Dreams come true in the most magical place on Earth — even 46 years later.
TikToker Mathew Ables shared a video on social media detailing his trip where he found an old Disney World ticket from 1978 in his home and used it to enter the park recently.
Ables started the TikTok video on January 23 saying, “I tried to get into Disney World with a 46 year old ticket that was originally worth $8.” He then cut to a shot of a note in an old drawer and noted that it had been “gathering dust since before I was born.”
He showed a yellow ticket booklet that read “10 Adventures in Walt Disney World, Magic Kingdom” and featured an older design of Mickey Mouse and a Disney castle. The back of the ticket booklet also said, “Allow one entry into the Magic Kingdom and you also had a ‘transportation ticket’ entry.”
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In the video, he said he realized it had “never been used” and that the ticket had “no expiration date.” “Which means I’ve either found the golden ticket or I’m deluded into thinking that a mouse will let me use it to get inside almost half a century later,” Ables said.
So he decided to fly to Orlando, Florida and go to the park to see if he could use his ticket to get inside. A TikTok video then showed him walking up to the ‘Guest Relations’ office and asking to use it to enter the park, explaining that it was an old ticket. He then noted that he became a little “nervous” that it wouldn’t work after she “started aggressively punching blanks in the ticket book.”
A general view of the Walt Disney World Resort, which celebrates its 50th anniversary on April 3, 2022 in Orlando, Florida.
AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
Ables then said a staff member left and returned to give him a more modern yellow Mickey Mouse pass, which he could use to enter the park. He scanned and was able to gain access to Disney World for a day.
“I can’t believe this actually worked,” he said in the video as he walked to the entrance castle at Disney World.
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He ended the video by noting that the same one-day ticket would “cost more than 20 times its original value,” going from $8 in 1978 to $164 in 2024. The latter price is shown on screen during Ables’ TikTok video.
Disney World Parks did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment about the reception.
The video has so far collected 9.2 million views within a week, more than 943 thousand likes, 50 thousand tags and more than 3,800 comments, with many people writing that they are glad that Disney “honored” a ticket to it.
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Another commenter wrote that the ticket “was a precious relic. I hope they set it up as a museum exhibit. It’s something from the past.” Ables noted that he tried to claim the old ticket, but they “kept it.”
Others wrote that they also used older cards from 1981 and 1993, because those cards didn’t have an expiration date either.
“All my childhood, my parents used the old cards they had. It’s always been so cool that they still accept them,” one person commented. Another said, “What! my grandparents have about 10 of these! I thought it was a souvenir all these years.”
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education