The Split-Second Decision That Sent A Teen Over A Disney Ride Drop

A 13-year-old visiting Disneyland was hospitalized after exiting a ride before it finished and plummeting the 50-foot drop on his own in Anaheim, California.

The incident happened around 6 p.m. on Sunday, June 21, when the boy was riding Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, one of the park’s water rides. He climbed out of the ride and descended the 50-foot drop on his own. A park cast member was immediately forced to stop the ride. 

The boy was taken to a local hospital for a precautionary evaluation before being released, according to a Disneyland spokesperson. He suffered minor injuries from the fall. 

The ride remained closed for the rest of the day and reopened on Monday, June 22.

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health’s Amusement Ride & Tramway Unit evaluated the incident and did not find any operational issues with the attraction.

Video of the horrifying fall was posted online, and witnesses took to Reddit to describe the incident. “He attempted to exit the ride vehicle at the top of the final drop,” one Reddit user said. “The ride stop mechanism failed to engage or was already past the threshold for the vehicle to enter free fall.”

“Luck was on his side,” another Reddit user wrote.

The ride currently does not have seat belts or lap bars.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which is based on the movie Princess and the Frog, opened in 2024 as a replacement for Splash Mountain, which many on the Left claimed echoed racist tropes. In 2024, The Smithsonian magazine wrote that the original ride was a “racist whitewashing of American history.”

“For some, Splash Mountain represented nothing more than a ride with a fun soundtrack and a chance to get wet under the sun in Florida or Southern California,” the magazine argued. “But for those who understood the ride’s deep roots, extending back before Disney even existed as a company, it represented something much more troubling: a racist whitewashing of American history.”