What lies at the end of Disney’s severed head?

A chilling introduction to cryonics.

As a kid, I was obsessed with Walt Disney’s severed head. 

Legend has it, the iconic creator arranged to have it surgically removed and frozen upon his death. Like the estimated 500-plus clinically deceased human bodies (and disembodied skulls) currently stored at cryonics facilities across the globe, Disney is, apparently, awaiting reanimation.

In my imagination, his disembodied head floats inside a glass cloche, like the wilting rose in Beauty and the Beast, his eyes gently resting like Snow White’s. The once great media mogul, reduced to a decapitated damsel in distress, silently waiting for science to swoop in and save him from death.

I used to wonder what would happen if he awoke. How would he get around? Where would the food go when he ate? He would need a body, but whose? I pictured Disney’s face protruding from the gut of a cyborg beefcake, something like Krang, the Ninja Turtles’ brains-and-brawn hybrid supervillain. 

Thing is, Disney didn’t have his body frozen, or his head for that matter. Had the legend been true, he would have been the first cryopreserved human. Instead that distinction belongs to James Hiram Bedford, a retired psychology professor from Glendale, California, the same city where Disney was, coincidentally, cremated just a few weeks prior to Bedford’s full-body freeze.

According to a 2022 SFGate article by Katie Dowd, weeks before his death Bedford made arrangements for the Cryonics Society of California to preserve his body. On January 12, 1967, he passed from kidney cancer and was quickly turned over to the care of his undertakers. Dowd described the process as such:

“The Cryonics Society’s doctors had seven minutes from the moment Bedford died to complete the first phase of the rest of his life. He was put on artificial respiration to keep oxygen flowing to his brain while dimethyl sulfoxide was pumped into his veins to replace his blood and protect his organs from freezing. Once that was done, he was placed on ice in a metal, tube-shaped capsule created by — no joke — a Phoenix wigmaker named Ed Hope. The body was then transported via hearse from a Los Angeles mortuary to the cryonics facility in Arizona.”

Bedford’s corpse has since been the subject of countless legal and insurance disputes. Over the past half century he’s been shipped between two states and at least five different cryonics facilities, finally finding a home at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. As unsettling as it is to think of this man’s dead body bouncing back and forth across the American Southwest in a giant thermos, he actually fared quite well for an early cryonics subject. In fact, Bedford’s is the only corpse cryopreserved before 1974 that is still on ice today. 

The most thorough account of cryonics’ early failures tells of a retired TV repairman named Robert Nelson, who having been elected president of the newly formed Cryonics Society of California, began storing the bodies of society members at a sympathetic mortuary. In 1969, after months of leaving the bodies on dry ice, some of the earliest participants were crammed four-deep in a thermos-like metal can designed by a New Jersey wigmaker-turned-armchair-cryonics expert by the name of Ed Hope. 

The metal container, also known as a dewar in cryonics lingo, was stored in an underground vault at a Chatsworth, California cemetery and intermittently pumped full of liquid nitrogen until 1971, at which point Nelson abandoned the crypt, leaving the bodies to thaw. 

Early cryonics patients endured brutal handling, bodily cracking, and varying degrees of decomposition at the hands of men who foolishly believed in their own abilities and the power of scientific resurrection. Bedford apparently escaped a similar fate, having been handed over to the care of his wife and son, who kept his frozen body properly stored until it was essentially adopted by Alcor, where it remains today. 

While dozens of bodies continue to be posthumously frozen, cryonics is still largely considered a pseudoscience. The tale of Disney’s severed head has been extensively debunked, but, like Richard Gere’s gerbil fetish, it proved a particularly persistent urban myth. As a child, it seemed, if not reasonable, then at least plausible that one of the world’s wealthiest, most creative men had put himself on ice in hopes of an eventual resurrection. 

Evidence suggests Disney was cremated two days after his death. Claims of his freezing apparently started with a group of Disney animators and picked up steam following a 1972 L.A. Times interview with the now-infamous Robert Nelson. Nelson said he had first-hand knowledge of Disney’s cremation, having seen the ashes himself, but noted that the iconic animator had originally intended to be frozen upon death. 

However untrue, the legend of Walt Disney’s cold dome raised the possibility that immortality could be had at a cost. When I first became aware of the Disney myth, transhumanism was a fringe philosophy, touted by eccentric figures with pseudonyms like Max More, T.O. Morrow, and FM2030. They publicly espoused the benefits of cryonics and peddled the promise of eternal life. Theirs was a message of selfishness and excess at a time when the Me Generation reigned supreme.

Transhumanism has since spawned more palatable ideologies like Effective Altruism, which focuses on doing the most good for the most people (even if those people are theoretical, non-biological entities floating in a far off server somewhere in space thousands of years in the future). Its thought leaders, no longer bound by cheesy codenames or the quackery of cryonics, lead the development of life-changing industries like AI, commercial space flight, and biomedicine.  

C Suite executives and billionaire investors, who are shaping the future of technology and, in turn, humanity, have taken up the cause of science-based eternal life. Philosopher and historian Emile P. Torres uses the acronym TESCREAL to describe the cluster of ideologies driving Silicon Valley elite.   

“Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism, they are all interconnected and they overlap quite a bit with respect to their methodologies,  to their vision of the future; this kind of techno-utopian world that we could potentially create if we re-engineer humanity and colonize space, and, in addition, create huge computer simulations full of trillions and trillions of digital people living happy lives,” Torres told me in a recent interview.

The idea is that we maximize human potential, cognitively, physically, and emotionally by ceasing to exist altogether. According to these philosophies, the next phase of human evolution isn’t human at all. In the future, we won’t need bodies, or families, or jobs. We will abandon the physical world and upload our minds to great, omniscient computers run on servers in outer space. We will live happily ever after as one big super brain, if we can get there before death catches up with us. 

In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, current Google executive and prolific inventor Ray Kurzweil predicted that, within the next century there will be “no clear distinction between humans and computers” and the words “life expectancy” will no longer hold meaning. 

“Even among those human intelligences still using carbon-based neurons, there is a ubiquitous use of neural-implant technology, which provides enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities. Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do,” Kurzweil forecasts. 

In a world of infinite connection, we could find ourselves disconnected from humanity, from nature, and from each other. According to Torres, the current state of haves and have-nots will no doubt continue in a techno-utopian future built on capitalist ideals. It’s worth noting that the ultra-rich, the people who benefit most from current power imbalances, are the ones who are working toward our collective post-human future. They will also likely be the first to access the technologies that could separate biological humans from immortal cyborgs. 

If the cost of cryonics is any indication, living forever will not come cheap. Alcor currently lists the price of full-body preservation at a minimum of $220,000. Neural preservation, or the freezing of the head alone, comes in at about $80,000.

At that cost, resurrection is still no guarantee. Even if it will one day be possible to resuscitate a formerly frozen corpse, there’s no reason to believe that Alcor or any of the other cryonics facilities will still be in business, or that there will be sufficient funds to defrost every severed head. Even if all of the Earth’s 500-plus frozen people do manage to make it to a post-human future, what will await them?

They might wake to find that there’s literally no one there and the world as they knew it no longer exists. Their loved ones, who chose to be cremated or buried, never to return. And if they did, they may never touch them or hold them again. The signs of affection once common in this world will have been digitized and decoupled from reality. We  may one day be able to dawn cephalopod facades in a galaxy-wide orgy, using advanced computing to experience entirely new sensations, but will we be able to truly experience the feeling of a first kiss? 

I imagine James Hiram Bedford, reanimated and alone in a wholly new world – his family having committed to traditional means of interment. I think about how lonely he might feel and how, knowing that his loved ones will never return, he might react to the question that we may all be forced to answer one day: Do you want to live forever?