Credit: Muhammad Faiz Zulkeflee, UnsplashCast Members go above and beyond to make every Disney day a magical experience for Guests – and sometimes Guests do, too.
Every Disney Park across the globe brings in millions of Guests per year. While Walt Disney World Resort’s Magic Kingdom may typically come out on top (despite what the current ghost town situation may have you believe), it’s actually Tokyo Disney Resort that draws in the second-highest number of visitors per year.
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Both Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea are popular with Guests from all over the world, thanks to world-class attractions such as Journey to the Center of the Earth, Sinbad’s Revenge, Toy Story Midway Mania, and, soon, a unique land called Fantasy Springs featuring areas inspired by Frozen (2013), Tangled (2010), and Peter Pan (1952).
It was on a visit to check out Tokyo Disneyland’s most unique sights that a Guest seized an opportunity to save a fellow Guest’s vacation – by quite literally saving their child.
In a recent Reddit thread questioning Guests about the scariest thing they’d ever seen in a Disney Park, user Millennial_Traveller shared an instance where they were staying at Tokyo Disneyland Hotel with their brother and sister-in-law and about to visit Tokyo Disney Resort.
While descending the grand staircase to enter the lobby of Tokyo Disneyland Hotel, they saw a toddler in a precarious position at the top of the stairs. “He’d obviously climbed up the railing and was about to drop about nine feet to the marble floor below,” they wrote. “My sister-in-law and I immediately rushed down and grabbed him. So now he’s screaming, and we’re trying to get his fingers to let go so we can [safely] pull him back over the railing (toddlers are strong when they want to be!)”
The two, fortunately, managed to pull the toddler to safety. While one would expect that the sudden safety of their child would spur a dramatic response from the parent on duty, the user wrote that the mother “appears, grabs him from us, and just walks away. She grabs him from us and just walks away. No ‘thank you,’ no ‘what’s going on?’ nothing.”
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They clarified that this wasn’t “one of those ‘I took my eyes off him for one minute things,” instead noting that the group “had enough time to walk across the entire lobby, down a set [of] stairs, and climb up a railing without them noticing. That experience still makes my stomach churn just thinking about what could have happened.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard tales of parents leaving their children unaccompanied at a Disney Park. As Inside The Magic reported earlier this year, a trio of young children – including a newborn baby – were abandoned by their parents as they rode attractions at Disneyland Resort. Another extremely young baby was left “wailing” when their parent left them alone in their stroller for an extensive period of time at Disneyland.
Fortunately, in all these cases, other helpful Guests were around to intervene – and while we hope these instances don’t happen again, fingers crossed that there are more kind-hearted Parkgoers on the scene if they do.
Have you ever witnessed anything scary at Disney? Let us know in the comments!