100 Places to Go After You Die

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

THE INFERNO ROOM

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

No one boarding a kiddie theme park attraction expects to plunge into a vivid, steamy vision of Hades where they will suffer along with the damned. But that's exactly what has awaited passengers on one disturbing "dark ride" for over sixty years. And what haunted Bradbury-esque carnival midway conceals this horror? Try Disneyland in sunny Anaheim, California. You know, the "Happiest Place on Earth."

Kenneth Grahame's 1908 children's classic The Wind in the Willows is a bucolic idyll of disappearing English country life, set in a strange world where anthropomorphized animals and Edwardian humans interact. Subsequent interpreters, from A. A. Milne to Walt Disney to Monty Python, have mostly jettisoned all the gentle nostalgia—Mole and Rat packing picnics and puttering about in boats and so on—to focus more tightly on Grahame's most inspired creation: the irrepressible Mr. Toad. Toad is an amphibian Falstaff, the village squire who's forever blowing his vast wealth on naughty, faddish indulgences like horse-drawn caravans and motorcars.

Disney's 1949 cartoon adaptation of The Wind in the Willows is a footnote in the studio's history today, but it was just a few years old when Disneyland opened in 1955, making it an obvious choice for one of the "spook house"–style attractions of Fantasyland. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is one of the few original rides that survive in the park to this day. Riders play the part of J. Thaddeus Toad by boarding tiny automobiles and recklessly zipping around the corridors of Toad Hall and the English countryside, eventually landing—like Toad in the novel and film—in court and then prison.

In Grahame's book and the Disney cartoon, Toad escapes from his cell, retakes Toad Hall, and lives happily ever after. But not so for the millions of tourists who retrace his steps in Anaheim! In a surprisingly dark twist, the puckish Disney "Imagineers" who designed the ride decide to end it by killing off Toad (that is, you) in a sudden head-on collision with a train.

In this afterlife, you will motor into a place Disney staffers call "the Inferno Room," the word "hell" being verboten at The Happiest Place on Earth. But make no mistake: this is truly hell. The temperature rises abruptly as you pass through the fanged jaws of a grinning stone devil, and your glasses may fog up. You will enter a subterranean cavern complete with all the traditional sights: stalactites, stalagmites, glowing fires, and little bouncing demons.

The ride's jaunty tune, "The Merrily Song," will continue playing while ominous laughter announces the return of the be-wigged judge from earlier in the ride, this time with horns, claws, and bat's wings. His pointing finger will sentence you to your doom, and a wheezing green dragon will aim its fiery maw in your direction. That's it, that's the end of the ride. You suffer forever for your bad road etiquette, Mr. Toad. Should have observed posted speed limits and used your turn signal!

The Wind in the Willows theology is a bit different in the original novel. In Chapter Seven, the animals do encounter a frightening, horned figure with a beard and goatish hooves, but it's not Satan come to drag them down to hell. It's some kind of pagan woodland god, and they worship him. Musician Syd Barrett liked this chapter so much that he even named the first Pink Floyd album after it: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

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