The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion Read online

  The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion

  Expanded 50th Anniversary Edition

  Jeff Baham

  Foreword by Rolly Crump

  Introduction by Floyd Norman

  Theme Park Press

  © 2014-2018 Jeff Baham

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, Theme Park Press assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting, or alleged to result, directly or indirectly from the use of the information contained herein.

  The views expressed in this book are those of the author alone.

  Theme Park Press publishes its books in a variety of print and electronic formats. Some content that appears in one format may not appear in another.

  Editor: Bob McLain

  Layout: Artisanal Text

  Publisher: Theme Park Press

  Address queries to [email protected]

  Praise for The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion

  Baham is one of the most trusted, established experts on the Haunted Mansion, a trufan’s trufan.

  —Cory Doctorow

  Bestselling author of Little Brother , Co-editor of BoingBoing.net

  Having delved into Disney lore for decades and having been immersed in the Haunted Mansion world since age 3, I thought I knew pretty much everything there is about my favorite Disneyland ride ever. I was wrong. Prepare to be enchanted, bewildered and mesmerized by this beat-by-beat account of the Haunted Mansion’s creation. A haunted tour that is both scholarly and thrilling. An “E” ticket ride to the darkest, most glorious regions of Disney’s imagination!

  —Guillermo del Toro

  Award-winning film director, Pan’s Labyrinth , Hellboy , Pacific Rim

  This is one of the best Disney history books related to WED/WDI released in recent years. A must-have.

  —Didier Ghez

  Disney historian and author, Walt's People series

  Lively, clear, and packed with facts.

  —Jim Korkis

  Disney historian and author, The Vault of Walt series

  For Camille Grace and Erin Eva, my jewels

  “Life is composed of lights and shadows,

  and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine

  if we tried to pretend there were no shadows.”

  —Walt Disney, 1963

  (from Faith is a Star , compiled by Roland Gammond)

  “Hateful divorce of love,”—thus chides she Death,—

  “Grim-grinning ghost, earth’s worm, what dost thou mean

  To stifle beauty and to steal his breath,

  Who when he liv’d, his breath and beauty set

  Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet?”

  —Venus and Adonis, William Shakespeare

  Contents

  Cover

  Front Matter

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Author's Note

  Part One: The History

  1. Origins, or To Dream of Ghosts

  2. The Ghost House

  3. Geppetto the Tinkerer

  4. On the Move Toward Animated Electronics

  5. Too Many Cooks

  6. The Spiritual Cacophony

  7. Eighty-Two Thousand, Five Hundred Sixteen

  Part Two: The Experience

  8. Act One: Ghoulish Delight

  9. Act Two: Sympathetic Vibrations

  10. Act Three: Out to Socialize

  11. Needful Things

  Appendix: Dear Old Sandy Claws

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  More Books from Theme Park Press

  Foreword

  I appreciate Jeff Baham's attention to detail and found The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion to be extremely interesting. I even learned some things I wasn't aware of. Even though I worked on the development of the Haunted Mansion along with the other Imagineers, at the time we were all working independently of each other, and we really didn't share what we were doing with each other. Somehow it all came together, but we'll never know what might have been if Walt had lived to see the Mansion completed.

  Baham really did his homework, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

  —Rolly Crump

  Introduction

  Back in the late ’50s, I knew that the Haunted House was in development at the Walt Disney Studios. WED Imagineering used to test out a lot of things at the studio in Burbank, and I remember going up to the second floor of the animation building, where they had a mock-up of what the Haunted House could be…or might be. I remember walking through several very dark rooms—very murky, scary, and spooky. Then I suddenly felt cobwebs on my face. Spider webs! That was one of the early ideas designed to freak-out the guests as they walked through this attraction. You’d feel the webs hanging in the air, and you’d try to brush them away from your face, and you just had this icky feeling while you were pulling the stuff away from you. It was really creepy, and that’s what I remember most from that first walk-through on the studio lot.

  Of course, there were scenes with flashing lightning and frightening images, but being at the studio, you knew you were safe and it was a simulation. But to actually feel the webs on your skin—it was very personal. I think Walt knew how to balance the fear and the fun, to create something scary-fun. A safe level of terror. Walt knew that you can scare your audience—but once you scare them, then you have to make them laugh. You have to ease that tension. It’s all a part of storytelling. You have to know where the line is, and how to balance it.

  To me, writing for Walt Disney Productions was second nature—knowing how far to take it, and when to pull it back. Walt Disney was always aiming at the whole family. When I would write a story, I’d write it for everybody. The kids had to enjoy it, but grandpa had to enjoy it, too. Walt never focused on a narrow demographic. If he’d get the kid to smile, he’d get the grandparents to smile as well. It’s a particular Disney sensibility, started by Walt. He wanted his park to be a family experience, from the youngest child to grandma and grandpa—something uniquely Disney. Walt knew that’s what people wanted, and it’s why they kept coming back again and again.

  I think this explains the Haunted Mansion’s effectiveness—that Walt was really one of us. He connected with everybody, and everybody felt connected to him. It’s why the Haunted Mansion, all his attractions, his movies, his songs, his stories—they’re all universally loved, because of that connection. The Haunted Mansion’s balance of freak-out and fun was uniquely Walt. And that explains its extraordinary success.

  —Floyd Norman

  Writer and artist Floyd Norman started working as a Disney animator on the film Sleeping Beauty in 1959, until Walt Disney recognized his unique talent as a storyteller and handpicked him to join the story department for the studio. Norman, a Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame inductee, is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Education and Outreach Committee; is the recipient of the Inkpot Award, the Winsor McCay Award, the Sergio Award, and the Friz Freleng Award; and was named a Disney Legend by the Walt Disney Company in 2007.

  Author's Noter />
  Walt Disney’s Disneyland Park, a fantasy kingdom to which pilgrimage is made by 16 million people every year, hardly brings to mind the intimation of death, the occult—even suicide. Nevertheless, one ride—which Disney unfailingly included in his plans for every themed park he considered building—features such nefarious themes, sets them to toe-tapping music, and leaves its guests singing the tune on the way out of the stone crypt from which they emerge post-ride, perhaps scratching their heads incredulously at some of the bizarre visions they had just seen. This is exactly the type of magic that Disney so deftly created by establishing a themed realm so completely detailed and encompassing that visitors are happy to leave their preconceived notions of reality at the door. This, foolish mortals, is the Disney version of a haunted house.

  There are those who love carnival haunted houses and dark rides, and those who don’t. The clackity-clack of the cars running along the track, the musty air with an occasional whiff of cotton-candy or bile, the gaudy plywood forms painted in fluorescent hues, the air-powered peek-a-BOO! pop-up ghoulies—all of these things inspire either fear and loathing or a giddy sense of escape, depending on the stars one was born under, it seems.

  Walt Disney didn’t love the grimy atmosphere of the carnival, but he did love dark rides. The storied mogul took his favorite yarns and fairy tales (grim as the original stories often were), made them into feature films loved around the globe, and then turned those films into dark rides in his personal vision for what a carnival could be like—should be like. That vision eventually became Disneyland, and Disney’s dark rides remain among the most popular themed attractions in the world to this day. Just try to ride Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight around two in the afternoon, and you’ll understand. Yes, they may be called “kiddie” rides. But who doesn’t want to believe they’re still a kid at heart?

  Disney’s darkest dark ride, the Haunted Mansion, finally opened to the public on August 9, 1969, though Walt had started formal development of the attraction in the early 1950s, with some design sketches and concepts for the haunted house created long before Disneyland even opened its gates on July 17, 1955. But Disney’s ambition to create a truly mystifying attraction (along with worthy distractions, such as the development and creation of famous exhibits for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in New York) carried the design phase of the Haunted Mansion well into the latter part of the 1960s. After their work for the World’s Fair (for which Disney’s exceptional team of hand-picked WED “Imagineers” perfected their robotic actors, known as Audio-Animatronics), Disney assigned some of his strongest talent to get back to work on Disneyland. Those designers would go on to complete the world’s finest example of a robotic themed attraction (the Pirates of the Caribbean), and then the world’s greatest haunted dark ride in the hearts of legions of scare lovers, the Haunted Mansion.

  Of course, those same designers might not agree with that assessment. Many of the Haunted Mansion’s key developers disagreed with the direction the project took after the death of Walt Disney in December 1966, nearly three years before the attraction would be completed. In fact, to this day, some of the designers are unhappy with the result of their efforts. The Haunted Mansion’s long development was rife with repeatedly discarded story concepts, disagreement on the types of scenes and effects to be used, conflicts over how many viewers should be carted through the attraction per hour—even as basic an idea as whether the attraction should be scary or not. Egos were bruised, tempers flared, and at the end of the day, it just seemed that there were “too many cooks in the kitchen,” as Imagineer Marc Davis would often recall. Most of the original design team members look back at their individual tasks and work on the Haunted Mansion with pride, but scratch their heads at whether or not to call the overall finished attraction a success. Yet many Disney theme park guests call the Haunted Mansion their favorite attraction, and it commands an army of die-hard fans.

  But what is it that this army finds so compelling? By tracing the roots of mankind’s preoccupation with matters of horror and the supernatural in the world of entertainment, historian Maria Warner probed some of the historical metaphors and media that have preceded Disney's haunt. In her book Phantasmagoria , Warner wondered if Madame Tussaud's Sleeping Beauty , a wax sculpture of a young woman "suspended for all eternity like an effigy on a tomb awaiting the resurrection," might have provided a pivotal historical moment. Prior wax museum displays were intriguing likenesses, but in the case of Tussaud's Sleeping Beauty —produced sometime around the turn of the 19th century—the perpetually slumbering maiden was given a mechanical feature in her chest, which caused her "clockwork breast to be electrified. The waxwork image of this sleeping woman, automated to look as if she was alive," was presented to the world as "the vehicle for communal dreams." A century and a half later, Walt Disney's Imagineers would revolutionize robotics, bringing the illusion of life to their automatons in Disney's theme park, as did Madame Tussaud—but as Warner posits, our human "communal dreams" remain the same as ever.

  Warner traces the history of what she calls "subjective perception" as we hunger for a connection to the supernatural, being willing to suspend disbelief for a progression of vivid, dreamlike experiences, many of which move through history in pursuit of the latest technological feats—stretching back to the "magic lantern" of the 17th century, through the era of the Phantasmagoria horror shows of the 19th century and a general moment in history when there was a "lack of distinction between revelation and illusion," Warner claims. This material "occupies a transitional zone between the sublime and the gothic, between the solemn and the comic, between seriously intended fears and sly mockery of such beliefs," Warner writes. "Its aftertaste lingers in much of today's popular entertainment."

  This "transitional zone" between the serious nature of fear and the ability to laugh in its face is evident in Disney's timeless attractions such as "Pirates of the Caribbean" and the Haunted Mansion. The Haunted Mansion - an attraction Walt had planned to build in the early 1950s, is now five decades old - but what's—but what’s forty or fifty years? Consider 250 years, which is the age of some of the most confounding magic inside the Haunted Mansion. Visitors experience entertainment technology here that spans four centuries. The “magic lantern” was used to project illusions on walls as early as the late 1700s. Pepper’s Ghost, a stage trick involving reflections, was used to create living, transparent ghosts in the 1800s. Disney’s own space-age robotic technology came to life in the mid-1900s, and digital projection and computer-controlled effects have just entered prime-time this century—and all of these techniques are used with great impact throughout the Haunted Mansion. It utilizes the best special effects techniques from the broad history of modern live entertainment, so it’s no surprise that it still appeals to anyone who loves being amazed and impressed by great feats of imagination.

  Despite the recent addition of digitally projected effects, the Haunted Mansion’s late-’60s technology is the magic behind the ride that leaves guests stymied to this day. Not much has changed since then, though even today riders will leave scratching their heads, mumbling about the futuristic three-dimensional “holograms” that must be employed to create the incredible transparent ghosts seen inside the attraction—not aware that nineteenth-century audiences also marveled at the same stage trick. Nevertheless, there was some cutting-edge technology used to make the massive attraction function properly back in 1969. The characters in the ride are examples of Disney’s aforementioned Audio-Animatronic robots and are computer-controlled, as are their individual soundtracks. Some of the ride’s visuals are provided by projection, so film loops were in constant use (though those have been replaced by digital video projection today). And the ghost train carriage system itself—called the Omnimover system by Disney—was quite innovative in its own right, spinning toward the action at every scene and forcing the viewer to watch precisely what the show designer intended him to watch. All of these innovations clearly took the Haunted Mansion a lea
p beyond the previously existing expectations for a carnival dark ride, and set a standard for haunted attractions which still stands.

  A trip through the Haunted Mansion leaves the typical visitor slack-jawed, whether or not he is a dark ride aficionado. The sheer scope of the ride is mystifying, especially since the guest is led to believe that the entire ride occurs in the relatively small visible facade of a late nineteenth-century plantation manor that you enter to begin your tour. But hidden elevators swiftly move visitors underground, and the massive ride itself occurs in an enormous warehouse beyond the visible berm that separates Disneyland park from the outside world. While the Walt Disney World version of the attraction has a larger, more imposing facade, the secret scale of the attraction is no less amazing.>

  Once inside the doorway, guests experience a haunting tour, eerie atmosphere, and obsessive attention to detail. Even the gleaming stanchions used to hold the chains that direct the queue to board the carriages are unique brass bat-gargoyles, custom-made for the ride. Crystal chandeliers are outfitted with thick, draping cobwebs. Bronze gargoyles hold flickering candles in their clawed hands. Detail was so important to Walt Disney that WED Enterprises even hired a master woodcrafter from Cuba to sculpt the enormous number of architectural details scattered throughout the Haunted Mansion. [1] Suffice to say, there are plenty of silly sight gags and breathtaking illusions to go around. A gallery stretches before your eyes. Marble busts stare you down and follow your every move with their malevolent glare. Restless spirits materialize, and in one stunning set piece, you can watch them dance in and out of sight, disappearing and reappearing as you look right through them.

  The engaging details can’t be contained to the interior of the mansion, however. Upon reaching the attic, with nowhere else to go, riders are thrown from a window into the private graveyard, where in a cacophony of crazy music and singing statues, the graves open to release their occupants, all of whom have “come out to socialize,” as the ride’s theme song insists. Behind a glowing veil of fog, dead socialites share a sip of tea with each other, while an Egyptian mummy murmurs in the background. An executioner sings a duet with his victim, a decapitated knight (who holds his singing head under his arm). And finally, as you are about to escape through a crypt, a trio of hitchhiking ghosts tries to join you by materializing aboard your Doom Buggy. In fact, the sheer amount of details even gave the ride’s designers pause—at least until they caught up with Walt Disney’s vision, which entailed leaving the guest ready for a repeat performance. WED Imagineer X. Atencio, who developed concepts and wrote the script and song for the Haunted Mansion, recalls a conversation he had with Walt about the Pirates and Haunted Mansion attractions, which were packed with scenes, sounds, and conversations surrounding the ride conveyances, which seemed to move past the scenes too quickly for the guests to catch all of the goings-on. “I said, Walt, I apologize, but you can’t understand what they’re saying. Then he said ‘X, it’s like a cocktail party. You tune in on this conversation, then you tune in on that. Each time they come in, they’ll hear something new.’” [2]