The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion

by Jeff Baham

  One notable illusion that Gracey and Crump stumbled across was a nineteenth century theatrical spectacle developed for stage use by British scientist John Henry Pepper, which has come to be known as the Pepper’s Ghost effect. Pepper, whose curiosity led him to such lofty goals as attempting to manipulate the atmosphere to create rain and using science to debunk theatrical magic acts, developed this effect in 1858 along with co-conspirator Henry Dircks, who is likely the primary inventor of the trick. The illusion, which was based on lighting and reflections, would make it seem as if an actual three-dimensional ghost was occupying the stage, though the ghost could disappear and reappear at will. Unfortunately, cracks began to appear early in the Pepper-Dircks relationship. Pepper claimed that Dircks’s optical effect “excited no attention because the explanation of it was somewhat vague and unsatisfactory.” Dircks’s version of the effect, which was based on reflection and sheets of glass, needed sunlight to function according to his design, which was unappealing for theatrical applications. When Dircks and Pepper couldn’t agree on how to market the effect, they ended their partnership, and Pepper ended up naming the trick, and thus ensuring his claim to a sort of fame. [3]

  Pepper’s Ghost became a popular stage illusion for theatrical presentations in the late nineteenth century, and a version of the illusion was described in volume one of a set of books called The Boy Mechanic . Subtitled “700 Things for Boys to Do,” the set of books contained an exceptional collection of experiments, tricks, and such diversions as would attract the mind of a tinkerer. Gracey, being just such a man, turned to the books for inspiration when developing gags for the haunted house, and didn’t come up empty-handed.

  As described in The Boy Mechanic Vol. 1 , Pepper’s Ghost was the perfect method by which to create ghostly effects. “One of the audience is invited onto the stage, where he is placed in an upright open coffin,” the book says, describing the illusion. “A white shroud is thrown over his body, and his clothes and flesh gradually fade away till nothing but his skeleton remains, which immediately begins to dance a horrible rattling jig. The skeleton then fades away and the man is restored again.” [4]

  The illusion that Gracey and Crump devised based on Pepper’s Ghost follows that description to a certain extent. Working off of Anderson’s tale of Captain Gore, the duo devised an effect which featured a pirate captain, who had died at sea, coming back to his home as a moldering ghost. “His ghost had come back, but he had killed his wife before he went off to sea, and she was bricked up in the wall,” Crump recalled. “He would appear in the middle of the room, in front of a brick fireplace, covered in seaweed with water dripping off of him.” The figure would have actually been offstage with a shower raining down on it from above, but the Pepper’s Ghost illusion would create the appearance that the ghost had materialized inside of the room. “Then the wife’s ghost would appear from behind the brick wall, and she’d come out screaming and trying to attack him, then they’d both suddenly disappear,” Crump said. When the illusion was finished, the interior lights of the room would brighten, showing that the ghosts had all totally vanished, leaving only a shaken audience in their wake.

  One item of note: it’s probable that Ken Anderson also attempted to create an effect utilizing reflection before Gracey and Crump began their machinations. In a description of another of Anderson’s sound stage tests, which he titled “Mirrored Room,” Anderson describes a series of tests designed to set the lighting for his effect to work successfully. “Light an individual occupying the room, first in a normal level inky light, then changing to black light and eliminate the inky light,” Anderson notes. “Meanwhile, illuminate in black light the florescent ghost on the opposite side of the transmission mirrors so he is an equal density with the reflection of the individual in the room.” [5] This is essentially the description of the hitchhiking ghosts effect currently used in the Haunted Mansion, which succeeds by blending reality with reflection—as do the concepts Pepper espoused, but it was Gracey who ordered the eight-foot by fifteen-foot piece of glass to fully demonstrate the potential of Pepper’s stage effect for creating disappearing and reappearing ghosts. By all accounts, the sea captain vignette developed and demonstrated by Gracey and Crump was an astounding, and eerie, piece of stage magic.

  Crump soaked up Gracey’s creativity, and Disney began to take note of Crump’s dedication to the project. “The interesting thing was, when Yale wasn’t there and Walt would come by, he and I would talk [about the projects] for long periods of time,” Crump said. “Evidently, Walt and I had formed some sort of bond, and he trusted me in the fact that he knew that if Yale wasn’t there, I’d tell him everything that Yale and I were doing, and I really knew what was going on.”

  “The first two or three years, when I had meetings with Walt I wouldn’t say a word,” Crump said. Only in his twenties, Crump was two decades younger than a lot of his peers in Imagineering, and he attempted to play it straight and rely on his talent, which was always a better way to please Walt Disney than by being a “yes man.” “I would just watch and listen to what everybody else said, and pay attention to how Walt reacted,” Crump recalled. “I began to really study Walt, and to get a feel for where his head was at. I think that gave me an advantage.”

  Working for and with Walt Disney was both a mighty privilege and a heavy responsibility. Far from the “Uncle Walt” persona viewers watched weekly on television, the Walt Disney that ran the Studio and WED Enterprises was a driven man that expected more from individual artists’ talents than they realized they had inside of themselves. “All the other guys that had worked for Walt for years, they had worked with him for so long, they didn’t study him anymore,” Crump said. “But I’d watch the way he’d interface with the different guys. I call it ‘song and dance,’ because a lot of times we’d have workshops, or sessions, and a guy, he’d have an idea, and he’d get up and he’d ‘sing and dance.’ I’d watch him, and I’d think, ‘this is the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen! How is Walt putting up with this?’ Everyone wanted to pretend they had a great idea and everything. I realized later on that Walt loved all of the guys. He accepted them for who they were, knowing full well that something good is going to come out of one of them.”

  Crump’s nuanced view of Walt Disney helps provide some insight into how Disney obtained such incredible results from his artists and designers. “The other thing I learned, working in animation, is that when Walt put two story men together, he’d use two story men that didn’t get along,” Crump said. “He always felt that if they fought a little bit about the story, he’d get a better end product.”

  The New York World’s Fair of 1964 and 1965 would eventually intervene and take Gracey and Crump off of the haunted house project, but after the Fair, Crump returned to the task. Unfortunately, his nuanced view of Disney may have contributed to his eventual removal from the Haunted Mansion’s development, as corporate politics inside of the WED Enterprises organization began to take root, and the distinction between the creative personnel and the administrators became more apparent. But more on that later.

  Perhaps Yale Gracey was always meant to leave his mark on the Haunted Mansion. Rolly Crump recalled asking Gracey about his personal beliefs in the supernatural. “When Yale and I were sitting there in the big [sound stage], I said to him, ‘Have you ever had anything happen to you that seems a little…different?’ And he said ‘Oh yeah,’ and I thought, oh my,” Crump said, not expecting that answer from the rational, mechanically-minded Gracey. Gracey proceeded to tell Crump about a trip he took to the East Coast at the age of nine or ten, during which he was to spend the summer in a large old house with his aunt and cousins. On the day that the young Master Gracey was to pack up and head home, his aunt asked him what he enjoyed the most about his summer holiday. “Yale said, ‘The little lady who lives in the closet and comes out and reads to us every night,’” Crump recalled. “All of his cousins started jumping up and do wn and telling him to stop, because if he started
talking about her, she’d never come back.” With his cousins denying the story and his summer coming to an end, you might expect Gracey’s aunt to consider the story a common childish fib, though even as a child, there must have been something about Gracey’s personality that didn’t mesh with tall tales. Unable to leave it behind, the aunt went to the local library to research the history of her house, and found out that there was, in fact, a woman who had lived her whole life in the house previously. Taking a photo from the book, the aunt went back to her children and showed them the photo, asking if it was the little closet lady who had been reading to them at night. And they recognized the woman immediately and admitted that it was that same lady.

  “That was one of the most beautiful ghost stories—and I know Yale didn’t make it up,” Crump said. “Because he just wasn’t that kind of a guy.”

  “When we built the illusions, we were surprised to find how effective they actually were,” Gracey later told Famous Monsters magazine, describing his role in the creation of the Haunted Mansion in retrospect. “People enjoy being frightened, but we couldn’t make the attraction too scary because of the droves of children that would be coming. It’s like adding a wink of an eye to the end of a ghost story.”

  It’s apparent, however, that both Gracey and Crump had originally been treading down a darker path with their inventions. “Someday I would like to design a real scare house,” Gracey added wistfully. “Some of the illusions that weren’t used in the Haunted Mansion would send chills through anyone I know.” [6]

  Gracey died tragically in 1983, murdered by a transient on Labor Day in an incident in which his wife was shot four times as well, though she survived the attack. [7] It’s unfortunate that Gracey didn’t live a few years longer, so that he might have experienced a bit more of the admiration expressed by fans of WED Imagineering. “Yale used to get really upset that they never put our names out there. He was from animation, and in animation, you always got your name on the screen,” said Crump. “He said at Disneyland, you can design something, but your name’s not there. And I said, ‘But it’s DISNEY-land.’ And he said, ‘But don’t you think we should get something?’ and I said, ‘You get a check every week. Be happy with that.’”

  Chapter Four

  On the Move Toward Animated Electronics

  By 1961, Walt Disney had decided to halt much of the work on Disneyland, and he set WED Enterprises onto other projects related to the upcoming 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, after being approached by New York’s influential Robert Moses, who represented the Fair to Disney and believed that Disney’s involvement would prove to be a win-win situation. But movement on the haunted house project wasn’t completely on hold. Still moving forward, architectural plans were being developed, and construction finally began on the attraction’s facade in 1961, before Disney assigned most of the Imagineers to the Fair.

  With the decision to locate the Haunted Mansion (as the project was titled by 1963) in the proposed New Orleans Square segment of Disneyland, the exact area in which the structure would be built was determined based on the footprint of the building and the space needed to handle the capacity of the expected crowds. During the development of the Haunted Mansion, work was also being done on another similar walk-through exhibit for New Orleans Square that would represent a wax museum portraying infamous pirates of history. With capacity becoming an ever-present concern for the park, it was determined that both the pirate exhibit and the Haunted Mansion would need to be rides with some sort of conveyance to carry guests through the entire experience. But with both rides being fully enveloping experiences, simple dark ride show buildings such as the ones in Fantasyland hosting Peter Pan and Mr. Toad wouldn’t do. These buildings would have to be massive warehouses built underground and beyond the obvious border of the park.

  New Orleans Square, which would host the Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride, eventually opened in July 1966. In a special dedication ceremony to which the mayor of the actual New Orleans—Victor Schiro—was invited, Schiro claimed that Disney’s vision of the grand French Quarter of New Orleans “looks just like home.” True to form, Disney couldn’t resist the chance to punctuate one of his favorite themes by replying, “Well, I’d say [ours] is a lot cleaner.” [1] But the mayor was correct; Disneyland’s French Quarter was the spitting image of the actual locale in New Orleans, so much so that in 2006, New Orleans mayoral candidate Kimberly Williamson Butler utilized a photo of Disneyland in her campaign literature, digitally inserting herself into the photo and then digitally erasing a trash can with an obvious Disneyland heritage. Apparently Butler believed that Disneyland’s New Orleans was even more realistic and appealing than the real thing. [2]

  Such realism entailed intimacy and tiny corridors. Disney’s planned New Orleans Square was to host a labyrinth of tiny shops and crowded avenues, and the Haunted Mansion wouldn’t fit in the Square proper. So for the 1961 groundbreaking for the attraction, the location was moved north of the planned imitation French Quarter, which itself broke ground in 1962, replacing Swift’s Plantation House restaurant (and its $1.70 “premium fried chicken” dinners) that used to be located off the bank of Disneyland’s “Rivers of America” moat.

  As we note the groundbreaking, pause and recall the Haunted Mansion’s architecture, discovered as a photograph by Frances Lichten for her Victorian catalog, and repurposed by Ken Anderson for Disneyland. The reproduction built in Disneyland is so eerily accurate that it is highly unlikely that is was simply drafted from the photo in Lichten’s book. It is said that Anderson, perhaps with other Imagineers, traveled to Baltimore to take inspiration from another mansion called the Evergreen House, which had been bequeathed to John Hopkins University by the time Anderson arrived to inspect the property in the late 1950s. [3] While an inspection of the mansion for architectural details is certainly possible, conjecture allows for other possibilities—perhaps, being located on the university campus, Anderson visited the house on a search for more information about Lichten’s mystery mansion, for which no street address had been given in the book—just the city of Baltimore. Of course, Lichten may have had more information about the house at her disposal, and WED probably contacted her or the photo-credited National Gallery of Art about the property. The details to that end will probably remain shrouded in the mists of time.

  Jason Surrell, author of The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies (the Disney Company’s authorized book about the Haunted Mansion), also mentions Stanton Hall in Natchez, Mississippi, as a likely influence in his book. While the appearance of the structure is notably similar to the Haunted Mansion, it’s clear that Anderson’s original sketch was based solely on the photograph in Lichten’s book. Since WED representatives did visit the South early in their research of the dark lore of Southern culture, the storied Stanton Hall may well have entered the picture around that time, though evidence of its involvement in the development of the Haunted Mansion remains murky.

  It’s likely that Anderson, if not other WED staffers as well, also visited the Baltimore mansion in Lichten’s book. In 2008, Disneyland historian Jason Schultz contacted the National Gallery of Art for more information about the photograph, and discovered that the picture that Ken Anderson’s original drawing is based on was taken by Christopher Schindele in 1937, in an attempt to document the iron grillwork on the property. Schultz also discovered that the mansion was properly known as the Shipley-Lydecker House, having been built by Charles Shipley in 1803. The house no longer stands, though it was still extant in the 1950s when Anderson may have journeyed out to Maryland. Evidently, the home held some sway over the community; Schultz’s research uncovered various opinions on the structure, including the following commentary by author Hulbert Footner in his book Maryland Main and the Eastern Shore

  One of the butcher’s houses standing in a plot at the corner of McHenry Street is without doubt the quaintest, the most absurd, and the most picturesque dwelling in Baltimore…Originally a plain, squar
e dignified structure of that good period, some later owner of a taste less pure, has embellished it with a double gallery all around, decorated with cast-iron work more fantastically elaborate than anything in Baltimore, which is famous for its cast-iron balconies. All this iron lace-work is painted white, and the effect is dazzling.

  Whether Footner was enchanted or repulsed by the house is not entirely clear, though his prose is undeniably compelling. A final note, also discovered by Schultz: the Shipley-Lydecker house was utilized at some point in its history by the West Baltimore Post 476 Veterans of Foreign Wars, who converted the house into a memorial to the dead of World War II. Perhaps even in reality, the Haunted Mansion’s architecture was a sort of conduit to the afterlife. [4]

  The Haunted Mansion’s facade was designed as a shell which resembled the Shipley-Lydecker house, but actually contained little more than some minor workspaces, a large foyer, and two large, octagonal portrait galleries which held two enormous Otis elevators. While the content of the attraction hadn’t been determined, nor even whether or not the Haunted Mansion would be a ride with a conveyance system, WED was certain that the facade would need to shuffle as many people into the attraction and out beyond the visible berm of Disneyland as quickly as possible. The lawn was carefully manicured and the exterior neatly trimmed, just as Walt Disney had required. Despite all the tidiness, some tricks were employed to increase a bit of the drama of the place. Imagineer John Hench employed some of the subtle special effects magic he used on Disney Studio productions on the color scheme of the Haunted Mansion. In the book Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show , Hench said:

  We wanted to create an imposing southern-style house that would look old, but not in ruins. So we painted it a cool off-white with dark, cold blue-grey accents in shadowed areas such as the porch ceilings and wrought iron details. To accentuate the eerie, deserted feeling, I had the underside of exterior details painted the same dark color, creating exaggerated, unnaturally deep cast shadows. since we associate dark shadows with things hidden, or half-hidden. The shadow treatment enhanced the structure’s otherworldliness. [5]