In the year 1909, seven-year-old Walt Disney was playing by himself in the backyard of his family's farmhouse. He decided to sneak up on a big brown owl, but when he grabbed it the owl panicked, Disney threw it to the ground and stomped it to the death. According to his biographers, that owl haunted him for years, and produced a morbid fear of death.

Disney’s first big hit as a young animator came when he was 26 years old, in a cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse. But he immediately followed up that success with a short feature titled “The Skeleton Dance,” which opens with a terrified owl perched in a tree followed by skeletons rising from their graves. Disney’s distributor complained, saying, “We don’t want this gruesome crap… More mice… More mice!”

This was a small sample of what was to come. One scholar said, “If Disney was a mouthpiece for an American way of life, the force of his voice depended on a curious obsession with death.” Virtually every one of his famous films focused on the subject, from Snow White to Pinocchio.

His personal life was focused on decline and demise as well. Disney’s daughter Diane said that Disney hired a fortuneteller when he was in his early 30s to predict when he would die. The fortuneteller predicted the age of 35. Disney distracted himself by workaholism and success. If he stayed busy, maybe he could distract both himself and the Reaper. He survived 35, but never forgot the prediction. Shortly before his 55th birthday, he knew that maybe he had misheard, and the fortuneteller had said 55, not 35.