There’s not just one version of the classic Haunted Mansion ride: each park’s version is a bit different.
Disney Parks’ Haunted Mansion has a long history, dating back to the 1950s when Walt Disney was first thinking of building a modestly-sized (11 acre) “Mickey Mouse Park” in Burbank California near the Disney studios. In Harper Goff’s early concepts of the park, there was a church with a graveyard with a decrepit “haunted house” looming on a nearby hill. Though the haunted house idea didn’t make it into the original plan for Disneyland, when the park was a hit Walt decided to expand into a New Orleans Square area that would include the old haunted house idea… and that’s where things started to get dicey.
The subsequent concepts by Ken Anderson called for a run down manor antebellum manor house that Walt scoffed at, not wanting something so run down in his otherwise pristine park. The Haunted Mansion existed in limbo for many years, with numerous stories written for it. Was it to be home to a murderous sea captain, the tragic Blood family, or the headless horseman himself? Should the attraction be scary or should it be funny? In the end, imagineer X. Atencio combined many disparate ideas from others to create a Haunted Mansion much like the one you’ll find today at Disney parks.
Because Atencio was drawing from source material that didn’t always quite fit together, the Haunted Mansion’s story isn’t quite a coherent narrative and the ride’s tone zigs and zags. But that’s not to say that the Mansion’s other ideas have been lost to time. In fact, if you want to see what the Haunted Mansion would have looked like if the imagineers went a different direction, you need look no further than the Haunted Mansions as seen in Disney parks world-wide, all of which are a bit different.
5. Disneyland (1969)
Haunted Mansion© Disney
The version that started it all, Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion was built as a New Orleans style manor house to fit in with the newly constructed New Orleans Square. The building’s exterior was finished by 1963 and outside hung a sign welcoming restless spirits to sign up for “post-lifetime-leases” at this retirement home for ghosts. By this point, imagineers still hadn’t decided just what would go inside the ride and the empty building teased guests for years.
Disneyland’s mansion is the version that all other Haunted Mansions are based on, even when they differ. The tricks Imagineers used to make Disneyland’s mansion work have been replicated — in some cases, quite literally — at parks around the world. One example is the stretching portrait gallery, which was designed specifically to overcome a technical problem: the modestly sized mansion wasn’t large enough to fit the entire ride. Therefore the stretching room is a way to lower guests below the berm encircling the park and lead them into the building that houses the ride, all without guests realizing they’ve gone beyond the park’s boundaries. Even though this trick isn’t necessary at other parks, which have enough space not to need it, it proved popular enough that it’s been replicated in most versions of the mansion.
4. Magic Kingdom (1971)
Magic Kingdom Haunted Mansion© Disney
The Haunted Mansion was part of Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom from the day it opened in 1971… and on the inside, it’s actually quite similar to the Disneyland version. Because of the narrow time difference between the Disneyland and Magic Kingdom openings, when Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion was being built, imagineers built two of each prop — one went to Disneyland and the other went into storage until the ride building was ready in Florida.
On the outside, however, the two versions of the mansion couldn’t be more different. While the southern plantation house style of Disneyland’s mansion fits perfectly with New Orleans Square, Magic Kingdom has a Liberty Square instead — and to fit the Haunted Mansion into its new home, it needed a major architectural overhaul. The mansion here is a sprawling building in the Dutch Gothic Revival style and the ride itself is housed (mostly) within the building you can see (though more of it is hidden past the treeline).Otherwise, the mansion has a couple of extra rooms (a library and an Escher-inspired staircase room) plus a recently-added interactive queue area.
3. Tokyo Disneyland (1983)
Tokyo Haunted Mansion© Disney
In the Tokyo park, the Haunted Mansion is an almost identical copy of the Florida version down to the Dutch Gothic Revival architecture. Though Tokyo Disneyland has neither a New Orleans Square nor a Liberty Square, the Japanese tendency to consider ghost stories as fairy tales made Fantasyland a good fit — and the mix of American and European styles in the architecture made the mansion a nice transition from the European-style Fantasyland to the American-style Westernland.
The only differences you’ll find here are the two bronze griffons guarding the front gate — adding to the “fantasy” — and the more overgrown gardens surrounding the mansion.
2. Disneyland Paris (1992)
Phantom Manor© Disney
Though it might not look anything like the Haunted Mansion to parkgoers accustomed to the mansions found in other Disney parks, Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris would have been immediately recognizable to Walt Disney — it looks a lot like Harper Goff’s original haunted house drawings and its story draws heavily from Ken Anderson’s early drafts. The ride is located in Frontierland and builds an elaborate story about the bride character who plays a part in mansions elsewhere, but here takes center stage as the main attraction.
In many places, the bride has simply been added to familiar existing Haunted Mansion scenes, like the ballroom scene where she appears alongside other animatronics. However, everything from the graveyard scene onward is a totally new ride, taking riders to visit the haunted old west town of Phantom Canyon. The overall effect: it’s a ride that leans more towards creepy than silly.
Would Walt have approved of this run-down western manor house sitting on the shore of the Rivers of America? That’s a question we can’t answer…. but Phantom Manor does bring some of the attraction’s originally planned scares (though not the famous hatbox ghost) back to life in a creepy new way.
1. Hong Kong Disneyland (2013)
Mystic Manor© Disney
The latest mansion to join the lineup, Hong Kong’s Mystic Manor is hardly a Haunted Mansion at all… mostly because it’s not haunted, so you won’t find a single ghost on the premises. So why does it make this list? Well, the ride does fill a role similar to that of the Haunted Mansion in other parks, providing a creepy but fun dark ride. Instead of running into ghosts, the rider is confronted with the supernatural as a magic music box brings the contents of Lord Henry Mystic’s home to life. The scares here are minimal, but the humor is high as you watch Albert — Lord Mystic’s pet monkey — accidentally release the power of the music box throughout the house.
But aside from the overall premise of being a somewhat spooky attraction, almost nothing here matches up with versions of the mansion seem elsewhere. The architecture is a Queen Anne style mansion — though unlike its counterparts in Tokyo and Paris, this mansion is very nicely kept — to match with the brightly colored style of Mystic Point in which it’s located.
Inside there are even more differences because even the style of the ride differs from what you’ll find in other parks: instead of a static omnimover system carrying riders in an endless loop through the ride, Mystic Manor is trackless, individually navigating each car through the ride and providing you with a slightly different experience each time you hop on board. It’s a new type of ride tech that Disney hasn’t brought to domestic parks yet… but who knows, perhaps in the future all mansions will take on this unusual ride style.
