Break the rules and you'll go to Disneyland jail. Just ask Blake Lively.

May 23-The "happiest place on Earth" is only happy if you don't break the rules. If you run amok in the house of Mouse, it's straight to jail for you. Disneyland jail, that is.

There might not be any cells or characters locking you up with Mickey-shaped keys, but it's a real place where people committing serious transgressions are sent before being handed over to local authorities. Many people have shared their stories about the experience - including some very high-profile celebrities.

"I was banned for a year because I went to Disney prison," Blake Lively shared on "Late Night with David Letterman." The incident happened when she was just 6 years old, which would have been around 1993.

"I was really young, so I wasn't responsible for this," she said. "This is all my brother's fault."

She and her brother, who was 12 at the time, knew a trick for transferring the hand stamp that allows a guest to reenter the park after they leave. If you spray another person's hand with hair spray, at least at the time, then press the stamp to the sticky skin, it would transfer over. The two offered to transfer their stamps to people in the parking lot, and were caught by Disney security.

"We go downstairs with Disneyland [security], it's all white rooms, everybody's dressed in all white, the furniture is all white," she explained. "And they just interrogate us. ... It was crazy. And it was really scary and traumatizing."

Lively speculated that if she and her brother had admitted what they had done, they would have been banned for life - but because they insisted on their innocence, despite being caught on camera, the two were only banned for a year.

"It was pretty sad," she said.

To be clear, the jail is not actually a jail, but rather a plain room in the Disneyland security office where offending guests are held for questioning. A 2025 video shows a glimpse inside the area from footage filmed while a guest was being detained at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom.

There are many different reasons a person can run afoul of Disneyland security, from theft to disruptive behavior. Some of them will get you a slap on the wrist or a simple warning. Others, like physical violence towards other guests or employees, or being in possession of banned substances, can incur much more serious consequences, including being turned over to local police and banned from the parks.

That happened to Richard McGuire, who attempted to camp on Walt Disney World's long-closed Discovery Island in 2020. He was arrested for trespassing. McGuire accepted a plea deal and avoided jail time, but was permanently banned.

One public figure who was removed from the park but not sent to Disney jail was Barack Obama, decades before he was president. While he was a student at Occidental College, he said at an event in Anaheim in 2018, he went to Disneyland to see a Kool & the Gang concert. "After the concert ... you could still hang out in the park, so we went into the gondolas," he said, referring to a now-closed ride called the Disneyland Skyway. "I'm ashamed to say this, so close your ears, young people. But a few of us were smoking on the gondolas."

Security apprehended the future president and his friends, and escorted them from the park. "I was booted from the Magic Kingdom," Obama said. "At the end, they said, 'You're going to have to leave, sir, for breaking the rules of the Magic Kingdom, but you are welcome to come back anytime.'"

As a teenager, Robert Downey Jr. was apprehended by Disneyland security for smoking a different substance, also on the Disneyland Skyway. "I was brought to a surprisingly friendly processing center, given a stern warning and returned to, if memory serves, one very disappointed group chaperone," Downey said in 2019 while being named a Disney Legend.

On his "Brotherly Love" podcast, former Disney Channel star Andy Lawrence shared that he "got almost arrested in Disneyland once by Disney police ... Severely reprimanded." When he was a teenager, he and his friends were messing around in a parking lot; Lawrence tried to jump a parking gate as it lifted into the air. "I just smash through it and obliterate it into a thousand pieces," he recounted.

Two Disney security officers apprehended Lawrence in the lot. "They handcuff me, and they sit me down," he said. "I'm like, 'Oh my God I'm freaking out,' because by this point I'm doing a couple of things for Disney so I'm like, 'This could be bad.'" Lawrence voiced the main character T.J. Detweiler in over 100 episodes of the Disney Channel cartoon "Recess" and appeared in multiple Disney TV movies, including "The Other Me" and "Jumping Ship." Eventually the security guards let him go - but many others have had different stories.

In a BuzzFeed video, Jaydan Malsky shared her story of visiting the Hall of Presidents at Walt Disney World during the week that Trump's animatronic debuted. "As soon as Donald Trump's animatronic started saying the Oath of Office, I stood up and started screaming, 'Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!' I would not stop until they shut down the ride, which they did," she said.

"There were lots of kids crying because, and lots of parents crying, too, because I definitely interrupted their kids naps," Malsky continued. "Most of the audience didn't like me. There was, I remember one burly man coming up and being like, 'If you don't shut up, I will beat you up,' or something like that."

She was "carted off to Disney jail," she said. "... I think once they realized I was not a legitimate threat, they were like, 'You can go.' But they did say you can't come back to the Hall of Presidents ever."

In the same video, Grace Swygert shared that she and a friend were once detained because of the friend's wardrobe malfunction. She was wearing a strapless top, and raised her arms as the two were going down the drop at Splash Mountain (now Tiana's Bayou Adventure), and, well, you can imagine what happened next. The friend was photographed on the ride mid-malfunction - and not knowing what to do, the pair stood in front of the monitor with the accidentally risque photo, trying to block kids from seeing it.

"And next thing you know it, these two people came, I guess secret undercover people, whatever, and they're like, 'We need you two to come with us,'" she said.

"I was so scared," she continued. "And I was like, 'OK, so where are we going exactly?' And so they're like, 'You know, we have to take you like to Disney Jail right quick.' And my heart sank, like the only thing I could think of was, 'OK, we're about to pay a fine, we're getting kicked out.'"

Swygert described being taken to a "regular room, a desk, little decorations."

"It's not like, you know, a theme jail. ... It's no 'It's a Small World' [song] playing, it's none of that stuff, it's no bars," she added. The two were let go after they explained what happened, but didn't go on any more rides that day.

In the park's earlier days when dress codes were even more strict, the offenses didn't have to be severe to incur a trip to Disney jail. "In about 1970 I got 'arrested' at Disneyland for wearing patches on my jeans," Redditor tishgllrda wrote. "They took me to a room where they took a Polaroid of me which they taped to a wall with lots of other photos. They told me to leave and never come back. I spent the rest of the day at Disneyland with my friends. I never went back."

David Lowery, lead singer of the band Cracker, even wrote a song about the place, called "Disneyland Jail, 1977."

In it, he described taking hallucinogenic mushrooms in the park's parking lot and sneaking vodka inside. (Lowery did not respond to SFGATE's request for comment as to whether this really happened.)

"Never take mushrooms / and ride on Space Mountain / you just might end up in Disneyland jail," he sings. "Never drink vodka / pass out on the Monorail / you just might end up in Disneyland jail."

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