Welcome, foolish mortals. Welcome to this special edition of Behind the Ride. I am your special host, your ghost host. You’ve wondered why hinges creak in door-less chambers, and strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls of The Haunted Mansion. I, your humble narrator from the great beyond, will explain why candle lights flicker where the air is deathly still.
Now is the time when ghosts are present, practicing their terror with ghoulish delight! Kindly step all the way in, please, and make room for everyone. There’s no turning back now! Prepare to learn four of the ghastliest tricks at The Haunted Mansion…but remember! There’s always room for one more.
The Experience: Me, your enchanting Ghost Host
The Trick: Adding a disembodied voice as narrator to every room of The Haunted Mansion
In the early days before Disneyland’s New Orleans Square even existed, clever Imagineers knew that they wanted a spooky presence at the Happiest Place on Earth. Foolish mortals were in danger of having too good a time. From what I remember of it, life needs balance.
Once Disney finalized plans for my eternal resting place, The Haunted Mansion, they decided that they needed star power, someone to spice up the proceedings of a trip through a gothic manor. They went back to a familiar face or, well, voice. Paul Frees handled many voiceovers for Disney television programs during the 1950s and 1960s. His memorable vocal stylings proved perfect for the caustic, macabre dialogue recited by yours truly.
Image: DisneyFirst, someone had to write my eternally quotable lines, though. A series of legendary Disney employees, including Marc Davis, Claude Coates, Rolly Crump, and Yale Gracey, all contributed ideas to the backstory of the various characters, myself included. Ultimately, the final responsibility fell to X Atencio, who melded together several scary and silly stories about the 999 Ghost inhabitants of The Haunted Mansion.
As the narrator, I have the assignment of letting you know all the important details about the various inhabitants. The dialogue Atencio wrote and Frees recorded for me has remained the same at Disneyland since the introduction of the attraction in 1969. Other non-American parks use different voices for the narrator, but I prefer the classics. Don’t you?
The Experience: A ride through the supernatural on a Doombuggy
The Trick: One of the first and most recognizable Omnimovers
The debut of The Haunted Mansion was supposed to occur soon after the introduction of Disneyland in 1955, back when I was still among the living. The original maps indicated that this attraction would stand as a major part of the first major park expansion. Fourteen years passed before its actual arrival. Two issues caused the delay. The first was a rift about the tone of the ride, whether it would be funny or scary. The second was whether it would be a ride at all. Some Imagineers argued that it would work better as a walkthrough tour or possibly a museum. You know how stubborn mortals can be.
Walt Disney shelved the debut of The Haunted Mansion due to the indecision, postponing my big moment for more than a decade. He asked his employees to prioritize other attractions that were closer to ready. This delay proved fortuitous thanks to Disney’s participation at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. During the build-up to this event, Imagineers developed new technology that empowered them to control ride throughput in historically unprecedented fashion.
While constructing four pavilions for the event, Walt Disney and his team discovered the precursor to the Omnimover. While nothing at the World’s Fair technically qualified as a true Omnimover, Imagineers returned from the exhibition with renewed confidence and excitement about future projects. They quickly built Adventure Thru Inner Space in 1967, the first attraction in the world to employ Omnimover technology. Two years later, The Haunted Mansion became the second one, although its vehicular transportation has a bit more je ne sais quoi.
Foolish mortals, I realize that you don’t all have Imagineering degrees. Here’s what you need to know about Omnimovers. They’re called endless transit systems, and for good reason. A chain of vehicles populate a huge track that’s hidden beneath the floor. They rotate along a base, creating the illusion of a vehicle moving down a path. The truth is that you’re pulled around by a chain, something that sounds more appropriate for my companions, the Hitchhiking Ghosts.
The Omnimover is how your trip through The Haunted Mansion matches the narration I provide. You’re always guaranteed to be in the right space at the perfect moment to enjoy my sardonic wit. The main difference in the Doombuggy from a regular Omnimover is a bit of showmanship, although that’s everything in my line of work. Imagineers themed the Doombuggies to make them seem like a moving hearse. They also gave the vehicles the ability to spin, which has become a standard feature ever since. You mortals enjoy this the most as you’re twisting through the attic and circling through the graveyard.
The Experience: A room with no windows and no doors
The Trick: The world’s quietest full-room elevator
Image: DisneyBehold my favorite line of dialogue, one I often recite to uninvited guests of The Haunted Mansion:
“Our tour begins here in this gallery where you see paintings of some of our guests as they appeared in their corruptible, mortal state. 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, hmm? And consider this dismaying observation: This chamber has no windows and no doors, which offers you this chilling challenge: To find a way out!”
There is, of course, a way out, and I don’t mean my way. The Haunted Mansion features one of the cleverest designs in the history of Disneyland. Since space was so tight in Anaheim, Walt Disney identified a brilliant way to increase the size of his rides. He constructed large portions of them in the basement. Imagineers faced a problem, though. How could they lower the guests without their knowing? As always, their solution was stunningly creative.
Do you know how every horror film says, “Don’t go down to the basement?” My Haunted Mansion doesn’t give you a choice. The octagonal room that you enter when you visit my abode harbors a dark secret. In Doctor Who terms (yes, even ghosts watch Doctor Who), it’s bigger on the inside. The Stretching Room doesn’t really stretch. The name is intentionally deceitful. Instead, the room itself moves, operating as an elevator that lowers you to the basement.
The reason you may feel confused is the set of paintings on the walls. They’re not extending in size. They’re always that length. The trick is that the room obscures your view of the paintings until you begin your descent. As you sink lower on the elevator, you can see more of each image.
Should you ever take a trip up the elevator, you’ll notice that the entire picture frame moves, and the size of the display determines how much of the ghastly visages you can view. Our friends in Orlando don’t have an elevator. Since Magic Kingdom has plenty of space, the Stretching Room doesn’t include a descent. Instead, the ceiling rises. Once again, the original version is superior.
The Experience: A headless groom
The Trick: 50 years of technological innovations
Image: DisneyConstance Hatchaway is a hard woman to love. Despite this statement, many men, possibly even including me, did so. Each one of them was wealthy enough to persuade her to marry, and each of them wound up quite dead because of it.
Specifically, her grooms are dead because of her hatchet, which she swung at each groom with great force. The worst part of The Haunted Mansion is that if your evil bride does kill you, death isn’t an escape from her company. Instead, both of you join the rest of the 999 ghosts who live here.
Out of the five men who married Constance, the most noteworthy is…someone else altogether. To add to the perception of Hatchaway the decapitator black widow, Disney added another man to the attic where she resides, a doomed fellow whose head disappeared from his body then reappeared in an unexpected place.
Image: Disney
His name was Harry, and a lot of the special effects imagery in the days prior to the opening of The Haunted Mansion mentioned him. That’s because the Imagineers loved the concept of a ghost whose head came and went. They used a special effect to disappear the head. Once my home opened to the general public in 1969, Disney employees quickly realized that the disappearing head, well, stayed appearing. The special effect failed under the actual conditions of the functioning attraction. The ambient light near the Doombuggy track undid the trick, and that’s why Harry vanished for years.
Ghosts don’t stay gone forever, though. My friend triumphantly returned in 2015. More than 45 years later, a new generation of Imagineers found a great solution. They project Harry’s face onto a blank head. All that’s required to make the top half of Harry vanish into the hatbox is for Disney to remove this face. The space of the blank head now shows nothing. Meanwhile, they project his head in the hatbox. As far as Imagineering special effects go, this one’s nothing special, yet it solves a problem that had befuddled cast members for almost half a century!
Now then, we’ve discussed four carefully kept secrets of my otherworldly residence. Like I said, there’s always room for one more, though…
The Experience: Madame Leota hosts a seance
The Trick: Putting a head in a floating crystal jar and allowing it to speak
“Serpents and spiders, tail of a rat; call in the spirits, wherever they’re at. Rap on a table; it’s time to respond. Send us a message from somewhere beyond. Goblins and ghoulies from last Halloween: awaken the spirits with your tambourine. Creepies and crawlies, toads in a pond; let there be music, from regions beyond! Wizards and witches, wherever you dwell, give us a hint, by ringing a bell!”
I know this spell all too well. The sorceress named Leota casts it ad nauseam, disrupting the rest of me and 998 of my dearest friends. Technically an undead spirit herself, Leota is the clairvoyant who allows guests of The Haunted Mansion to participate in her notorious Swinging Wake.
Image: Disney
The jarring aspect of an encounter with Madame Leota is her appearance. She’s a head in a jar a la Futurama. To achieve this effect, Disney recorded images of a person’s face that they project into the crystal ball. They didn’t hire an actress, though. Instead, it’s the work of Imagineer Leota “Toombs” Thomas, which explains the name…although Madame Toombs has a certain ring to it.
Thomas also had the first crack at the voice of Leota. Her coworkers didn’t find her menacing enough, though. Disney veteran Eleanor Audley, who provided voices in animated classics like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, performs the audio for Leota instead. Since she was the voice of Maleficent and Lady Tremaine, menacing was her specialty, a skill your Ghost Host respects.
The first version of floating head trick involved the a looped projection of Leota’s face on a vanilla head inside a crystal ball, somewhat similar to the Hatbox Ghost of today. Since more distance existed between the Doombuggy track and the crystal ball, track lighting never disrupted the effect. Clever theme park tourists noticed a glare from the projector into the ball, though.
Image: DisneyCurrently, Disney uses a kind of green-screen system to create the illusion of a floating crystal ball. Their HD video rear projection builds Leota’s face directly from inside her head. This tactic works better than projection from a different spot since it removes the reflection issue.
And there you have it. Those are the tricks of the trade that make my home the swingiest joint in the afterlife…but before you go, there’s a little matter I forgot to mention. Beware of hitchhiking ghosts! They have selected you to fill our quota, and they’ll haunt you until you return! Now I will raise the safety bar, and a ghost will follow you home!
