For five decades now, the Haunted Mansion has been touring Disneyland guests through a place where
hinges creek in doorless chambers and strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls.
The history of this beloved attraction begins in 1951 when Walt Disney and his team were drawing
up ideas for Disneyland. Walt expressed his wish to have some kind of haunted house.
Imagineer Harper Goff soon drew renderings of a church, graveyard and haunted house for the
11 acre Mickey Mouse Park they were planning. However, after the purchase of the property
in Anaheim, imagineers brainstormed ideas for Main Street U.S.A. One idea pre-dates
the unbuilt Edison Square and Liberty Street, it was a small road that was an off-shoot of
Main Street lined with Victorian houses, and the street dead ended with a run-down haunted house.
Plans for the haunted house were put on hold during Disneyland’s
construction due to the fact that Disneyland was exceeding it’s budget,
but Walt had revisited the idea of doing a haunted house around the year 1957,
as part of the master plan to expand Frontierland on the west side of the park.
This new expansion would be themed to New Orleans. Walt assigned Imagineer Ken Anderson to design the
Haunted House, because Ken had experience making thrilling and frightening scenes, as proven with
his work on the Fantasyland Dark Rides, Snow White’s Adventures and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
In 1958, Walt went public with the idea of adding a New Orleans addition to Disneyland,
and it would have a wax museum and a haunted house. Walt had spoken to the BBC in London about
how he wanted to build some kind of retirement home for all the homeless ghosts in the world.
He said, “The nature of being a ghost is that they have to perform,
therefore they need an audience” -Walt Disney. Ken Anderson searched New England and the
American South for inspiration on the look of the haunted home in Disneyland’s New Orleans land,
and he found photographs of the Shipley-Lydecker House in Baltimore, Maryland. This was the
house from which he drew his inspiration. Ken finally created a sketch of the ramshackle
house in 1958 and Sam McKim turned the sketch into the now famous painting of the Haunted Mansion.
Everyone loved the look of the house, the project they had been working on
finally had a face…except it was a face Walt didn’t like. You have to understand this was 1958,
Disneyland was still trying to distance itself from other amusement parks which featured run-down
and dilapidated structures. Walt insisted Disneyland
always look new and in pristine condition. And after only 3 years of trying to build
its reputation, Walt was not going to have this ramshackle house mar the beauty of his park.
Walt told the team that he liked the architectural style, however he wants the mansion to look just
as well kept as the rest of Disneyland. He then famously stated, “We’ll take care of the outside,
and let the ghosts take care of the inside.” -And if you consider those words for a moment,
they really make sense. Disneyland is providing this living space for these ghosts, its only
fitting that Disneyland keep the exterior of the house in the same condition it keeps itself in.
During the design of the Mansion’s backstory in 1957, Ken Anderson came up with several storylines
for the walk-through attraction. One featured a sailor named Captain Gore, who was secretly
the notorious pirate Black Bart, and he killed his wife when she discovered his true identity.
Another iteration was that the mansion came straight from the deep south and was brought
in one piece, to Disneyland. The mansion was then known for killing all of its inhabitants.
There was even a more humorous and light-hearted version of the story that featured Walt Disney
himself as the tour guide via recorded tape and projection effects. But I will not be delving
into these backstories, instead I will focus on the history of the physical mansion itself.
Walt had Yale Gracey and Rolly Crump teamed together to research and develop special
effects to be used in the haunted house. Walt saw Yale as an out-of-the-box thinker,
and he was known for his mastery and building models as well as tinkering around with illusions.
Rolly had an affinity for magic and illusions himself, and he was well-known at the studio
for his fooling around with creating mobiles and propellers, creating kinetic sculptures and things
that moved in any which way you could imagine. Yale and Rolly were able to learn from old
fashioned illusions and deconstruct them in order to create more visually complex special effects.
These illusions were rather simple when their workings were revealed,
but had you not peeked behind the curtain, you probably would never guess how it was done.
Back then, the designers at WED were a close knit group,
a lot like family, they may not have always gotten along, but there was a sense of together-ness,
teamwork, support, and most of all, the common goal of bringing Walt’s dreams to reality.
By the end of 1959, Yale and Rolly had staged a full scale mock-up of the haunted house
attraction, there were several scenes staged to take around 2 minutes each
to complete the full illusion or effect. Again, this was a guided walk-through tour.
Your tour guide would bring you from room to room where each staged scene would come to life.
When Walt got a good look at the mock up he was impressed with the illusions they created...
unfortunately he still wasn’t sold on a walk-through tour,
it wasn’t efficient enough to entertain the kinds of crowds Disneyland received,
and on top of that, the Imagineering team put in charge of the project could never pinpoint
a definite story-line to the attraction. So the haunted house was put on indefinite hold.
In 1961 plans to finally build New Orleans Square were being pushed forward,
and work began on clearing out the area of Frontierland known as Magnolia Park,
home to the Chicken Plantation Restaurant. Due to the larger design of New Orleans Square the
haunted house was given a plot of land further north than originally expected,
now it would reside near Fowler’s Harbor along the Rivers of America.
Due to the fact that New Orleans Square would house a large wax museum themed to
pirates and the Spanish main, as well as a simultaneous expansion of the Jungle Cruise,
this meant the boundary of the park would need to be extended and the Disneyland Railroad rerouted.
The Frontierland Railroad depot was moved about 100 feet to the west and a new station platform
was built to handle a larger amount of people waiting for the popular trains. While the pirate
wax museum building would be hidden from view by disguising it as part of the shops and restaurants
of New Orleans Square, there was no way to build the haunted house’s show building within the park
without shattering the illusion that people entering the little mansion were actually
led into the massive warehouse behind it. So it was decided the Disneyland Railroad would
pass through a tunnel between the mansion and its show building, providing the house with a large
hillside behind it to hide views of the warehouse. In 1962 construction on the façade of the haunted
house began, and it would be completed by 1963. During this time Walt Disney was
curious to see what show elements Imagineers could come up with for the haunted house,
he asked a group of Imagineers such as Ken Anderson, Marc Davis, Claude Coats,
Rolly Crump and several others to start coming up with designs and ideas for him to brood over.
Rolly had created several weird show elements.
Walt and Rolly would later decide that the room that contained his weird artifacts
would be called “The Museum of the Weird”. When 1963 came about, the only thing that
was completed was the mansion façade, it’s show building and even the rest of New Orleans Square
were put on hold as WED was busy at work designing attractions for the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Newly recruited imaginer Marty Sklar created a sign out front of the mansion,
advertising leasing for ghosts and restless spirits who wish to reside in the house.
The world’s fair was a big leap for WED, Walt saw the potential for ride and show experimentation
and expanding their library of knowledge, so he sent almost everyone he had at WED
to work on 4 attractions for the World’s Fair. Using the money corporate sponsors had given
to WED to design these attractions, they were able to develop new ride technology. Though,
Ford’s Magic Skyway would have a direct effect on the design of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.
It was an attraction where guests boarded real Ford convertibles that traveled back in time
to the age of the dinosaurs and then made their way through the history of man kind’s technology.
Imagineer Bob Gurr was tasked with figuring out how to get the Ford cars to drive through
a show building in a safe and predictable way. What he came up with was using tubular steel
rails underneath the road bed that would guide and steer the vehicles through the building,
and embedded in the roadway every few feet was a powerful electric motor fitted with a rubber tire
which would propel the vehicles forward at a controlled speed. This type of ride system
would be forever known as the Peoplemover. So when WED came back from their work at the
World’s Fair, Walt had to decide whether or not the haunted house
would be a walk-through or a ride-through. Some argued they could increase the capacity
of the haunted house walk through by creating an identical walk-through in the same building
so that it could double the capacity, but even still, Walt was not convinced.
The plans for the redo of Tomorrowland would call for several high capacity attractions installed,
such as the massive rotating theater of the carousel of progress,
the Tomorrowland Peoplemover which could chow through an astounding 3,000 riders per hour,
and finally, a redesign of the peoplemover which would be called the Omnimover…used for
the Atomobiles of Adventure Thru Inner Space. Walt called these high capacity rides, “people eaters”
because of their ability to consume the crowds that would otherwise be queuing up outside.
The untimely and devastating death of Walt Disney in December of 1966 left Imagineers
without a guiding force to keep The Haunted Mansion on track. There were so many different
directions for the them to go, and nothing had yet been given the green light by Walt.
It was apparent that Imagineers would have to decide things for themselves…a
predicament which led to divisiveness at WED. In 1967, Richard Irvine who was in charge of WED
decided that with the massive success of Pirates of the Caribbean, that he would put Marc Davis and
Claude Coats in charge of the Haunted Mansion, hoping the duo would create another smashing success.
But Claude Coats felt that Pirates was successful because of the scenery and sets he
created, while Marc Davis thought the secret to its victory was the design of his Pirate characters...
this would lead to a feud where Claude thought the Haunted Mansion should be frightening
and use its sets and place setting to develop that fear. But Marc felt that the house should
draw inspiration from the hilarity of Pirates of the Caribbean by creating light-hearted
and comedic ghost characters. But, there was one thing Marc Davis and Claude Coats both agreed on:
now that Walt wasn’t here to intervene, they would NOT allow Rolly’s museum of the weird to be built.
Rolly Crump was dismayed at the news of his project being cancelled…he would later
say that for him, the Museum of the Weird was “the one that got away”. However, Rolly Crump
held no grudge against Marc or Claude. You see, without Walt Disney there to provide his guidance,
Richard Irvine and everyone at WED felt like they should leave the Haunted Mansion
in the hands of the two guys who knew best how to translate Walt’s dreams into reality.
Everyone trusted Marc and Claude, and if they said the museum of the weird was not a good idea,
then perhaps, they were right. Nevertheless, Rolly’s museum would have been a sight to behold.
As development on the Haunted Mansion continued, Park Operations Manager Dick Nunis had been
checking in on all the projects happening at Disneyland, he was the one that insisted to Walt
that the pirates wax museum should be turned into a high capacity boat ride. He was also the one
that eyed the progress of New Tomorrowland and made sure Imagineers knew that the park needed
more people-eating rides. Imagineer X Atencio joked “We called him Hopalong Capacity.”
Dick Nunis was also against the Haunted Mansion being a walk-through, even though it would be a guided
tour to keep people from staying in one place too long, and even though there would be a duplicate
experience to double the hourly capacity…he still felt this wasn’t enough. He suggested
that the Mansion might benefit from the Omnimover technology used in Adventure Thru Inner Space.
When Adventure Thru Inner Space was being developed, Imagineer John Hench was put in
charge of the project and he consulted with fellow Imagineer Bob Gurr on what
type of ride system they could use to take people through the attraction.
Bob was sitting at Hench’s desk twirling a candied apple by its stem while he thought. It suddenly
occurred to him when he looked at the apple twirling that they could use the peoplemover ride
system to create an endless chain of vehicles, but instead of vehicles that always faced forward,
the Atomobiles would have the ability to rotate their pods 360 degrees in order to direct the
guests view at exactly what Imagineers wanted you to look at, WHEN they wanted you to look at it.
For the Haunted Mansion, they would duplicate the clamshell shaped omnimover system, then
simply paint it black and dub them Doom Buggies. One very interesting technological aspect that
Ford’s Magic Skyway, The Peoplemover, the Atomobiles and even the Doombuggies share
is their audio system. We take for granted how the ghost host’s narration is delivered
to us in each Doombuggy at precisely the right moment. The system developed at the New York
World’s fair is still in use at the Haunted Mansion today, albeit, SLIGHTLY upgraded.
The whole chain of 130 doombuggies are divided into groups of 20 vehicles.
In that string of 20 pods, the narration track is shared between a pair of vehicles.
And the first doombuggy in that chain of 20 keeps the audio system powered using a dynamo that
charges up a 12 volt motorcycle battery, so as the first buggy rolls along, it generates power.
Now, each narration zone in the ride had a hidden antenna wire underneath the track that transmitted
the narration, and each pair of Doom Buggies that passed by would pick up an individual
narration track. The narration was broadcast in each area into six separate radio channels,
that way 6 different pairs of doombuggies had the narration timed perfectly to the exhibit
as they were passing through. Now today, they use RFID scanners and chips to assign each pair
of Doom Buggies a pre-programmed digital version of the narration.
The designers of the Haunted Mansion had a daunting task ahead of them.
The two Imagineers chosen to spearhead the project couldn’t agree with a direction to take it.
They had been working on the mansion off and on since 1959 and they feared guests
were getting restless. It didn’t help that the façade of the attraction was already built,
and a sign had been hanging out front taunting park visitors of a ride that may never come.
The Imagineers at WED were all but willing to give up… however, it was hard to imagine where
things would go now that everyone was without Walt Disney, their leader and beloved mentor…On Part 2,
we will finish the story of the attraction and I will guide you on a scene by scene tour,
showing you the secrets and the history of the Haunted Mansion.