The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion

by Jeff Baham

  Speaking at a special event honoring the 40th anniversary of the Haunted Mansion held at the Walt Disney World Resort in 2009, Imagineer/author Jason Surrell commented that while he was researching his own Disney-sanctioned book about the Haunted Mansion (published in 2003 to tie in with Walt Disney Pictures’ The Haunted Mansion , a film starring Eddie Murphy), Imagineering vice-president Marty Sklar had confided to him that “Ken just copied that house,” a statement that left Surrell somewhat confused because at the time he was writing his book, Anderson’s model for the Haunted Mansion had been lost in the fog of history, and Anderson’s original sketch was being represented by the Disney company as an original concept. As it turns out, the Haunted Mansion really is a replica of a pre-existing building, a fact discovered due to some amateur internet sleuthing by Disney history enthusiasts in 2004.

  In fact, to jump forward in time once again, while the exterior of the Haunted Mansion was being designed for the Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort for an October 1971 debut, WED once again turned to Lichten’s book. Surrell said at the event :

  Herb Ryman did a really beautiful concept rendering of this Hudson River Valley house. It was gorgeous—but we thought whoa, we’re going down the same road again [as with Disneyland’s design], so [we] decided to turn it into more of this Dutch Gothic manor that you see today. It was [WED Imagineer] Claude Coates who took that design and…scaled up the wings a bit and used a little forced perspective with it. Claude’s intention was to make the house seem like a hulking monster that was looming over you.

  Turning back to Lichten’s book, Surrell showed the crowd a slide of another image, this time an etching on page 59, which was labeled as follows: “Wealth commanded a castellated stone villa, with parapets, towers, and the lancet-shaped windows of genuine old castles.” While the image’s role as a design influence is less definitive than the photograph of the Baltimore house, the illustration very closely matches the look and feel of the Haunted Manion’s gothic structure in Walt Disney World. It’s little wonder that Surrell finally noted, regarding Lichten, that the Imagineers “definitely went back to that well a couple of times.” [10]

  But back to Ken Anderson, and 1957. With Disneyland now open, and Disney himself pressing WED to work toward the park’s first expansion, Anderson found himself toiling intently on storylines and layouts for the ghost house. At first, Disney and Anderson considered making the attraction a sort of display that the guests would walk through—along the same lines as the Sleeping Beauty Castle diorama exhibit Anderson had worked on the year prior.

  “Originally, the walk-through experience was designed to have the guests just walk through a series of rooms where these scenes and a series of special effects would unfold, almost like…an elaborate department store window, like you might see at Macy’s,” explained Surrell. “Just minimal animation and tricks of the light—things like that to pull off some of the gags.” [11] But Anderson soon realized that many of Walt Disney’s concepts required a bit more of a set-up than a casual self-guided walk could provide, so he began to devise storylines for his ghost house proposals that entailed distinct scenes that visitors would stop and watch, perhaps under the direction of a dastardly tour guide.

  Over time, Anderson’s proposals evolved from a simple walk-through experience to one with some sort of conveyance to carry larger groups of guests through the ghost house. Even by the late ’50 s, attraction capacity at Disneyland was a concern, and though the possibility of maintaining the experience as some sort of walk-through was maintained through the early ’60s after Anderson had left the project, Disney and Anderson started kicking around ideas for transporting people in groups as early as the latter part of 1957.

  “At this point, people would be collected on the porch of the house, and these big double doors would open all by themselves,” Anderson recalled. “People would enter and stand in a temporary looking wheeled transport at the foot of the stairs. This was part of Walt’s idea. It was in his story that the ghosts would not permit any restoration of the house…and only this cart, looking like it was made of 2-by-4s and painted with primer, was allowed by the spirits.” [12] This set up would have entailed some sort of elevator system that would lower the carts to a basement level of the attraction, which would carry the guests along a track beyond the boundaries of the visible ghost house architecture to a larger show building out of view of the regular park guests.

  As Anderson came up with storylines and proposed scenes for the ghost house, he began to take them off of the paper and bring them to life in a sound stage loaned to the project at the Disney Studios. Working with WED artist Bob Mattey, a master of practical special effects, Anderson created a number of interiors and scenes for the proposed ghost house and invited Disney and other WED staffers to visit the haunted sets. With appropriately eerie sound effects and thunder and lightning crashing all around, Anderson’s concepts and spectral effects were brought to life—or at least, the afterlife. (After Anderson left the project and Imagineers Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey took the reins, they too converted a studio sound stage into a living, breathing host for their proposals for the Haunted Mansion.)

  A brief examination of Anderson’s proposals demonstrate that Walt Disney was likely torn in a number of directions regarding where to take the ghost house attraction. In 1956 or early 1957, after the New Orleans location was mostly agreed upon, Anderson, perhaps with a committee of his WED cohorts, formulated an early story revolving around a Dr. Gore and his hapless bride, Priscilla. Disney had earlier sent WED staffers to Louisiana to bone up on the local legends and ghost stories, and upon returning they put together a proposed outline for a story, with Gore now designated as a sea captain. [13] When Ken Anderson became the primary Imagineer in charge of developing the attraction, the Gore story took on a little more flesh. Still contemplating the attraction as being a sort of wax-museum or series of tableaus, the tale encompassed most of Anderson’s earliest concepts, including the descending carts and a tour guide, most likely costumed as some sort of caretaker to the old house.

  One important thing to note about the initial stories of Captain Gore: even at this early stage, the notion of an ill-fated bride was inserted into the Haunted Mansion’s storyline. Gore’s bride, named Priscilla, stumbled unfortunately into a secret the Captain long held—that he was actually a bloodthirsty pirate. His secret exposed, Gore’s young bride suddenly vanished with a scream into the darkness, never to be seen again. Anderson came up with various possible scenarios and effects to demonstrate exactly how Mrs. Gore met her demise, but suffice to say, after losing her own life, she was certainly going to demand something from the Captain in return. Vexed by her spirit, the pirate eventually took his own life, hanging himself from the cupola of the old house, a tableau that is echoed in the Haunted Mansion as it was finally designed. [14]

  An early working title for another one of Ken Anderson’s visions for the ghost house was Bloodmere Manor, named after a fictional Blood family, all of whom are said to have met their demise in the house. This is likely the version of Anderson’s proposed attraction that was most fully developed, as Anderson had a complete floor plan designed to go along with the story, had tested many of the effects with Bob Mattey, and even had Walt Disney’s agreement to participate in the show. This storyline was unusual in its use of a meta gimmick. Rather than suspending a guest’s belief that he or she is wandering the grounds of a moldering Louisiana bayou, Anderson’s script portrays the mansion as a piece of historical architecture that Walt Disney had relocated to Disneyland, to restore as a display for the New Orleans Square area of the park. In fact, the attraction was to employ a recorded message from Walt Disney himself describing the situation at hand as guests approached the porch of the mansion. Disney was to explain that though the building was brought to Anaheim for restoration, some type of manifestation was appearing each night and destroying whatever construction work had been done the day prior. “Additional night watchmen were em
ployed to catch the vandals red-handed, but they were unable to do anything other than report weird and frightening apparitions,” Disney was to have said. “We conducted a thorough investigation through special agencies in New Orleans, who furnished us with startling new facts.” Disney would go on to describe the gruesome history of the house’s prior owners, leaving their ghosts behind with displeased dispositions, finally resulting in the sudden disappearance of one of Disneyland’s own carpenters who had been working on the restoration. [15]

  The Ghost Pirate of New Orleans

  Ken Anderson’s earliest plans for the haunted house at Disneyland had ties to Walt’s Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, but the point was made clear at the 2017 D23 Expo in Anaheim, California. Walt had always loved pirates—Mickey Mouse had even tangled with them back in the 1930s—so there was no doubt that Walt had a streak of the buccaneer in his heart. At the Expo, in an exhibit honoring the 50th anniversary of the Pirates attraction, hidden away inauspiciously in a corner display, was Ken Anderson’s first sketch of the floor plan for his proposed walk-through haunted house.

  In a structure designed by Sam McKim, which would be located just south of the Pirates attraction in a location close to where the Tarzan Treehouse now sits, would be the residence of one of the most notorious pirates to ever sail the Spanish Main. This house was clearly intended to be related to the entire Pirates environment, as the adjacent Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at the time was also proposed to be a walk-through exhibit, demonstrating some of the cruelest, most villainous pirates of history, in an attraction underneath the otherwise prim and proper sights of New Orleans Square.

  Backing up half a decade, history rhymed with the moment once again. Monday evenings, the National Broadcasting Company aired a radio show called The Railroad Hour, a weekly series of comedies and dramas starring Gordon MacRae, an entertainer popular in the 1940s and 1950s from his success on the stage, screen, and radio. Walt Disney was quite impressed with the show—so much so that for the Christmas 1949 episode, he worked with The Railroad Hour to produce a live arrangement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the broadcast. In July of 1952, in the midst of Walt’s frenzied planning for Disneyland, MacRae presented an episode titled “The Pirate of New Orleans,” an operatic telling of a southern ghost story. The show began with a swell of the dramatic orchestra, and a deep bass singer starting the tale:

  Down in New Orleans on the old Gulf Coast, there’s a walkin’, talkin’, singing ghost—who wanders around the old French town, looking for a spot to set his self down. On a foggy night, if you should meet this pirate ghost down a lonely street—just tip your hat, then move your feet...because the dead man’s name is Jean Lafitte.”

  Whether Walt Disney heard this particular tale or found his own way down a similar moonlit path matters little—the fact is that his proposed New Orleans Square, his life-long love of pirate stories, and his haunted house came together in a mysterious nautical knot of storytelling potential. Pirates had been on Walt’s mind for some time. The studio’s first live-action film was Treasure Island, released in 1950 to worldwide acclaim, and Walt was enthusiastically seeking a way to bring the daring adventure of the popular pirate caricature into the real world. Perhaps his New Orleans area and planned ghost house could tie the ideas together. It was time for someone to dive into the project and start to make sense of the various ideas.

  So when Ken Anderson started to conceptualize the attraction (which Anderson had started calling the “Ghost House”) as a part of the New Orleans Square experience, he began to create a story worthy of the eeriest character to ever terrorize the Louisiana coast.

  Walt couldn’t just stop at creating brilliant representations of places in his park. There had to be an associated backstory. While New Orleans Square was more intricate than the Chicago Railroad Fair version, and was designed to look like a neater, cleaner representation of the real city, Walt also wanted to uncover the rapacious, darker aspects of the Big Easy through the power of storytelling. So, underneath the parasols and street jazz performers planned for New Orleans Square proper, he devised a wicked exhibit of notorious pirates that guests were to walk through in caverns underground, viewing waxwork tableaus and simple animations that told the predacious tales of New Orleans’ own Jean Lafitte and other famed buccaneers. Walt sent Imagineers Marc Davis and Claude Coats off to start designing this attraction. And off to the side of New Orleans Square, not far from the pirates exhibit, Walt planned to build the home of Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts… a home that was said to be haunted by the wickedness of its owner.

  Bartholomew Roberts was far too plain a name for such a chilling character, however. So Ken called him Gore...Captain Bartholomew Gore, the cruelest pirate ever to sail the Spanish Main, whose final journey planted him here, in New Orleans Square. And with that initial push off from shore, the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean began their journeys in tandem.

  Working off of this theme, Disneyland gag man and writer Wally Boag also came up with a pre-show element that could be installed in the court or external queue area of the ghost house while the attraction was still in development. A phone booth would be situated somewhere adjacent to the building, enticing guests to pick it up to see who was on the other side of the line. “When curious guests would pick up the receiver, they would hear a plea for help from a painter who had been working on completing the Mansion, who finds himself locked in the Mansion’s basement with a malevolent presence,” explained Ed Squair, a Disney historian. The painter would suddenly be cut off with a scream and replaced on the line by a wicked-sounding monster, claiming the painter’s life for the ghost house and warning potential guests of the mysteries that awaited them when the attraction was finally opened to the public. [16]

  Returning to Anderson’s proposal—the narration continues to warn of possible dangers, all the while assuring guests that “trained and competent” tour guides would provide safety. (In Anderson’s vision, these unsuspecting guides would be constantly on the verge of disaster; one Anderson sketch portrays a monstrous arm—cutely named Hairy—reaching out from behind a trap door in the wall, about to assault the naive tour guide.)

  An eternal darkness was explained—perhaps unnecessarily, for what type of ghost house would be well lit?—and finally, Disney was to end the narration by calling for each group of 40 or so guests to stay close together and “above all…obey your guide’s instructions,” a hint at some of the criticism that had already been leveled at the guided tour conceit—notably, the idea that the public couldn’t be trusted to do anything in a predictable manner, and all sorts of vandalism and sneaking off would take place if the viewers were stopped for any amount of time in front of a given scene.

  Despite early doubts about the guided tours, Anderson’s Bloodmere Manor was carefully plotted out, and the proposal included such traditional haunted house standards as bats, dark hallways, sliding panels, and creaking doors. A page of notes scribbled by Sam McKim from this period of development also points to some time-honored, if slightly rusty, haunted house tropes: “Unnatural, supernatural, unknown! Dim lighting, moon in and out of clouds, thunder, lightning, things (furniture, doors etc.) move by themselves. Eerie sounds. The unexpected. Ghosts, goblins, spooks, witches, spirits, apparitions, the ‘UNseen.’” [17]

  However, hints at some of the unique features that finally made their way into the finished Haunted Mansion can be found in Anderson’s proposal, including a long corridor of portraits that would slyly follow guests’ movement with their eyes, and another ghostly marital tale. But Anderson also included many familiar characters in his designs from throughout history, stretching all the way back to the mummies of ancient Egypt, and extending all the way up to the movie monsters kids might be seeing in their local cinemas during the weekend matinees.

  Disney historian Jim Korkis notes that Anderson’s Bloodmere Manor proposal included an effect reminiscent of the changing portraits that would be re-designed
later in the Haunted Mansion’s development. Korkis quotes Anderson, describing some of his changing portrait ideas: “As a typical example…a portrait of the blue-blooded relative will seem to fill up with blue blood like a bottle filling with liquid, sound effects and all. Also, a maiden aunt with an austere face will coyly wink, and the portrait of a gay blade will disintegrate a la Dorian Gray…” [18]

  One concept that Anderson developed culminated in a ghostly nuptial ball, providing another possible storyline upon which the eventual Haunted Mansion bride was based. “Walt had an idea that there would be a wedding in the house, and that Walt Disney’s own Lonesome Ghost character (from Disney’s 1937 Lonesome Ghosts cartoon) would guide you at certain points,” Anderson told The “E” Ticket magazine. “At that time we also talked about Dracula and Frankenstein and other Universal Monsters—we were trying to get in everybody!”

  Bloodmere Manor also featured a salon facing a large picture window, and in this room guests were to encounter a certain famous headless specter made popular in Walt Disney’s 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad . In this concept, the attraction would have featured Ichabod Crane’s fateful encounter with the Headless Horseman, a show-stopping set piece filled with special effects. In a 1949 review of the film, Time magazine stated that “the midnight chase through a clutching, echoing forest, with the gangling, lily-livered schoolmaster in full flight before the Headless Horseman, is a skillful blend of the hilarious and the horrible. It is Disney at his facile best.” Undoubtedly, Anderson considered this highly effective scene a strong candidate as the basis for a visceral theme to which the audience could relate.

  In October 1957, Anderson wrote a treatment for this storyline describing those effects surrounding the climax of the attraction—which would have been a close encounter with the Horseman, of course—and describing how those effects were to be accomplished. Interestingly, many of the Haunted Mansion’s special effects utilized in the graveyard remain the same as Anderson envisioned them to this very day. Anderson, along with other experts from the Disney Studios and WED, had developed a number of intriguing practical effects that would make the Horseman’s arrival unforgettable. [19]