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 "Welcome, foolish mortals, to the Haunted Mansion"BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! Ahem. So, you may ask, why does this site have a page for just one ride? Well, even though it is not my favorite ride (very close to it though), it has so many secrets, stories, and rumors that I could not possibly fit it into a single description. Below, you will find many interesting facts about this ride and it's counterparts in the other Disney Parks. So get ready to read about the spookiest attraction to come from the minds of the Disney Imagineers.
Trivia: |
The Ride
Guests walking up to the large mansion hear wolves howling in the distance and see a glass coffin out in front of it with several dead roses resting on it. The line, which is under a canopy to protect guests from inclimate weather, starts to the left. Situated along the left edge are tombstones with humorous epitaphs that bear the names of some of the Disney Imagineers that helped create the ride. At the end of the line is a side door into the mansion, where a servant lets you in. The walls are filled with pictures of people whose eyes seem to follow you, and over the fireplace is a portrait of a young man who fades away before your very eyes to a grisly skeleton. The servant then shows you into a circular room that has several pictures of nice-looking people, including a rosy-cheeked lady with a parasol. Surprisingly, this room contains the most frightening part of the attraction. The door closes and your invisible ghost host greets you, then draws your attention to the fact that the room is actually stretching. This allows you to see the rest of each picture, showing each person in a perilous situation. The lady is now balanced over a pit of crocodiles on a tight rope. It is then that you notice the room has no doors or windows, and your ghost host offers you this "chilling challenge": to find a way out! "There's always my way," he offers, and with that the lights flicker out and there is a clap of thunder and a flash of lightning as you see high above you the former body of the ghost host hanging from a rope. The lights return to normal and a panel slides back to let you out into the boarding area. Here you board your doombuggy and start your tour. You see skeleton hands reaching out through doors and door knockers being worked by invisible apparitions. You slip through an eerily deserted library with busts on the shelves that turn to stare at you. You creep past seemingly endless hallways containing floating candelabras, and through a room smelling of flowers with a coffin occupied by an unhappy prisoner. You pass a demented grandfather clock stuck on thirteen o'clock. Your host tells you that 999 "happy haunts" live in the mansion, but that there is always room for one more. "Any volunteers?" he invites. The tour progresses into the seance room where musical instruments mysteriously float and the disembodied head of fortune teller Madame Leota inside a crystal ball chants to make the ghosts appear to the guests. You come onto a balcony that overlooks a ballroom where you see transparent figures eating, dancing, and playing an organ. In the attic you see a weeping bride with a glowing heart shining through her gown. Your doombuggy turns itself backwards as you descend the roof outside to the graveyard, where spirits shoot skyward from their open graves while a group of musical busts sing the ride's theme, "Grim Grinning Ghosts". You reenter the mansion You know it's over when the fat lady sings, and a doll-sized version of Leota urges you to, "Hurry back...Make final arrangements". Your host warns you to beware of hitchhiking ghosts. While passing a set of mirrors at the end of the ride, you notice a silly spook sitting with you in your car....
The History
The history behind this ride is as strange as the mansion itself. In the 50's, Walt Disney started assingning people to a new project. He wanted to have a haunted house attraction in his new park, Disneyland. Many of their ideas were of an attraction very different than the one we have today. It was to be a walk-through tour, and guests were to be led by a butler or maid who would tell the now lost story of the mansion (more about that later) as they walked through each scene. While concepts for the inside of the attraction were being developed, work began on the outside of it. By 1963, the mansion was fully built, but details for the attraction were still not decided upon. Imagineers decided it would be more practical to use a ride system to move guests about, and made many other substantial changes to the flawed concept of the mansion. Finlly, after six years of curious guests coming up to the manor only to find the gates tightly shut, the Ghost Host showed it's first "foolish mortal" through the ghostly halls of the Haunted Mansion.
The Story
There are many tales of the Haunted Mansion, and almost all of them have to do with the hanged man in the stretching room and the bride in the attic. I have heard more than one "official" story, and many others along the way. As it turns out, there are three very similar stories for Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and Walt Disney World. I found the Disneyland story in an article (found on Doombuggies.com) from the official Disneyland cast member magazine, Disneyland Line. It is the one that the butlers and maids were going to tell when the Haunted Mansion was going to be a walk through attraction.
"It seems that a wealthy sea merchant built the manor for his new bride....After the wedding, the young, well-brought-up woman learned that her groom was a bloodthirsty pirate. He killed her in an angry rage, but her ghost came back to haunt him. The pirate was so tormented by her spirit that he finally hung himself from the attic rafters. Thus, both of their spirits were destined to remain trapped in the mansion."
As the concept fot the Mansion developed, the story lost its spotlighted role in the attraction. It does provide a clue, however, as to the identities of the hanged man in the stretching room (The groom, also our Ghost Host) and the distraught bride in the attic.
In Disneyland Paris's Phantom Manor, an ingenious reworking of the already popular Haunted Mansion, the story is quite the same, but there is a different killer, the Phantom. In Phantom Manor, unlike the other Haunted Mansions, the story is actually worked into the ride, and continues with each scene. The Phantom falls in love with the bride before the marriage. The night of their wedding party, he hangs the groom, then dooms the bride to live with him forever.
At Walt Disney World, the story is almost the same as Disneyland's, except for some minor changes. The bride is at her wedding party waiting for her fiance, who is several hours late, to show up. Some of her friends work up the nerve to tell her that her boyfriend is a pirate, and the bride climbs to the attic, flings her ring out of the window, and herself after it. When the pirate arrives and finds his true love dead, he hangs himself.
A footnote to the WDW story: Supposedly, upon exiting the ride, you can see the indentation of a bride's ring in one of the bricks in the walkway.
Steve Buddin, a Cast Member for the Mansion and Jungle Cruise at WDW, had this to say about the story:
"The official history of the Mansion (from the actual training material): In the early 1600s, the land was bought by a wealthy Scandinavian stonecutter named Ub Vandertwerp, who was advised not to build his home there because it was an Indian burial ground. He built the house anyway. During the construction there were many strange accidents and deaths, there was a fire in the house, and Ub's wife and children became very ill. Finally, he had enough and decided to sell the estate and return to his homeland. The Mansion changed hands numerous times and housed among other things, an army barracks and a brothel. Each group was plagued with strange occurrences and accidents that couldn't be fingerprinted. Master Gracey Sr. bought the estate in the early 1710s and made extensive renovations (including secret panels). There were unusual incidents, as usual, but Master Gracey paid no attention to them. He was too busy chasing chamber maids. Mistress Gracey finally got fed up and did him in with an axe. She sold all of the land except for the house and it's surrounding parcel, which she gave to her son George Jr. The day before you visit the mansion, Master Gracey unfortunately passed. You are here to pay your respects and possibly hear the reading of the will. If no heir can be found, the mansion and its accompanying fortune go to Master Gracey's servants. That is why the butlers and maids are sometimes short with guests.
"The hanging figure is Master Gracey (the ghost host). He hung himself to escape the hundreds of ghosts who were driving him crazy. Most of them were former residents of the house, and the rest were summoned by Madame Leota during a seance to contact the spirit of the bride who disappeared before the wedding. She was hiding in a trunk in the attic and suffocated because she got locked inside. Her body is still inside the trunk. Look at the floor to the right of the bride's ghost in the attic. You will see the dress sticking out of the locked trunk."
Regarding the wedding ring myth:
"The "ring" in the pavement has nothing to do with either original story. It is part of a pole left over from the exit gate that was removed during the last major rehab (the big ornate gate that now serves as the entrance hasn't been around forever.)"
So just how do they do it? At Disney, making "ghosts" appear before your eyes is as simple as a little smoke and mirrors. Well, light and mirrors, actually. Here's how.
Foyer
In the entry room, there are galleries of portraits hanging on the wall. But wait, are their eyes following you? They sure are, and this trick is so simple you might kick yourself for not realizing it before. The eyes are cut out of the pictures, then placed a few inches back behind it in the wall. This results in the illusion that these people are staring at you. The morphing portrait above the fireplace is achieved through a projector in the wall behind the picture projecting onto blank fabric.
Stretching Room
This room is basically a huge elevator. In Disneyland, the floor goes down, but at WDW, the ceiling rises. It was developed for the original Haunted Mansion in Disneyland so that guests could get under the train tracks they had to cross to get to the main ride building. At WDW, guests didn't have to cross the tracks to get to the ride, but the room was so popular that they kept it. The scene with the hanged man is actually there all the time, above the ceiling, which is a scrim. A scrim is a piece of very thin fabric covered with tiny holes. You can't see through it unless it is backlit. A bright light on the other side is just shined through the scrim to reveal the scene.
Endless Hallways
You look at the passageway through a one way mirror, where the same scene is reflected infinately many times over. This also gives the hallway it's misty look. The candelabra is spun around in mid-air by nearly invisible wires.
Seance Room
The "head" in the crystal ball is actually a custom human head-shaped screen, projected onto from a projector with a distorted lens just below and in front of the ball. In Disneyland, they now use fiber optics to project the image of the face onto a blank head inside the ball. They also decided the table should "float", so they put machinery inside to make it do just that. Unfortunatly, that broke the fiber optic cables often, so now it just stands still. The floating instruments in the room are held by barely visible fishing lines coming from the ceiling, which, to tell the truth, were very visible on my last visit.
Ballroom
The "ghosts" partying in the ballroom are some of the best illusions I've ever seen. They are acheived through an illusion known as Pepper's Ghost, which has been used for over 100 years. As you are looking out from the balcony, you are looking through panes of glass between the columns. The ghostly figures are really Audio-Animatronics dancing beneath the balcony. There is a large mirror in front of them the stretches the length of the room, and is angled upwards. The glass you are looking through catches the reflection, and makes it seem as if the figures are transparent, and dancing in the ballroom. To make them fade in and out, the lights are made brighter or dimmer, respectively, below the balcony. The more light, the brighter the reflection is.
Graveyard
The ghosts streaming from their graves are actually just projected onto a scrim stretched from the grave to the ceiling. The projectors are in the graves. The faces of the singing busts are projected onto the blank heads from underneath your doom buggy.
Ending Scene
The face of Little Leota from the seance room is projected on the little doll from a laserdisc. You can sometimes see static on her face during technical diffculties. The ghost you see in your car is acheived by a two way mirror, the same thing that security guards in a store stand behind. The "ghosts" are traveling at the same speed as your doombuggies are, and light is shined on their side of the mirror so that you see both the "ghost" and the inside of your doombuggy.
If you would like more info on the Haunted Mansion, you can go to my Links page to look for more Haunted Mansion sites.
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Click here to return to your tour of the Magic Kingdom. Very special thanks to Haunts, Foxx, and Steve for their tremendous help getting my facts straight! |