If you’ve ridden the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World, you might recall that your
Ghost Host at one point shoots off the fact that the mansion features 999 happy haunts,
but that there’s always room for a thousand.
He even lets you know that you can make final arrangements at the end of the tour if you
want to be that lucky one.
But really, would you want to?
How miserable would it be to share a mansion with 999 ghosts?
How crowded is the Haunted Mansion?
Now look, I’m going to be honest and upfront here.
There’s no one single and easy answer.
I set out looking for an answer, and somehow ended up with even more questions, all of
which I’ll go over.
But I don’t like burying answers in videos so let me start off with the best summary
I can come up with: it’s gonna be a pretty miserable time no matter what.
So we know that with you, the viewer, hypothetically deciding to answer this Craigslist ad for
a one-thousandth roommate at the haunted mansion, means there will be a thousand haunts.
That part’s easy.
However what we don’t know is how big of a space we’re working with.
Do we measure the show building for the ride?
Do we just measure the facade?
Or do we measure one of the multiple real-life inspirations for the mansion?
Well folks, the answer is yes, because I did the math for all of them.
Oh, and if you’re wondering where the Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion comes into play here:
it doesn’t.
Let’s start with the worst one, the facade of the mansion.
The footprint for it measures at about 2,450 square feet, with two floors, giving us around
4,900 square feet of space.
Let’s call it an even 5,000.
At 1000 occupants, that’s 5 square feet of space per ghost.
That’s just enough space to stand shoulder to shoulder with everyone else.
How’d you like to do that for the rest of your afterlife?
Now if we expand that measurement to include the actual show building, it gets a little better.
The entire show building and facade come out to around 44,200 square feet, which gives
each ghost 44.2 square feet of living space. That’s a little over six and a half
feet by six and a half feet.
So maybe you won’t have a claustrophobic panic attack, if ghosts can have that, but
also consider that from everything we see in the Haunted Mansion, including the fake
doors, it’s a home with about 31 rooms.
That means whatever room you walk or float into, there’s an average of 30-32 ghosts in it.
Know that feeling you have a really long rough day and you get home from work and you just need to have some
time in silence to process life?
Not at the mansion!
As for real buildings
The Haunted Mansion, like many projects at the Disney Parks, draws its inspiration from
more than one source.
The Harry Packer Mansion in Jim Thorpe, PA is often cited as the visual inspiration for the building.
It’s even mentioned by name in the official Disney book on the subject.
And if you look at the photos, the style is definitely there.
However there’s another mansion that is even closer to the Haunted Mansion, and that
is the Rathbone Estate in New York.
I mean, look at that.
It’s the spitting image of the Haunted Mansion. And it's called the Rathbone estate which just sounds haunted.
It was built in the early 1840’s on a 75 acre plot of land just south of Albany.
That detail is important.
Interesting sidenote, but Rathbone had many children and among them was a son named Henry.
Henry Rathbone would grow up to join the Union Army during the Civil War, and after the war
Major Rathbone was invited to see a play at Ford’s Theater with President Lincoln and
first lady Mary Todd Lincoln.
He would end up being present at the assassination of President Lincoln.
He attempted to apprehend the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, but was wounded by
Booth in the process.
That has nothing to do with having too many ghost roommates, but I thought it was pretty interesting.
Anyway, back to the mansion.
There’s a book from 1956 that happens to contain the floorplan for the house.
It comes in at just under 4,000 square feet across 13 rooms.
That’s four square feet per ghost and nearly 76 ghosts in every room.
So I take it back, that’s actually worse than the ride facade.
I even take back calling it a mansion.
Sure 13, rooms, but how can you call any home a mansion if it can’t comfortably house
1000 ghosts, ya know what I mean?
When it comes to the inside of the haunted mansion, the commonly cited inspiration is
the Winchester House in San Jose, California.
It is a 24,000 square foot mansion with 160 rooms.
If you want to learn more about the really wild history of that mansion, I suggest checking
out Offhand Disney’s video after this that goes more in-depth into the real-life inspirations
of the Disney haunted mansions.
At 24,000 square feet that’s 24 square feet per ghost, and six to seven ghosts per room.
Not as bad.
I mean, I know people in New York willing to pay $1,200 a month for that sort of living situation.
Now if you’ve ridden the Haunted Mansion more than once, you might be thinking “But
Rob, not all of the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion are inside the actual mansion.
There’s that whole graveyard scene filled with ghosts”.
Well you’re right.
That changes a lot because it tells us that the Haunted Mansion ghosts aren’t bound
to the building itself.
That’s where the Rathbone Estate’s 73 acres really comes in handy.
Assuming the ghosts are just bound to the property, that means every ghost at the Rathbone
mansion would have around 3,180 square feet of their own space.
For a sense of scale, that’s more room than an average home in the United States.
But that one consideration opened up a slew of new questions.
Does that mean the majority of the 1000 ghosts have to just exist outside all the time?
Do ghosts have to worry about the elements?
I guess not, but is it comfortable?
And another thing, the Ghost Host says 999 happy haunts.
He doesn’t say 999 happy ghosts.
What’s a haunt?
Do those blinking eyes on the wallpaper count as a haunt?
What about all the moving objects?
Are they haunted, or are they just controlled by invisible ghosts?
If I hand in my death certificate do I get to keep being me, or am I at risk of being
assigned an eternity as a floating trombone?
Because if that’s how this works, I have to throw all these numbers away.
Do we count the animated corpses?
I mean, look at this guy.
He got the real short end of the stick and spends forever awake in a coffin.
Though he’s definitely getting more privacy than all the other ghosts in the mansion so
at least he has that.
Also, can’t ghosts just phase through each other?
Is that a thing?
Because then you could, in theory, have all 1000 ghosts sharing one space.
But Is that comfortable?
I never liked being too close to a stranger on the subway, I can’t imagine an eternity
phased through someone.
The answer to all that is I don’t know, and all of these questions do nothing but
destroy any purpose those numbers once had.
So I suppose if there’s one takeaway from all this, besides me having too much time
on my hands, it's that even though the Ghost Host will offer it time after time, day after
day, year after year, think twice before volunteering to join those 999 happy haunts.
They’re probably not as happy as you think.