Over the weekend, an obscure Disneyland mystery was solved by a popular YouTube channel — but upon closer inspection, there’s more Hollywood history to the story than the YouTuber first found.

The mystery begins with a light that never goes out. If you’re a Disneyland history buff, it’s not the one you’re probably thinking of. The most famous lamp in Disney lore is always illuminated above the fire station on Main Street USA. Inside, it lights the small apartment that Walt Disney had built so he could sleep in the park during its construction. Today, the lamp is always lit in tribute to Disneyland’s creator.

Across the way in Disney California Adventure, theme park YouTuber Chris Provost discovered another window that never seems to go dark. This one is much more obscure: It’s a nondescript window of a nondescript building in the Hollywood Land section of the park. After doing some research, Provost deduced this window was another tribute to Disney, this time in the form of his movie studio in Burbank. 

“This is meant to look like Walt Disney Studios. The awnings, the art deco and the billboard, that tells us this the Walt Disney Studios,” he says in the video. “And it looks just like it does up in Burbank.”

A dig into the archives shows that the historical inspiration is not so clear-cut, however. For one, the Buena Vista and Hollywood Land sections of DCA are meant to evoke the early days of the Disney company, spanning the 1920s and ’30s. The Burbank studio, which is Disney’s headquarters today, didn’t open until 1940.

During the decades used as inspiration for DCA, Disney was headquartered at a much smaller studio at 2719 Hyperion Avenue (hence the name of the Hyperion Theater located across the way from the DCA building in question). This studio, which is now a Gelson’s supermarket, was where some of Disney’s most famous creations were born. Mickey and Minnie were animated there, as was the groundbreaking feature film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” It was the runaway success of “Snow White,” in fact, that partly led Disney to seek a bigger backlot for his productions. 

There are a few other clues that the DCA building actually represents the Hyperion, not the Burbank, location. For one, there’s a sign on the side that reads: “Walt Disney Studios. Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony Sound Cartoons.” This sign is an exact replica of the one that was erected above the Hyperion studio. And although Provost points out the shaded awnings on the windows as evidence this is the Burbank studio, those same awnings existed on the Hyperion building too. You can see them in archival photos published by Los Angeles Magazine in 2016.

The window’s placement, however, may indeed be a tribute to the Burbank location. It’s not clear where exactly Walt’s office was on the Hyperion lot, but his Burbank office was documented down to the smallest detail. For years after Disney’s death in 1966, his office was kept locked and empty. In 1970, a research librarian was given access to the office, and he created a precise archive of suite 3H just as it was when Disney occupied it. Like the window in Hollywood Land, Disney looked out onto his studio from the third floor corner office.