow blood. I turned away as I heard a sickening tearing of cloth and flesh, only cared about getting away. Above the doorway out of this room, I saw the final message clawed into the metal with bone or fingernails, abandoned by God.

I never got the pictures out of the camera. I never wrote the blog entry about it. After I ran from that place, fled for my sanity, if not my very life, I knew why Disney didn't want anyone to know about this place. They didn't want anyone like me getting in. They didn't want anything like that getting out. This episode of creepy is presented by a Scottish podcast. My name's Lee Power.

I'm a radio personality, podcaster, and paranormal investigator. And in this short promotional trailer, I'd like you to imagine yourself walking through a dark, dungeon-like chamber. Water drips from the ceiling and pulls on the floor. Rats scutty around your feet. And there's an overwhelming smell of decay in the air. And as you step up to the iron and unbotting your flies, you think to yourself, these really are the worst pub toilets I've ever seen.

A Scottish podcast, Scotland's finest dramatised horror podcast, find us at Scottishpodcast.com. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, or to suggest stories for future episodes, please visit us. At Creepypod on Twitter, Instagram. All stories told on this podcast can be found at creepypasta wiki.com and are protected by a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved unless otherwise stated.