Whoopi Goldberg once made “The Happiest Place on Earth” just a little bit weirder.
The “View” co-host was promoting “The Change,” a new graphic novel, on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on Wednesday when, after decreeing that “no one should do this,” she told the story of scattering her mother’s ashes from a boat on the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland.
“My mother loved Disneyland, so we took her to Disneyland,” she told Meyers. “And when I was a kid, the World’s Fair was here, and it was the introduction of Small World — and she loved Small World. So in the Small World ride, periodically, I’d scoop some of her up.”
“And I’d do this,” Goldberg added, mimicking a fake sneeze she used to scatter her mother’s remains. “I said, ‘My God, this cold is getting worse and worse!’ And then we got over to the flowers where it says ‘Disneyland,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, look at that,’” and scattered the rest.
The EGOT winner eventually notified the park when she realized scattering human remains in a public body of water could be “dangerous.” Goldberg isn’t the first to use these resorts as a burial ground, however.
Managers at Disney theme parks in Orlando, Florida, and Anaheim, California, reportedly have a dedicated code for the situation (“HEPA cleanup”) and have retrieved cremated remains from bushes, lawns and rides — including The Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland.
“The Haunted Mansion probably has so much human ashes in it that it’s not even funny,” one Disneyland custodian told The Wall Street Journal in 2018.
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Goldberg first divulged the 2010 scattering in May in her new memoir, “Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me,” which was published in May. In the book, she also chronicled the sudden death of her brother, Clyde, who had joined Goldberg in the Disney stunt, from an aneurysm in 2015.
Goldberg wrote in her memoir that Disneyland meant everything to her mother.
“It was her vision of what human beings should be,” she shared in the book, “these children of the world: all colors, religions, and cultures together. Disney had made it seem possible that all the kids of the world would hold hands in unity.”
“The Change,” co-authored by Jaime Paglia with illustrations by Sunkanmi Akinboye, was released Tuesday by Dark Horse Comics. She told her co-hosts on “The View” that she initially wrote the comic book 25 years ago as she went through menopause, according to People.
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