The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion

by Jeff Baham

  Our tour begins here, in our gallery, where you see paintings of some of our guests, as they appeared in their corruptible, mortal state…

  Even as the Ghost Host prattles on, something strange begins to happen. The paintings begin to elongate…or is it that the walls are somehow stretching?

  Your cadaverous pallor betrays an aura of foreboding, almost as though you sense a disquieting metamorphosis. Is this haunted room actually stretching? Or is it your imagination?

  The patrons are now noticing that the formerly placid portraits have stretched to reveal darkly comical acts of murder and mayhem…all four of which are based on artwork created by Marc Davis. Meanwhile, the Ghost Host continues:

  Consider this dismaying observation: this chamber has no windows, and no doors…

  After quickly glancing around, the patrons notice that this is indeed the case. Whichever wall had opened to allow them access to this stretching gallery has since locked them in, with no clear means of escape.

  …which offers you this chilling challenge…to find a way out!

  Then, slyly, the Ghost Host offers the patrons an aside:

  Of course, there’s always my way…

  Suddenly, with a crash of thunder, the candles are all extinguished, and the ceiling to the gallery completely disappears as “lightning tears the roof away” (according to WED documentarian Frank Allnutt), [3] giving the guests their only glimpse of the Ghost Host’s rotted physical being, which is dangling from a rope hanging from the rafters high above. The Ghost Host’s suicide—his apparent “way out,” so to speak—is an atypical use of the darkest type of humor in the attraction, although relating the narration to the quick, spooky special effect usually flies above the heads of most impressionable guests. With a high-pitched scream reverberating through the room, all the lights now extinguish, leaving the patrons crammed into the tiny gallery in total blackness, until, seconds later, a panel of the wall slides open, allowing them to stumble out into the hallway beyond.

  Host with the Most

  Between the memorable work of both Paul Frees and Peter Renoudet, the Ghost Host character remains one of Disneyland’s most notable elements in any of its attractions. Sadly, Paul Frees died in 1986, leaving a gaping hole in Disneyland’s voice talent pool. In 1999, when Walt Disney Imagineering decided to create a 30th anniversary tribute CD in recognition of the Haunted Mansion, Fred Frees filled in for his father’s role briefly, recording some new Ghost Host tracks for marketing material. However, when Disneyland needed a new voice to reinterpret the entire Ghost Host script for their special holiday version of the Haunted Mansion, they turned to Corey Burton, a reliable voice talent who can be heard in the theme parks and as the voices of Cap’n Hook, Ludwig Von Drake, and Count Dooku for other Disney productions—among others. Burton did a spot-on impersonation of Frees’s Ghost Host for the holiday script, though he bristles at the thought of being considered the “new” Ghost Host. Burton said:

  I suppose I did a decent impression of the master, and the presentation worked well, but I hope only the genuine, original Mansion remains intact until the end of time, to inspire and thrill future generations.

  As I was inspired to enter into this career because of the Mansion’s impact on me as a kid, you’d think it would be a dream come true. Actually, it came as a surprise, when I went in to record what I thought was to be a brief demo of the Ghost Host voice for a ‘presentation’. It’s probably just as well. If I’d known ahead of time that I’d be standing in for my idol—if you ask me, Paul Frees remains the greatest voice genius ever—I might have been paralyzed by nerves. But his voice still constantly resonates in my head, so I just plowed ahead as with any normal session. With the fine script, constant reference to the original track, and engineer Randy [Koppinger’s] excellent sound processing, which I got to sit in on, I was relieved that it would sound acceptable to fans of the attraction.

  As the Haunted Mansion’s legion of fans can attest, each of these fine manifestations of the Ghost Host character have added elements that create a whole greater than the sum of each part, an attribute of so many Disney creations. But of course, the success of any project boils down to the fans’ reaction to the work…and the Haunted Mansion seems to work just fine .

  This Stretching Gallery (or “expanding room,” as the set is known to the Haunted Mansion Cast Members) is a disguised Otis elevator, with a cleverly concealed panel hidden off to one side which is operated by one of the staff (after they fill the space and call out for the patrons to “drag their bodies to the dead center of the room,” which moves them safely away from the sliding walls). The elevators serve a purpose beyond the special effect; they are designed to secretly take guests down below ground level. The Haunted Mansion facade that the patrons see while in line is only large enough to hold a few workrooms and the two elevators (there are two identical stretching galleries, side by side, both of which are used on heavy traffic days). Once below ground, visitors are taken beyond the berm of Disneyland, and the attraction takes place in a large, non-descript warehouse that is not visible to guests. At Walt Disney World, the stretching gallery remains a part of the attraction, though the walls simply extend upwards, as there is no need to take the guests to a lower level because of the attraction design.

  The Otis elevators have a tremendous load capacity for descending (12,000 pounds), but they were not designed to ascend while loaded with guests. Their maximum lift capacity is 2,000 pounds, and even then, they are only to be used to carry patrons back up in an emergency. There are other exits the guests can use located below ground level.

  The disappearing ceiling is a common theatrical trick created by painting a false ceiling on scrim material. Once the elevator has fully descended, the lights inside the gallery are extinguished, so that patrons can no longer see the painted front. Simultaneously, dim lights from behind the scrim are lit in a few bursts simulating lightning, illuminating the small attic rafter set containing the swinging corpse.

  At Walt Disney World, significant audio enhancements have been made to the Ghost Host’s narration in the Stretching Gallery. While the audio is quadraphonic in Disneyland’s Mansion (and the Ghost Host’s voice appears to leap from corner to corner of the room), the Orlando version of the attraction offers a newer technology by which the audio tracks are delivered digitally to an array of dozens of speakers that encircle the entire room. By using this method of amplification, the Ghost Host’s voice can literally seem to fly through the room, whisper over your shoulder, and glide throughout the entire space. Other subtle sound effects were added to the scene as well, making it seem that the walls creak as they stretch, and the bronze gargoyles whisper behind the guests’ backs as they leave.

  “The stretch room audio system at Walt Disney World is amazing. Each of the two stretch rooms has a computer control and monitor, which has an octagon shape on them with all of the speakers listed around the walls,” explained an anonymous Cast Member working on the attraction. “There are audio tracks listed with corresponding little red dots on the screens. The dots move around the diagram, and it shows exactly where the audio is playing. It’s almost like a giant balance slider. If the dot goes towards the center of the room, it plays over all the speakers, but if it goes towards any wall, that’s where the sound will come from. There are several different audio tracks used in the room now, including the Ghost Host, four wind tracks, eerie noise, four creaking sounds, bat screeches, and so on,” the Cast Member said. This represents a huge jump in technology beyond the playback used at Disneyland.

  Leaving the gallery behind, patrons of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion now find themselves creeping down a long, extravagant hallway containing more artwork on one side, and windows framed with thick, luxurious draperies on the other. (At Walt Disney World, guests board the ride vehicles and pass the portrait hall aboard a Doom Buggy.) Outside the windows, the weather appears to have taken a turn for the worse, as it is thundering regularly, and lightning strikes flas
h as rain pelts the ground. The five paintings in the hallway (again, based on ideas conceptualized by Marc Davis) metamorphose from rather pleasant scenes into unsettling visages: for example, a knight on horseback turns into a skeletal warrior; a stately roman goddess becomes a stone Medusa. Disneyland’s published “fact sheet” for the Haunted Mansion claims that these portraits are actually changing “from what they seem to be, to what they really are.”

  Seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, the disembodied voice of the Ghost Host booms throughout the hallway as patrons continue moving forward:

  I didn’t mean to frighten you prematurely. The real chills come later. Now, as they say, “look alive,” and we’ll continue our little tour… and let’s all stay together, please.

  Continuing down the hallway, guests find themselves approaching two stony-eyed, stern looking marble busts set into the walls, surrounded by thick moulding. The unsettling stare of the busts becomes even more unpleasant when each patron discovers that the gaze from the statues’ eyes appears to follow them down the hallway and around the adjacent corner.

  This unnerving effect is created by the use of inverted “statues” pressed into a black wall. Rather than extending toward the viewer as would an actual statue, the Haunted Mansion’s busts are inverted and sunken into the wall. They are composed of a translucent material that allows them to be lit from behind from a single immobile source, creating the appearance of smooth, white stone. However, since the shadows in the crevices of each statue change as the viewer changes position, the viewer’s mind construes the shadows’ movement as being an indication of movement by the statue itself. This, combined with some preconceived notion of how volume and space work that each guest carries around in his or her brain, leads each viewer to simultaneously sense the statues’ movement as turning directly toward him or herself in a very convincing illusion. Imagineers Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey honed this effect for the Haunted Mansion after accidentally discovering it while walking by a vacuum-formed bust of Abraham Lincoln in the WED warehouse that they had been using to try to create believable rear-projection effects. While they were unsuccessful with the rear-projection efforts, Crump did notice the strange effect that the eyes had when he was walking around the statue—and in an instant, a new effect was born. [4]

  Guests then turn a corner, and find themselves in a misty, candlelit loading area, where they wait to board carriages to take them on the rest of the tour of the Haunted Mansion. This loading zone appears to be a sort of otherworldly launch area which has supernaturally materialized inside the structure, and there’s no evidence that WED ever considered this area a “real” part of the house. The writer of the Haunted Mansion storybook record called it a “limbo of boundless mist and decay,” and WED documentarian Frank Allnutt has described the space as “a labyrinth of giant cobwebs,” [5] perhaps describing the scale model of the area prepared by the model shop, which showed the Doom Buggies moving through a series of enormous webs. Imagineer Claude Coats has illustrated concepts for the area which contained trees and gravestones, imagining a sort of outdoor atmosphere, but the decision was made to keep the illusion of being inside some sort of large residence, despite the train of floating carriages.

  While Disneyland and Walt Disney World have slightly different specifications for their respective Omnimover trains, we’ll look at Disneyland as an example. Running on a continuous 786-foot-long loop track, the 131 Doom Buggies (spaced 6 feet apart) travel 1.36 miles per hour, and they complete the run through the attraction in just under six minutes. Even at this leisurely rate, the Omnimover system can move 2,618 guests through the Haunted Mansion every hour. In the winter, the speed is reduced imperceptibly by 30 seconds per loop through the entire cycle. [6 ]

  The Doom Buggies travel on a track of two steel tubes, with a third cam rail controlling the turn and spin of the carriages. There are ten motors positioned throughout the ride on the straight portions of the track, each of which drives two tires spinning in opposite directions which catch fins attached to the Doom Buggies in pairs, and propel them. The attraction can operate with 70 percent of the motors operating, as long as no two adjacent motors are offline. [7]

  There is a 30-foot loading belt, which moves at about 60 percent of the speed of the vehicles, upon which patrons walk as they are about to board their Doom Buggy. This helps guests board without needing to stop the system. Nevertheless, occasionally the Omnimover will need to be slowed or halted (to help a disabled person load the carriage, for instance), and this means that every Doom Buggy will either go into a super-slow “creep mode,” or completely stop in its tracks for that period of time. However, this is typically for a few seconds at most, and the average patron takes advantage of being stopped in their Doom Buggy to quickly survey the highly detailed surroundings of whichever set where they happen to be parked. This is generally considered a treat by patrons, rather than a distraction.

  The Doom Buggy Patent

  After passengers are seated, the front of the Doom Buggy (which had doubled as a stair step up into the carriage) automatically raises, bringing a lap bar over the riders’ legs. (“Do not pull down on the safety bar, please; I will lower it for you,” the Ghost Host warns through loud speakers installed at ear level into the back of the Doom Buggies.) At Disneyland, the carriages then continue into the attraction building by gliding up an imposing staircase which is guarded by watchful griffin statues carved by Cuban sculptor Rolando Santana, who was hired by WED specifically to create ornate decorative elements for the Haunted Mansion. Prior to applying at WED, Santana’s work had been exhibited throughout the Americas and Spain, and journals had published his work as well. He was hired quickly, as WED recognized their good fortune to have found him. Santana’s griffins are barely visible in the flickering gloom, yet they remain a fine example of Disney’s remarkable attention to detail. [8]

  After being tucked into your Doom Buggy, guests at the Walt Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland Haunted Mansions pass a sinister gallery of portraits. Originally, the paintings in the gallery seemed to follow your every move with eerie, glowing eyes, but in 2007, Walt Disney World replaced them with the changing portraits found at Disneyland, and moved a few of the original portraits to the Doom Buggy queue area.

  The eyes were cut out of the original portraits, and the eyeballs were set behind the plane of the painting and backlit, giving the impression that they were moving and following the viewer. The next generation portraits now in place, which replicate the changing portraits at Disneyland, are animated, and flash from one image into another as thunder crashes and lightning strikes from outside an adjoining window.

  Passing this gallery, guests are next ushered past a library riddled with unseen ghosts, shuffling books to and from their shelves with unseen hands. On the shelves among the books are various marble busts of the “greatest ghost writers the literary world has ever known.” The dimly-lit library set is composed primarily of a mural depicting wall-to-wall bookshelves. The entire scene, from the wood shelving to the books themselves, is actually a large painting which appears very realistic under the ride’s dim lighting.

  There are real three-dimensional busts in the walls, however. The busts are inverted by the same method used in Disneyland’s changing portrait hallway. This effect causes the busts to seem to turn toward and follow each Doom Buggy that passes. Various shelves in the wall also have mechanical book props attached to black rails, which push the books in and out of the simulated shelving, giving the appearance of invisible hands moving the books around.

  Some of the books are scattered around the floor as an apparent result of the supernatural activity, and in the Tokyo Disneyland Haunted Mansion’s library, a few of them seem to “walk” along the floor, via a track in the ground. The skittering tomes are carted back and forth mechanically, making them appear to be carried around by an invisible ghost. Imagineer Rolly Crump recalled his own design for the Haunted Mansion’s library, which contained some of
the same elements, despite the fact that his would have been a walk-though scene. “One of the rooms I was thinking of was a library, where the paintings on the walls and the sculptures all started talking back and forth to each other,” Crump said. “You see, with it being a walk-through, you could kind of stand in the middle there, and that’s kind of what I had in mind.” [9]

  Since the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion opened in 1971—a mere two years after Disneyland’s attraction—it was in production side-by-side with Disneyland’s ride. A short extra bit of library-related narration from the Ghost Host was recorded along with the tracks for the Disneyland Haunted Mansion.

  By the way—if you were to check out some of the real books used as props from the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion’s library, you might be led to believe that a lawyer was haunting the halls. Among the titles of the law books that sit on the dusty shelves are Corpus Juris (which, translated, means “The Body of Law”) and Modern Legal Forms . There are also some medical books in the collection as well.

  Next, the Doom Buggies in Walt Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland pass a music parlor with a piano being played by an unseen ghostly presence…unseen, that is, except for the pianist’s shadow on the floor, which is cast by the moonlight shining through the window behind the piano. The music parlor special effect was also later installed into Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion in the attic. In Walt Disney World’s version, the piano plays a dramatic version of Buddy Baker’s theme song to the Haunted Mansion, but the Disneyland attic piano plays a mournful, minor-key version of Richard Wagner’s “Treulich geführt” from the opera Lohengrin , probably better known as “The Bridal Chorus.”

  The music parlor serves a few purposes. First, it lends the first hints of the ghostly presences that will end up coming together for a “swinging wake” as guests move through the attraction. By beginning the show with presences that are sensed but not seen, the ride can build guests’ anticipation, making the big reveal of the actual supernatural beings (in the seance circle, and most dramatically, in the grand ballroom) pack quite the preternatural punch. Second, it also gives the attraction a literal means by which to replay the theme song, further emphasizing the musical theme, which carries through the entire attraction. In the Haunted Mansion, all of the uses of the soundtrack theme are performed by entities or means that are represented in reality, as opposed to a soundtrack that is placed over the top of the reality of the situation, much like a movie score. So, each instance of the theme can be explained, whether the answer is an unseen parlor organist, a trick of the wind, or two opera singers, making an encore of their final performances. In Disneyland Paris’ Phantom Manor, which is an attraction based on the Haunted Mansion, this conceit has been tossed aside, and the soundtrack is lush, orchestral, and cinematic—though certainly you are not expected to believe that a symphony orchestra is following you through the ride.