The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion

by Jeff Baham

  Despite the rich, centuries-old technology, the attraction still appeals to today’s sophisticated theme park attendees. Many of Disney’s Imagineers, who designed and built the Haunted Mansion, are forefathers, in a sense, of today’s wired generation. There can be no doubt that many of those Imagineers would feel at home in today’s “maker” culture, were they part of this generation. You had arguably the world’s finest animator designing the gags for the ride in Marc Davis (the creator of Tinker Bell from Peter Pan and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty ), and then there’s the genius of tinkering duo Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey, who would lock themselves in a warehouse and engineer mechanical illusions so hair-raising that the cleaning crews would refuse to go into the room. In the early days of the Haunted Mansion’s development, WED Enterprises was composed of an intimate group of inventors, dreamers, and mad scientists, forging their way without precedent. Today’s geek culture is reflected in that set of circumstances.

  However, the ride’s popularity demonstrates more than a simple appreciation of its creativity. It also distinctly appeals to a wide cross-section of folks, and it definitely appeals to a variety of vocal and active fan groups. Goths, geeks, artisans, actors, haunters, magicians, and the standard-issue Disney fan all can find something to love and relate to in the Haunted Mansion. Many of the current generation of fans are monster kids, influenced by all manner of groovy ghoulishness: the great genre rags of the 1970s like Famous Monsters and Omni magazines, graphic novels, building-your-own-hovercraft with instructions from the back of a comic book, glow-in-the-dark plaster skulls, owning an amulet filled with dirt from Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. Those who remember such great stuff will find a very soft spot in their hearts for Disney’s haunt.

  But the Haunted Mansion also has a strong appeal to younger generations. One example of this occurs at Disneyland around the holidays, bringing about the largest yearly change to the attraction. In an inspired move, Disneyland decided to blend the story of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas with their Haunted Mansion franchise in the holiday season of 2001 by creating an overlay for the attraction: a “skin” applied to the ride that changes the soundtrack and some of the scenery and props to create a new experience for the rider. The holiday update was directed by Steven Davison, the Imagineer who went on to lead the production of the award-winning World of Color water show at Disney California Adventure. The experiment was an instant hit with holiday guests to the park, so the overlay has been repeated annually ever since. Blending the off-beat, monstrous world of Burton’s comic film with the kooky setting of the Haunted Mansion is so clever that it seems like an obvious and inevitable pairing, and the characters from Burton’s film fit right into the Haunted Mansion’s dank surroundings.

  Walt Disney once said that “Strong combat and soft satire are in our story cores…There is no cynicism in me, and none is allowed in our work.” [3] Much of popular culture today lazily rests on the laurels of grabbing a cheap snort through the use of cynicism. The idea that there exists an amusement park spook house that both encompasses the best of modern entertainment technology as well as innocent storytelling has an appeal to people of all types. There are no gory body parts, no horrifying decay, yet the dark humor rests underneath the surface, for those inclined to seek it out. The inoffensiveness of the Haunted Mansion is a greater draw then most people realize, and its adherence to Disney’s earliest intent for the attraction is key to that strong appeal.

  Welcome, foolish mortals, to the Haunted Mansion. As you read this book, I hope you’ll enjoy your trip through the secret spaces of the world’s finest haunted dark ride—a testament to Walt Disney’s fantastic commitment to drama and his consistent use of darkness to define the lighthearted nature of his art. After decades of daily use, the attraction’s magic hasn’t dimmed a bit. Here’s to decades more.

  Part One

  The History

  Photo courtesy of Gallery Archives, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

  Not at all what it seems

  While the subject of this photograph may bear an incredible similarity to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, it is actually a photograph of the Shipley-Lydecker House in Baltimore, Maryland, taken in 1937. The Shipley-Lydecker House was the primary basis for the design of the Haunted Mansion facade.

  Chapter One

  Origins, or To Dream of Ghosts

  Conjecture is required to contemplate the earliest possible origins of Walt Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Journey with me all the way back to the likely specters of Disney’s childhood. As with so many of us, Disney’s first notions of the eerie and unexplained may well have their knotted roots in his youth.

  After serving with the International Red Cross in France during World War I, Walt Disney returned to Kansas City, Missouri—where he had lived in his youth—to make a living as an artist. At the ambition-fueled age of 19, Disney quickly befriended fellow artist Ub Iwerks, and the duo formed a commercial art enterprise that eventually began to produce shorts and slides for theaters to entertain moviegoers between the features. According to Iwerks’s daughter Leslie, the two “spent their spare time haunting movie theaters…their schools were the theaters of Kansas City.” [1]

  One of the managers at the Isis Theater in Kansas City was a childhood friend of Walt’s named Gus Eyssell, who lived with his grandmother Marie Sauer, the widow of the son of Kansas City magnate Anton Sauer. Grandmother and grandson lived near the house Disney lived in when he returned to Kansas City from Marceline, a town to which the Disneys had fled years earlier due to the rough, working-class Chicago neighborhood in which Walt’s father Elias had built his home. Being childhood friends of the same age, it’s fair to assume that Walt Disney spent a fair amount of time in relationship with Eyssell, who certainly had intriguing stories to tell about his grandmother’s notable family. [2]

  According to WED concept artist Herb Ryman, who worked closely with Disney for many years, Eyssell was, in fact, the first person to make the fateful introduction that would enable Disney to convince theater mogul Milton Feld to buy the first of Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram filmstrips. If Ryman’s tale is true, it would be convincing evidence of a mutual respect between Disney and Eyssell, if not an honest-to-goodness friendship. [3 ]

  Eyssell’s stories may have included his notable family tree. Patriarch Anton Sauer had built an imposing classical Italianate manse atop a bluff in Kansas City along the Shawnee Indian Trail in 1871 which has since been added to the National Register of Historic Places. By the time Disney returned to Kansas City, history had already left some heavy shadows over the Sauer mansion, and it seems probable that Disney and Eyssell spent some time considering the myths murmured throughout the community about the old Sauer “Castle”—myths that have, over time, encompassed tales of buried treasure, hidden tunnels, four known deaths on the property, and glimpses of apparitions. Such tales, though they may be laughed off or set aside, often bury themselves in the subconscious, where they linger, slumber, and eventually make themselves known subliminally, if not blatantly. [4]

  By the winter of 1921, Walt and Ub Iwerks were hard at work creating commercial art and attempting to break into the world of advertising for the local Kansas City media. On January 11, the Kansas City Times, a newspaper of which Disney was well aware, published an intriguing article titled “England’s Ghosts Must Seek New Haunting Grounds.” Reporter Joseph H. Applegate told the story of “many of the ancient houses of Britain, time-honored and populous with family spooks for generations” which were being demolished to make way for “modern skyscrapers and apartment houses.” In the article, Applegate reported that “the attention of the British Society for Psychical Research had been directed toward the ruthless demolition of various ancient manor houses in England and Scotland, where for many years the nocturnal wanderings of old established family ghosts have been the subject of close scientific investigation and report.” Applegate discussed various famous ghosts from centuries past, and wondere
d, “What is going to happen to the ghosts when their abiding places are no more?”

  Let’s fast-forward nearly four decades: in 1958, while Walt was heavily into the development of New Orleans Square, which was part of a second wave of major improvements to his young Disneyland park, he sat for an interview with the BBC in London to speak about the new addition to Disneyland, which would uncover the dark underbelly of the old Crescent City. One note Walt made was his plan to include a haunted house—but not just any haunted house. Most haunted houses had been traditionally haunted by a single poltergeist, or a former late resident. But Walt Disney’s haunt would be grand, in true Disneyland style, and would be large enough for all of Europe’s cranky lost spirits. “Walt had expressed his sympathies for all of the ghosts that had been displaced from their ancestral homes,” wrote former Imagineer Jason Surrell. “In World War II, new construction made way for modern housing. Walt announced that he planned to build a sort of retirement home at Disneyland for all the world’s homeless spirits.”

  Might “Uncle Walt,” the consummate storyteller, have remembered—perhaps even saved—the Kansas City Times article that dated back to the very beginnings of his career in the media? We will never know. But it’s interesting to note that at the end of Applegate’s article, the writer contemplates the future for the misplaced souls of Europe, once they’ve lost their homes: “There will not be any secret passages in which to clank chains, nor ivy-clad turrets to parade around, and no mysterious windows to flit across in the moonlight. If they are going to have new homes to haunt, some ghosts may come to America.”

  Let us take note that each variation of Walt Disney’s proposed amusement parks has contained a haunted house of some sort. When Walt considered adding a “Mickey Mouse Park” to a parcel adjacent to his Burbank studio lot in 1951, he had Disney studio artist Harper Goff include a “church graveyard and haunted house” in the plans. Goff, who Disney had met in a miniature train shop, was an accomplished artist of Americana, having been regularly published in magazines like Esquire and Coronet . Inspired by Goff’s visions of American heritage and family (and likely inspired by Goff’s common interest in miniature steam engines), Disney quickly hired him for a secret mission—to begin developing an amusement park that would surpass the dirty, crass carnival midways so common at the time. Goff was to develop concepts that would reflect Disney’s vision of an idealized American experience—one which, of course, must contain a haunted house. [5]

  Disney’s grand plans eventually outgrew the proposed Burbank location, and by the time Anaheim was designated as the proposed site for the park (now known properly as Disneyland), concepts and storylines for the haunted house—alternately called a “ghost house” in some of the plans—were well underway. A pair of connected drawings makes Walt Disney’s desire to include a haunted house in Disneyland plain. Culling from the talent at 20th Century Fox, Disney hired art director Dale Hennesy (whose father also worked for Disney, in animation) to create conceptual illustrations for Disneyland. In late 1953, Hennesy sketched and colored yet another view down Main Street—a vista Disney wanted to get exactly right—which contained a spooky-looking ramshackle house at the end of the lane, similar to Harper Goff’s earlier 1951 illustration. [6]

  Furthermore, Hennesy’s sketch was based on Herb Ryman’s marketing bird’s-eye view map of Disney’s proposed park, which also contained a residential-looking mansion of sorts at the end of Main Street. Ryman’s map, which Walt Disney needed in order to sell Disneyland to investors, was famously created in a weekend in September 1953, during which Disney and Ryman sequestered themselves at the studio on a balmy Saturday morning, and Ryman worked furiously (both figuratively and literally) while Disney tried his best to encourage the artist by bringing in milk shakes and tuna sandwiches. Ryman, relying partially on his memories of his hometown Decatur, created an incredibly detailed map of Walt’s proposed park before Monday, when Roy was to take the map to New York. Later in his life, Ryman would be somewhat embarrassed by the design and style of the quick work, while still acknowledging it as a remarkable feat. [7] With Disney looking over his shoulder and directing the planning and positioning of each detail while Ryman worked, the completed map had that odd mansion sitting at the end of the lane, adjacent to Disneyland’s central hub, on one of the earliest pieces of conceptual work for Disney’s proposed park.

  Disney’s intention to have a haunted house in his park is inescapable. He pulled one of his best art directors, Ken Anderson, from the animation department and put him with WED Enterprises to work on Disneyland, in a move that Disney repeated so often that WED earned the whispered nickname “Cannibal Island” for eating up so much of the studio’s talent. [8] Anderson had studied architecture in school and worked as a conceptual artist at MGM before joining Disney in the ’30s, so Walt knew he was a veritable jack of all trades. Quickly, Anderson was tasked with developing stories and concepts for the ghost house that would reside in Disneyland.

  We will return to the stories behind the development and delays of the Haunted Mansion attraction shortly, but it should be noted that in 1963, while Disney was trying to find a location for another Disney theme park for tourists east of the Mississippi, a site under consideration was a parcel in St. Louis adjacent to the proposed Gateway Arch, which itself was just under construction. “I feel that my roots are in the great state of Missouri and that I am a Missourian in every sense of the word,” wrote Disney in 1945, so a Missouri park seemed a natural location. [9] This “Riverfront Square,” as it was called, was a park that Disney intended to be both entertaining and educational, true to his Disneyland tradition. In Disney’s proposed blueprints for the park, upon entering the turnstiles guests would be greeted by an intriguing centerpiece: rather than a princess’s castle, guests would stare straight down through Town Square to a distant hill, upon which sat a formidable haunted house.

  Perhaps this eerie Riverfront proposal reflects a full circle from Disney’s earliest encounters with the imposing house on the hill in Kansas City, also purported to be haunted. Mere conjecture, of course.

  Sauer’s shadowy Kansas City castle remains standing to this day, nearly 150 years after it was raised. And Sauer myths and ghost stories linger on, [10] though one historical note sticks out like a hitchhiker’s thumb; in 1919, a mere few years before Walt and Gus would connect at the Isis Theater, Anton Sauer’s widow, literally finding herself at the end of her psychic rope after losing her husband, would follow his lead and shuffle off this mortal coil.

  Many believe that she died by hanging herself in the lonely old house.

  Stories abound of Walt Disney’s various excursions to multitudes of amusement parks, some of which are true, a few of which may be out-and-out fabrication, and most of which probably greatly exaggerate the described visit’s impact on Disney’s eventual design for Disneyland. Nevertheless, it is true—albeit obvious—that Disney did travel to many various amusement parks as he was researching and planning for his own themed park, while sending trusted staffers to even more parks and diversions.

  In relation to the development of the Haunted Mansion, a few of Disney’s encounters seem to stand out from the rest, though trying to guess which moments in Disney’s life were most inspirational is a fool’s game. The simplest, and most suspect, story regards Disney’s repeated visits to Griffith Park in Los Angeles with his daughters, where it is said he decided to build Disneyland one day after wistfully watching his girls orbit the carousel on its magical wooden horses, desiring to build a park that would please families of young and old alike. While the romance of this story can’t be denied—and the fact that he took his daughters to Griffith Park on multiple occasions did lead him to claim in interviews that the park provided his inspiration—this is just one of many experiences that led Disney toward his goal of creating Disneyland. [11]

  While the earliest plans for Disneyland’s haunted house have it located atop a hill or behind some overgrown trees on a winding path off o
f Main Street, Walt quickly settled on setting his spook house in New Orleans Square, a new land he planned for Disneyland that would take the appearance of a lovely section of the French Quarter of New Orleans, with familiar winding avenues, quaint courtyards, and fancy ironwork on the patios and porches. Take note that the Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948, which Walt attended with his fellow locomotive enthusiast Ward Kimball, must have made a deep impact on him, with its tellingly familiar features: numerous vintage steam engine trains, a modern pageant stage that hosted intricate musical productions, an Indian village with representatives and exhibits from six different tribes, a replica of Old Faithful in a natural wonderland, and a familiar-looking street scene from New Orleans’ French Quarter. Walt was clearly enthralled by the fair’s exhibits and atmosphere, and he utilized many of the ideas he found so appealing from the railroad fair in his plans for Disneyland.