The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion

by Jeff Baham

  Another of Walt’s trips, possibly of more impact, was to Denmark to visit Tivoli Gardens, an amusement park which had been created in 1843 and ran as smooth as a clock by the time Disney visited in 1951. Disney found the blend of amusements, comfortable decor, and pleasant atmosphere to be perfect for his vision of family entertainment that would please both children and adults, and it’s likely that this trip helped cement his notion that regardless of the subject matter of any given attraction, the exterior would be kept clean and pristine—a notion that would come to play later in the development of the Haunted Mansion. [12]

  In 1887, Coney Island Park was created on the shoreline—not of the Atlantic, but of the Ohio River, as the park in question is the self-described “Coney Island of the West”, an amusement park which hoped to gain some traction by naming itself after New York’s better-known namesake. Family operated, conspicuously tidy, and lushly landscaped, Coney Island Park was another establishment that had honed its operations by the 1950s, and Disney also visited this park, even paying them for consulting services. The park decided to keep the check Disney signed to them rather than cashing it, so it remains in their archives to this day—although since the fee paid was only a token $1.00, saving the check was probably the wisest choice. Notable is the fact that Coney Island Park, like its East Coast namesake, hosted a number of fun houses, and a Laff-in-the-Dark dark ride, of which Disney likely took note. [13]

  Most seminal, however, had to be Electric Park in Kansas City, an amusement park that Walt Disney used to sneak into as a child, and later haunted with his sister numerous times after returning to Kansas City. To a child, Electric City could have been nothing short of amazing. The train that circled Electric City and the nightly fireworks displays are the obvious influences that the place had on Disney’s eventual plan for Disneyland, but less obvious were the darker influences found there, such as an Old Mill water dark ride, and the fortune telling and palm reading that took place at the park. [14] Mysterious enticements such as these may have piqued Disney’s childhood curiosity, clearing the path for his future desire to include a haunted house in every plan he proposed for a Disney theme park, be it the Burbank Mickey Mouse Park, Disneyland, Riverfront Square, or the future Magic Kingdom that was built in Orange County, Florida, after Disney had passed away.

  The evolution of the Haunted Mansion’s story from Walt’s point of view is not always clear, but there are a few clues we can look at to make some conjectures. First, as we’ve discussed earlier, there is a possibility that Walt had been exposed to a hilltop homestead claimed to have been haunted in Kansas City, a home with a dark past. Second, it’s at least plausible that Walt had read a newspaper article about the wandering, lost ghosts of England, who would be packing up and heading for America. And finally, we also know that Walt had been impressed by a convincing replica of a French Quarter square at the Chicago Railroad Fair, simulating an evening in New Orleans.

  Whether any of the preceding experiences had more of an impact on Walt Disney than any of the other visits he made to various amusement parks and miniature railroads throughout the early 1950s is impossible to discern, but it is almost certain that during his varied trips he stumbled across any number of scary dark rides, sometimes simply called “hard tops” by the carnies. These rides were so popular at the time that when Disney started to develop the plans for Disneyland, placing a number of dark rides in Fantasyland was a given, and the question was not so much whether or not to include dark rides, but rather how to design them so that the attractions would appeal to audiences of any age.

  Spooky dark rides of the era, however, were not intended to appeal to audiences of any age, but rather to older kids and adults able to withstand their typically gruesome horrors. A typical time-worn 1950s-era hard top “was a Victorian nightmare in plaster and paper mache, much of it peeling away,” said Doug Higley, a producer of numerous sideshows and circus attractions, “but no less an effective measure of what passed for high tech in the 1930s, and what could stay with a 10-year-old in 1954 for a lifetime.” [15]

  While noting that the hard tops did have competition on the midway with the sideshows and roller coasters, Higley believes that the haunted house dark ride was the most compelling—at least for adventurous youths. “It wasn’t just the dark rides that got our dimes, but in reflection, they were the rides we looked most forward to. Monster movies were not yet on every screen as they would be a few years down the road…and kids do love monsters, don’t we.” [16]

  As it turns out, so did Walt Disney. And while he wasn’t sold on the crash-bang dark ride as the best vehicle for his spooky attraction—perhaps wishing to avoid anything that smelled even slightly of the common carnival—Disney sent trusted art director Ken Anderson off to wrangle some of those monsters for Disney’s own haunted house, even as Disneyland was still being realized.

  What’s with WED?

  When Walt Disney was creating Disneyland, he drew upon the best and brightest artists that Walt Disney Productions had on the roster, and also looked for talent from other movie studios—most notably, Twentieth Century Fox. This part of Walt Disney Productions eventually came to be known as WED Enterprises, Inc., named after Walt E. Disney’s initials. By the mid 1960s, when the division had moved into their own space in Glendale on Flower Street, the name WED was prominently announced to the corporate world (in the hopes that WED might be able to pick up some corporate work in-between Disneyland gigs). Frank Allnutt, WED’s public relations manager at the time, described WED this way in a corporate promotional brochure:

  When you enter the doors at WED, you step in a unique world of creativity where ideas become realities…where imagination is the basic raw material…where the impossible is accomplished everyday. Officially titled WED Enterprises, Inc.…this is the master planning, architecture, engineering, research and development subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions. Shortly after WED was organized by Walt Disney in 1952, he fashioned it into the versatile instrument he needed to plan and design Disneyland. With WED, Walt literally added a new dimension to Disney entertainment. The abilities of those who had worked by his side for years in the two-dimensional world of films were rechanneled into the design of three-dimensional attractions for the Magic Kingdom. They became project designers, sculptors, research and development technicians, model builders and interior decorators. He complemented these talents by adding highly flexible architects, engineers and draftsmen who could design yesterday, tomorrow and the timeless world of fantasy…

  WED Enterprises, Inc. would eventually go on to be renamed Walt Disney Imagineering—but the title “Imagineer” is one that Walt had used to describe his crew of designers even prior to the official organization of WED.

  Chapter Two

  The Ghost House

  Due to Walt Disney’s canny use of television programming to promote Disneyland before it had even been constructed, the park was highly anticipated, and achieved incredible popularity from the outset. Disneyland had set the bar for themed entertainment higher than it had ever been set by an amusement park before, and the public was responding overwhelmingly. Disney’s park was entertaining, educational, enthralling, and, above all, experiential. By deciding to add a haunted house to the park, Disney was also throwing down the gauntlet by inviting comparison to the standard-issue creaky carnival dark ride. Initially, many of Disney’s designers and artists developed ideas and sketches for the attraction, but eventually, he tapped Ken Anderson to create specific stories and experiences to fill the walls of the house.

  Anderson, who came to Disney in 1934 and was an art director for the animation department until Disney decided to put together a group of individuals dedicated solely to designing his theme park, had a degree in architecture, not the typical background for an animator. However, the skill was extremely useful for situations that required precision in perspective, and Anderson’s talent enabled him to solve many problems—such as his construction of models of the cottage in Snow White w
hich helped the rest of the animators illustrate the structure convincingly for the film. Despite his success in animation, Anderson still wasn’t completely satisfied with the work. “I didn’t want to be stuck in animation,” Anderson said. “I wanted to do story, painting…I wanted to do everything, be involved in everything. I loved being close to Walt, because Walt was where everything started.” [1]

  Walt Disney, recognizing Anderson’s wide set of skills—notably his aptitude for incorporating a strong understanding of architecture into his artwork—tapped him to start working on the design of Disneyland, for which Anderson conceptualized many projects in Fantasyland, including the Storybook Land Canal Boats and design for the Sleeping Beauty Castle’s walk-through exhibit. But by 1957, Anderson was assigned to begin developing ideas for Disney’s long-envisioned haunted house. Many of Walt’s earlier spooky plans—including Harper Goff’s 1951 concept sketch of a haunted house for the proposed “Mickey Mouse Park”—had been put aside while the park was being launched, but Walt quickly reintroduced the idea of a haunted house to the park’s designers, not two years after Disneyland first opened its gates to the public. While many WED artists contributed concepts and sketches to the project—a wonderfully atmospheric sketch of a small boy walking through a gothic portrait gallery, staring up with trepidation at enormous, dastardly paintings of ghoulish characters, done by WED art director Bruce Bushman comes to mind—Anderson was the one to carry the project toward its still-hazy future.

  “[Walt] had it all thought out,” Anderson recalled in an interview with The “E” Ticket magazine in 1992. “He said, ‘We’re going to have this haunted house, and it’s going to be a great place. We’re going to use all the ideas we’ve ever had, and we’re going to invent more…we’ll need all kinds of ideas and ways of doing things that we haven’t thought of yet. But they will be thought of.’” [2]

  So Anderson and Disney began planning the haunted house, which Anderson often termed the “ghost house,” in a series of meetings. Largely taking cues from Disney’s personal vision for the project, Anderson began to design the look of the structure, which he thought should be a “large antebellum mansion, out in the Louisiana bayou, all rotten and moldy.” [3] Being the one of a very few designers working on the ghost house at the time—and possibly the only one fully dedicated to the project after Disneyland opened—Anderson needed to complete multiple tasks simultaneously and quickly, so he scoured the library at the Disney Studios and found a book with a photograph of a suitably spooky-looking home: not too wide, with nice vertical architecture, and pillars to give it an aura of majesty. Once it was muddied-up a little, this would be the perfect home for a family of ghosts, with an appropriate footprint for Disney’s intimate park.

  Anderson quickly sketched up a copy of the photograph from the book, incorporating his bayou, rot, and mold, and sent it off to Disneyland art director Marvin Davis, another WED Imagineer, also with a background in architecture, who had been brought to the Disney Studios from 20th Century Fox (where he had been an art director on films such as Marilyn Monroe’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ) by Dick Irvine, another Fox art director brought to the Disney Studios by Walt himself. Disney realized early in his development of Disneyland that beyond his staff of great animators and storytellers, he would need to add directors with experience in movie set design and architecture to realistically bring his magic kingdom to three-dimensional life, and Irvine was one of the first men tapped by Disney to fill that role. [4] Marvin Davis was only on the Disneyland project in the early years—1953 through 1955—and then he returned to the Disney Studio to continue his work on movies, so it’s possible that Anderson’s initial quick drawing of the ghost house structure was completed prior to 1957 while he worked on the other Disneyland attractions before the park even opened; the details are a bit sketchy, so to speak.

  Davis, who originally considered locating Walt Disney’s haunted house on a hill off of Main Street (and there’s no reason not to ponder whether this may be due to Disney’s recollections of the old Sauer Castle), sent Anderson’s sketch off to WED artist Sam McKim, who also came to work for Disney in 1954, after a stint at 20th Century Fox. By this time, the idea that the haunted house would be located out beyond Frontierland, possibly in a New Orleans-themed land yet to be developed, was the working premise for the attraction. McKim, who had also contributed his own concept for the haunted house architecture with a hint of the Old West, set to work finishing Anderson’s sketch into a colored painting that Marvin Davis could present to Disney for feedback.

  “We went through a lot of rough sketches, and Marvin said ‘Okay, we have a meeting tomorrow morning with Walt, so let’s get a good colorful thing done, and I’ll look at it this afternoon and see if its ready,’” McKim recalled. So after weeding through his own ideas, McKim and Davis settled on Anderson’s sketch as the model, and McKim worked on the painting intensely all day to have it ready to present the next morning. In fact, he was so spent from his efforts that he didn’t accompany Davis to the meeting with Walt the next day, and finally caught up with Davis when he returned. “Marvin said ‘Well, your [artwork] was effective. The effect was that Walt doesn’t want it to look anything like that,’” McKim recalled wistfully. “He said we’re going to let the ghosts do all that stuff on the inside. So much for the first sketch. Although they did use it after they built it, for publicity.” [5 ]

  As it turned out, Disney wasn’t offended by Anderson’s choice of structures on which he modeled the ghost house. He was more frustrated by Anderson and McKim’s decision to locate the structure in a moldering, swampy bayou. The impressions left on Disney by the trim, friendly architecture and landscaping found in Tivoli Gardens was still fairly fresh in his mind, and he decisively and consistently pushed Disneyland in that direction.

  Anderson had been pushing for a more “haunted” look to the ghost house. He envisioned it encompassed by the bayou and located off the beaten path, so that its appearance wouldn’t necessarily sully Walt’s park. He imagined guests would have to wind their way through the moss-draped trees, passing graves with unearthed bones poking out of the ground before the visitors would finally make their ways to the entrance to the house, similar to the way the Indiana Jones Adventure queue is handled at Disneyland Park today. [6]

  To skip ahead in the story a bit: the ghost house building, as envisioned by Anderson and McKim, was eventually built at Disneyland in 1962, where it stood unoccupied for years, as Disney needed his entire WED workforce to focus on expanding the scope of the company toward sponsored work for special pavilions to be presented at the 1964–65 World’s Fair in New York. Marc Davis (no relation to Marvin), one of Walt Disney’s famous “Nine Old Men” of animation, eventually came to work on the Haunted Mansion after the World’s Fair effort was complete, and ended up asking Disney if he wanted the existing architecture to be spooked up a bit once the project was back at speed and heading for the finish line. True to his conviction, Disney reiterated that he still wanted the exterior to remain pristine, a decade after Anderson’s sketch was first created. Alice Davis, another WED designer and Marc’s wife, recalled her husband’s conversation with Disney:

  Marc was talking to Walt, and he asked him if he wanted the house to look like Charles Addams, scary and all that. And Walt said “No. I want the lawn beautifully manicured. I want beautiful flowers. I want the house well-painted and well cared for so that people would know that we took care of things in the park, and it’s a clean, good park for families to come to and have a good time. You can put all the spider webs inside that you want, I don’t care about that…but the outside has to be pristine and clean at all times.” [7]

  So the Anderson/McKim ghost house illustration became the basis for the structure that housed the entrance to the Haunted Mansion. But as noted earlier, Anderson, possibly under pressure to accomplish many simultaneous tasks in the early ’50s as Disneyland’s opening date neared, simply copied his sketch from a photograph that he found
of a suitable house, which was located in Baltimore, of all places—far from the bayous of Mississippi. He discovered the photograph in a book published in 1950 titled Decorative Art of Victoria’s Era , a catalog of sorts written by Francis Lichten, who was the supervisor of the Index of American Design, a federally-subsidized art project. Lichten’s book is described in the jacket notes as “a beguiling panorama of the whole Victorian way of life…[and in] back of these activities was the imposing Victorian house with its heavy furniture, its wealth of ornamentation, its carefully draped portieres and its general air of formality and dignity.” [8] Since Anderson was attempting to design a haunted house from scratch, there’s no doubt that this new addition to the Disney Studio’s library would have quickly caught his attention.

  There, on page 105 of Lichten’s book, is a photograph of the house sketched by Anderson. That this photograph marked the beginning and the end of the search for the Haunted Mansion’s architecture is quite obvious—both due to the facts that even at a measured glance, the photograph appears to represent the actual Haunted Mansion building in Disneyland, and also that Anderson sketched the house from the same point-of-view as the photographer, down to the perspective of the building. “Temple-fronted, mid-Victorian mansion, Baltimore,” the simple caption reads. “Flounced in crinoline fashion with a double row of black iron-lace porches.” The spread also contains a number of photos of verandahs from Baltimore structures, featuring their cast iron flourishes as designed by the foundry of Robert Wood of Philadelphia. [9]