The story of the Hollywood Tower Hotel: the night five people vanished

Everything starts with an imaginary place: the Hollywood Tower Hotel, an upscale hotel sitting high in the Hollywood Hills. By the late 1930s, the biggest names in the movies stay there, and it stands for all the glamour of the era. Rod Serling, who narrates, describes it as a celebrity of the Hollywood landscape in its own right.

Then comes Halloween night, October 31, 1939. A fierce storm rolls over Hollywood, and lightning hits the tower. Five people happen to be riding one of the hotel elevators at that very moment, heading up to a party at the Tip Top Club, the exclusive club at the top. The bolt wipes them out of existence, along with a section of the building. No one ever saw them again.

The tale links their disappearance to Rod Serling’s TV show The Twilight Zone. The lightning did more than damage the hotel: it carried the elevator and everyone in it into another dimension. That’s what the ride is really about. Rather than simply touring a haunted hotel, you walk into an episode of the show starring you.

To grasp what went wrong, start by picturing the hotel in its heyday. The Hollywood Tower Hotel isn’t a real place: Disney invented it. In the fiction, it ranks among the trendiest addresses in Hollywood, where actors, singers, and producers rub shoulders. The movie world’s elite meets there, and the staff fuss over every detail to protect the hotel’s reputation.

Keep that in mind: the brighter the hotel shone before the storm, the more haunting its decay looks now. That gap between the golden years and the wreckage is where the story gets its punch.

When the bolt hit, there were five people inside the elevator. Each one has a name and a clear part to play in the official lore. Meet them below.

These five characters are the core of the story. They’re the reason the hotel closed and never reopened. When you step into the elevator in turn, you’re retracing their journey, nearly a century after they disappeared.

The young girl who shows up around the ride goes by the name Sally Shine. In the fiction, she’s a child film star and one of the five people lost on October 31, 1939. On the night of the storm, her nanny, Emeline Partridge, was with her.

Of everyone in the story, Sally Shine is the easiest to recognize. The 2019 Disneyland Paris version makes her the star: each of the ride’s three new storylines centers on this child stuck in the other dimension. So if you see a ghostly girl connected to Tower of Terror, now you know who she is.

The Twilight Zone, whose French title means the fourth dimension, is a TV anthology series created by Rod Serling in the late 1950s. Each episode tells a strange tale in which reality tips over into the unexplained. The show has remained a benchmark of the fantasy genre.

In the ride, that is the world that swallows the five missing guests. The lightning didn’t kill the elevator passengers: it moved them into this parallel dimension, outside of time. That’s also why Rod Serling’s voice guides you. He plays the same role as in the series: the narrator who takes you across the threshold into the strange.

A quick word on vocabulary: in French, the series is literally titled the fourth dimension, yet the ride’s mythology talks about a fifth dimension. Both point to the same idea, a passage to somewhere else where the usual laws no longer apply.

Rod Serling created The Twilight Zone and narrated it. Every episode of the show began with his low, calm voice. On the ride, he’s your host, the one who greets you and tells you what went on in this hotel.

Serling passed away in 1975, years before the ride was built. To put him on screen, Disney pulled archive footage from the show (the episode It’s a Good Life) and had an impersonator, Mark Silverman, record the new lines. Serling’s widow, Carol Serling, picked and signed off on him. At Disneyland Paris, you can also hear the narration in French.

This attention to detail is why the ride feels like a seamless extension of Serling’s universe, not a simple copy.

So much for the fiction. Now for the behind-the-scenes side, meaning how Disney designed the ride. Tower of Terror opened at Disneyland Paris on December 22, 2007, in the second park (Walt Disney Studios at the time). It became that park’s centerpiece, rising on a plot of land that had sat empty for years for lack of budget.

The project goes back a long way. The tower was planned for Paris very early on, alongside the Japanese version. But the resort’s financial troubles held up construction for years.

In the end, California got the very same ride first (Disney California Adventure, in 2004), and Paris had to wait three more years. When the tower was finally built, the park’s silhouette was transformed overnight.

The ride was created by Disney’s Imagineers, the designers behind the company’s attractions. To stay faithful to the spirit of the series, they reportedly watched every episode of The Twilight Zone at least twice before sketching the sets. That deep dive explains how many nods are tucked into the line and the lobby.

The architecture was carefully chosen too: the tower is built in what’s called a Pueblo Deco style, which recalls Southern California in Hollywood’s golden age.

The Paris version was built in concrete (rather than steel, as in the US) to meet French building codes. At around 56 meters tall, it’s one of the tallest structures in the resort, and you can spot it from far away as you approach the park.

The 2019 makeover was led by Tom Fitzgerald, one of Walt Disney Imagineering’s longtime creative directors, who had been involved with the Tower of Terror saga since its early days.

A detail many people don’t know: the drop isn’t simply a free fall. Motors pull the elevator down faster than gravity, which is why it feels like you’re falling harder than normal. That same system also makes it possible to vary the sequences.

The ride has three elevator shafts with two cabs per shaft, for six vehicles in all. The ups and downs are run by a program that mixes the sequences: from one ride to the next, the order and height of the drops change. That’s why no two descents ever feel quite the same.

Since it opened, the Paris version has gone through one major change, in 2019. Here are the key milestones behind the scenes.

The 2019 makeover, called A New Dimension of Chills, added three different stories. Depending on the ride, the elevator plays one or another, which changes what you see and feel. Every one of them features Sally Shine, the little girl who vanished.

The hotel has stayed shut since that night in 1939. Nothing was moved, as though everyone had fled a minute ago. The sets tell this chapter of the story silently. Slow down and look closely, since the lore is tucked away in the details.

Every one of these details tells you the same thing: on that night, the hotel simply stopped living. No one got to finish their tea or gather their things. To make the abandoned look convincing, part of the furniture (lamps, telephones, antiques) was found at flea markets around Europe, and specialist artists add the dust, the patina, and the cobwebs by hand.

The line and the hotel library are packed with references to episodes of The Twilight Zone. They’re nods for fans of the show, slipped into the props and furniture. Here are the best known ones in the world of the ride.

Heads up: these references belong to the Tower of Terror saga, and which ones you’ll find varies from park to park. To know which are in Paris, your best bet is to keep your eyes open when you’re there.

These aren’t the only secrets to track down in the park. For Hidden Mickeys (those Mickey silhouettes hidden all over the place), check out the Hidden Mickeys, and for other curiosities to spot during your visit, see the secrets of Disneyland Paris.

The backstory is still the 1939 one, but the Disneyland Paris version has had its own identity since the 2019 makeover. All three of its storylines feature Sally Shine, the little girl who vanished: she’s the one haunting the elevator, which strengthens the tie to the original lore.

Good to know: there’s another version of the ride in Japan (Tokyo DisneySea) that tells a completely different story, with no link to the five missing guests or to Rod Serling. If you come across that tale online, it isn’t the Paris one.

If ride history is your thing, you’ll find the park’s story and the other backstories in the history of Disneyland Paris. Other rides have their own legend to tell: the backstory of Pirates of the Caribbean and the Thunder Mesa saga.