Aftermath Of Man Arrested For Camping On WDW’s Abandoned Discovery Island

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Last week we wrote about a guy who was apprehended for trespassing on Discovery Island, the former, and now abandoned nature preserve on Walt Disney World property. Click here to read all about it and to see how decrepit it looks. And if you’d like to learn a little more about the past, present and future of the guy who did it, and why we think he did it, read on…

Some background info: we moderate comments to our blogs before they get posted. So before they go “live,” we review them and then give them the “OK” or “not OK.” Anyway, about 4 or 5 hours after our post about Discovery Island Guy (we’ll call him DIG for short) went up, we got a comment to review. It said:

Check out the documentary on youtube coming soon on [redacted].

The author has the same last name as DIG. Hmmm…

So I did some Googling and some cross-referencing.

Turns out that DIG has a history of being an amateur fighter in MMA (mixed martial arts). Other things I found (he has a history of writing on Quora) suggest that he’s still interested in the sport. If that’s the case, and if he still fights (or at least keeps in shape), it would explain being strong enough to have swum across to Discovery Island.

To be honest, I haven’t been able to find any documentation that suggested if he swam or boated over. But I hope it was the latter. Bay Lake and the Seven Seas Lagoon, which are connected, are known to have alligators (remember the one that killed that poor little boy a few years ago?) and at least one person died from the brain-eating amoeba in the water in the earlier years of the resort, to say nothing of all the chemicals in the water from nearly 50 years of boats going across it every day – can you imagine getting those all over your skin? Ew! But IF he swam, at least he was in good enough shape to make it across.

Anyway, DIG left the URL of his YouTube channel in his comment. He had 14 videos listed. The first one, from 2 years ago, had over a million views but since then, each one has gotten a couple of hundred to a little over of a thousand views each. They start with nature and hiking things – turtles, snakes and bugs, really. But then about 2 months ago he started changing topics to exploring and sometimes camping overnight at abandoned places. A haunted house here, a hospital there, an abandoned theme park, maybe.

Well hey, if he can trespass onto those places, how about trespassing onto an abandoned island in a closed up Walt Disney World, right? And so he did.

And so far he has 2 brand new videos that are all about his visit there.

So when he said he didn’t know it was off-limits and thought it was a “tropical paradise?” Yeah, I don’t think so. He was just making the next videos for his channel.

As urban explorers go, I’ll stick to watching The Proper People for general stuff and MattSonswa for Central Florida stuff.

But now we know the rest of the story.

P.S. – Guess it wasn’t QUITE the end of the story after all. It’s been 2 weeks since I posted that and guess who just tried to leave the URL of his videos in the comments again? Yep…DIG. No comment…just the URL, LOLOL!

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary