The Disneyland mystery is solved: the thief behind the missing Society of Explorers and Adventurers artifact is Hazel Hightower, daughter of the infamous Harrison Hightower III, and she has a surprisingly sweet reason for what she did. The reveal came Oct. 20 on the Disney Parks Blog, and there’s a free souvenir waiting for you in Frontierland.
How the mystery started
Back in August at D23, a group of Imagineers opened a sealed crate from the S.E.A. archive in front of a live audience. Instead of a priceless artifact, they found a pile of bricks and a cryptic note.
From there, the Society’s archivist, Bonnie Booker, began sharing riddles on the Walt Disney Imagineering Instagram page. Each riddle’s answer was a single letter, and fans had to unscramble those letters to reveal the thief’s name. The best part: you could solve them from your couch by looking up photos of Disneyland.
The clues we loved
The riddles sent fans hunting through the park’s details, including Main Street, U.S.A., the Lilly Belle car on the Disneyland Railroad, the Swiss canton shields at the Matterhorn queue, and the display of expedition oars at The Tropical Hideaway in Adventureland.
Along the way we learned that the thief had been rejected by the Society, may have taken something called the Ridge Jewel, and somehow left clues across different time periods. Then came the schematics for a device called the Timeskipper, which explained the time-hopping.
The big reveal
The final letters spelled out the name once you removed H-I-G-H-T-O-W-E-R from the pile, leaving H-A-Z-E-L.
Hazel was born in Egypt in 1881. Her father, Harrison Hightower III, vanished on New Year’s Eve in 1899 after acquiring the cursed idol Shiriki Utundu. When Hazel applied to the Society, she was turned down because of her family name.
Her response was to prove them wrong. She finished building the Timeskipper and traveled back to Rainbow Ridge, the mining town that once displayed a rainbow-crystal geode called the Ridge Jewel. She realized her father had taken it, so she swiped it back from him and spent years leaving riddles across time, with the plan to return it herself.
The twist is that traveling made her less angry. In her own letter, she calls herself a little bit of a villain and a little bit of a hero, and she ends by wishing the Society luck on their next adventure.
Clint Gamache is the owner of ThrillGeek. He started ThrillGeek to share his love of theme/amusement parks and pop culture with the world. You can find him at Halloween Horror Nights. Also, be sure to follow him on Twitter/X, Instagram @iamcg83