The Unauthorized Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion

by Jeff Baham

  The storyline involving the raven was jettisoned from the final attraction (although they were retained for the script used for The Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion , the official soundtrack album released by Disneyland Records).

  The incorporeal Ghost Host contrivance worked well for the attraction because the ride was essentially to be a series of scenes and occurrences without an extended storyline. The narration offered a slice of deft humor that helped keep the scenes light and mysterious, rather than dark and ominous. With Atencio’s script, this would be the hallmark of the Haunted Mansion: wonderful, creepy, magical effects, delivered with a light touch .

  X. Atencio was somewhat surprised when Walt Disney first tagged him as a scriptwriter for WED when he had come from the animation department, having never written for Disney before his work on Pirates. But as has been said before, often it seemed that Disney could see potential in people that they didn’t even see in themselves. In his youth, Atencio’s father owned a small Spanish weekly paper in Colorado where Atencio aspired to be a journalist but failed to get a scholarship. So he ended up going to art school in California, eventually being hired by Disney while quietly maintaining an interest in journalism. “I guess in the back of my mind, I thought it was strange that Walt knew that too,” Atencio mused. “Somebody told Walt, I guess. After 27 years in the animation department, he said ‘I’d like to get you over to WED [to] do some scripting. I said ‘Fine with me,’ and loved every minute of it.” [3]

  So who could properly deliver the voice that Atencio’s script required? After a few general tests and auditions, it was determined that Paul Frees fit the bill. Frees, a veteran voice talent, was well known at the time for a number of popular roles, not the least of them being his characterizations of Boris Badenov for Jay Ward’s The Bullwinkle Show ; Ludwig Von Drake in numerous Disney cartoon shorts; and the voice of the ticklish Pillsbury Doughboy. At Disneyland, Frees could already be heard in attractions such as Adventure Thru Inner Space and Pirates of the Caribbean, both of which utilized Frees’s talent for creating compelling, somewhat sinister characters with his deep, basso profundo voice. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company in 1976, Frees discussed his work for Disney as it related to his experience with darker, more ominous voice work. “I’ve narrated a great many films about all that is scary,” Frees explains. “At Disneyland, I am the ‘Host’ of the haunted house…and of course, in the old days of radio, I was the host on Suspense —I was the man in black, telling a ‘tale well calculated to keep you… in suspense!’” Frees clearly had a pedigree in hosting haunting tales long before his gig as the Haunted Mansion’s Ghost Host.

  Although Frees also had a few parts in feature films under his belt, he preferred voice-only work. Voice-actor historian Brian Kistler points out that Frees “told me that he did at least ten movies, including The Shaggy Dog and The Thing …although, point blank, he did not like ‘camera acting.’ He indicated that he could go into a studio, record, and leave in a relatively short period of time. In on-camera acting, he co mplained about…how one would have to wait forever, for lights to be adjusted just right, or [how] it might be necessary to stick around for hours to shoot a scene again and again. He said he reveled in wrapping the work up quickly, heading out, and focusing on other things in life.” So Frees led a well-balanced life and enjoyed his free time, despite an extraordinarily prolific career. “He emphasized that this was his idea of what life should be all about,” Kistler concluded. [4]

  A brief aside regarding the aforementioned soundtrack album, also based on Atencio’s script: possibly due to Frees’s commitment to make his free time paramount, the Haunted Mansion soundtrack LP that was marketed through toy and variety stores in the 1970s featured a different voice talent for the Ghost Host—that of Pete Renoudet, another veteran Disney voice who can also be heard in Disney attractions such as the Country Bear Jamboree and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Although some of Renoudet’s fans claim that he was under consideration for the role of the attraction’s Ghost Host, Renoudet himself has no such recollection, and believes that his role as the Ghost Host was always intended solely for the soundtrack album. The recording Renoudet made was given an otherworldly flair with electronic echo effects in stereo, while Frees’s recording for the actual attraction remains crisp, with a hint of plate reverb. This is likely due to the fact that Frees’s voice needed to cut through all of the incidental live sound, while Renoudet’s version needed to convince kids that they were, in fact, listening to the voice of a ghost.

  “The record was produced by Tutti Camarata, who did all of the Disneyland Records in those days,” Renoudet recalls. Like that of Paul Frees, his recording session was more or less a one-shot project, recorded alone without the benefit of hearing the lines from the other characters. “There were very little [retakes],” Renoudet notes. “I think the whole thing didn’t take probably more than an hour and a half.” Renoudet’s role for the album was tightly developed and scripted, which differs slightly from Frees’s situation, in which he had a little room to make the character his own. This may be because Renoudet’s job was to build upon Frees’s existing character, while Frees had developed the character from scratch. “The script was nailed down. There were no changes at all,” Renoudet said. [5] On the other hand, Atencio found Frees to be a bit intimidating, and realized that allowing Frees to experiment with the script for the ride would probably result in a better end result .

  “Paul was such a genius,” Atencio recalled, reminiscing about the Haunted Mansion’s recording sessions. “The nice thing about Paul, well, he would come in for a recording session, and you would spend the first half hour of a recording session listening to Paul tell you how great he is. Then we’d finally say ‘Let’s get to work, Paul,’ and I’d give him the script, and he would just run with it. He would come up with stuff that I couldn’t dream of writing. I [didn’t have a large enough] ego to say, ‘No, I want you to do it just the way I wrote it.’ He’d really ‘plus’ it.” [6]

  Renoudet was able to claim a small role as the Ghost Host at Disneyland, however. For the press preview opening of the Haunted Mansion on August 12, 1969, a recording of Renoudet was used to invite the attendees to leave their special reception in Disneyland’s swanky Club 33 restaurant to walk across the courtyard and take a midnight ride through the new Haunted Mansion. “Ah, there you are,” Renoudet said in his familiar Ghost Host voice from the album. “The happy haunts have donned their finest shrouds, and are prepared to greet you at the stroke of twelve to guide you on your tour of the Haunted Mansion. As you can see, the exterior of this haunted old mansion has been faithfully restored, in keeping with true Disneyland tradition. Ah, but the interior belongs to the spirits. We’ve decorated it in the weirdest ghostly tradition. We’ve made it frightfully un-livable. And now, the bewitching hour approaches, and your tour is about to begin. ‘Bone’ voyage, as we say, and rest in peace...”

  But the most famous Disneyland character ever voiced is arguably Paul Frees’s Ghost Host as heard in the Haunted Mansion. Of course, Ludwig Von Drake and Boris Badenov were probably Frees’s most famous characters overall, but his work for Disneyland took him in a different direction. “What was most impressive to me was his versatility,” said Fred Frees, Paul Frees’s son. “That he was able to do not only cartoon voices, but also straight dramatic narration. He did a lot of Edgar Allen Poe—he did Tell Tale Heart , and really spooky kinds of narration.” [7]

  As was the case for Pirates of the Caribbean, Atencio was also tasked with writing the lyrics to the theme song from the Haunted Mansion. To do this, he was paired with the Disney Studio’s prolific composer Buddy Baker. Baker had also completed World’s Fair obligations for Walt Disney, including writing the scores for both Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln and the G.E. Carousel of Progress. Together, Atencio and Baker created the song heard throughout the Haunted Mansion, which began as a ditty that Atencio called “Grim Grinning Ghosts (The Screaming Song).
”

  “We wanted to make it a little spooky, but tongue in cheek,” Baker said. “It was a device to tie the whole show together.” So Baker ended up trying different things and making the music take on different moods by using different tempos and different instrumentation. Like magic, the song would take on different personalities as guests travel through the ride, as the result of Baker’s various arrangements. The tune is a somber dirge for the foyer, perhaps, becoming a whisper of breeze in the area where you load the vehicles. In the Haunted Mansion’s seance room, the tune is performed by various levitating instruments, and in the ballroom, it’s transformed into a mad waltz performed by a crazed organist.

  “In the ballroom sequence, at first I had this grand organ playing,” Baker said. “Since that was a sequence that needed to be more fun, and less serious, after this organist played it really well I called another organist and said, ‘Play this tune—but almost play it. Play wrong chords all the way through. And it worked.” [8]

  A “graveyard band” plays a jazzy version of Baker and Atencio’s theme song in the Haunted Mansion’s cemetery, which presented Baker with all-new challenges. During the original recording session in late 1969, many different styles of instrumental performance were utilized to try to make the instruments sound unearthly. These methods included unique techniques, such as slightly detuning the instruments, playing them with abstract stylings, and adding special effects to the recordings. One impressive trick was to re-score the music backwards, and then to play the notes from end to beginning. When the recorded tune was then reversed on tape, the tune, while following the original melody, contained very eerie, never-before-heard instrumental sounds.

  There were also many singing characters placed in the graveyard that Baker had to wrangle, including animated statues, ghostly party guests, dearly-departed historical figures, even hokey opera stars. “In the graveyard sequence, we had the greatest singers in the recording business,” Baker recalled, “but I told them to all be on the edge a little bit—to be just a little bit nuts. Don’t sing it straight.” [9 ]

  The graveyard band consists of a drummer pounding the beat out on a graveyard marker, a flutist, a bagpipe player, a harpist, and a horn player. The soundtrack heard in the graveyard adds a few unseen instruments to the mix, however. The basic groundwork for the whole scene is a foundational one-minute loop created by a standard-issue ’60s swing combo: strumming guitar, jazz organ, trap drums, bass guitar, and a walking contrabass. According to soundtrack historian Tish Eastman, writing in Persistence of Vision magazine, the bagpipes heard in the attraction were really performed by an oboe detuned to sound similar to a bagpipe—though the graveyard drummer is actually a recording of a percussionist pounding on two rocks.

  “The process [of developing the graveyard soundtrack] that emerges is one of a musical collage, rather than a rigid score,” Eastman explains. She notes that Baker and Atencio recorded as many as 42 different tracks of various instruments and special effect recordings for possible use in the graveyard, including slowed-down and speeded-up tracks from the flute, trumpet, and harp. “All 42 tracks made one big noise in that small show area,” Eastman said. So Baker and Atencio ended up picking and choosing from the various tracks to develop the final soundtrack that is heard today. [10]

  “Walt wanted it to be kid-friendly,” Atencio recalled. “I figured that the best way to do that was to say it in song: ‘Grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize.’” Atencio explained how he brought what he remembered from years of story meetings about the Mansion into the lyrics of the song. “The thing about the song was just to bring up the fact that these [ghosts] were just real fun-loving people. Our relatives have been waiting hundreds of years to be on stage, so we finally got the [Mansion] opened, and there they were. We went looking for ghosts all over the world—we might have some of your family there.”

  Atencio also recalled some of the technical challenges the team ran into while working with the music. For six characters in the Haunted Mansion (Madame Leota and five singing marble busts), a projected face of the singer would have to be synchronized with the musical audio recording, so WED had to figure out how to film the characters as they sang. “For Madame Leota, we had a brace on her face when we were [filming] her, and the same thing with the [busts],” Atencio said. “We had braces on their faces so they [wouldn’t move their heads horizontally to the music] but they’d sing this way,” which Atencio demonstrated with exaggerated up-and-down chomping. [11 ]

  After recording a sound for every character in the graveyard, Baker and Atencio took stock of the situation. “Some things [in the graveyard] didn’t work worth a damn,” Atencio recalled. “I never did like the popping up screaming heads—they were a little annoying. Buddy and I went through the graveyard scene and [everything] had separate tracks. It just got to be a bunch of noise, and you couldn’t hear anything. So we doubled up [the tracks]…they’re singing the same thing, just with different vocals. That cleaned it up a little bit.” [12]

  There are still many things going on sonically in the graveyard. But the underlying musical theme helps each different track fade into the next, as the guests travel past each graveyard vignette. This technique, incidentally, was first utilized by Walt Disney himself along with the Sherman Brothers while designing the soundtrack for It’s a Small World, a World’s Fair attraction that needed numerous different soundtracks to tell the story. In the case of the Haunted Mansion, many soundtracks were needed to establish the otherworldly presence of the attraction’s varied residents.

  Chapter Seven

  Eighty-Two Thousand,

  Five Hundred Sixteen

  The Haunted Mansion was one of Disneyland’s most anticipated additions ever, as a part of an eagerly awaited $7 million set of enhancements announced back in 1961. While even the title “Haunted Mansion” was still a work in progress, a pamphlet distributed at the park heralding “Coming Attractions” talked about the new land being built on the outskirts of Frontierland that would bring the French Quarter of New Orleans to Anaheim. Claiming that Walt Disney had “talent scouts” out gathering the “world’s greatest collection of ghosts,” the pamphlet promised the attraction would be coming to the park in 1963.

  Well, at least the attraction’s facade was built by 1963—but nothing else. Public fascination with the proposed ride reached a fever pitch, and rumors started to fly. Most of them involved the demise of some lucky-unlucky soul who, upon being granted a sneak peek at the unfinished attraction, was literally “scared to death,” causing Disneyland to go back to the drawing board to avoid future wrongful death lawsuits.

  As we’ve learned, the real reasons behind the delay included the New York World’s Fair, indecision regarding the Haunted Mansion’s focus, the passing of Walt Disney, and personal conflicts among the Imagineers. But Disneyland continued to whet the appetites of the parkgoers, as evidenced by this insert in the 1966 Guide to Disneyland souvenir book:

  The world’s greatest collection of “actively retired” ghosts will soon call this Haunted Mansion “home.” Walt Disney and his “Imagineers” are now creating 1,001 eerie illusions. Marble busts will talk. Portraits that appear “normal” one minute will change before your eyes. And, of course, ordinary ghost tricks (walking through solid walls, disappearing at the drop of a sheet) will also be seen…and felt. Here will live famous and infamous ghosts, ghosts trying to make a name for themselves…and ghosts afraid to live by themselves !

  Less than a week before the Haunted Mansion’s 1969 opening date, WED Imagineer Marty Sklar called Dick Irvine and asked if he might help select a title for Bob Gurr’s Omnimover, so Sklar could forward it on to the park and use it in his writing about the Haunted Mansion. After all, Adventure Thru Inner Space had named its Omnimover the “Atommobile,” so the Haunted Mansion needed something equally catchy. Sklar sent Irvine a list of suggestions that came from internal polls at WED. Among such suggestions as the “Seance Conveyance” and the “Ghost Mobil
e,” the “Doom Buggy” came out on top—because, as Sklar explained, it “would have an immediate connotation to the kids by relating to ‘dune buggy.’” [1]

  The Haunted Mansion finally opened to the public on August 9, 1969. Exactly one week after the attraction opened its cobwebbed doors, Disneyland admitted a record 82,516 guests—a record that would stand for almost eighteen years. “It was the creak heard ‘round the world,” wrote Imagineer David Mumford. [2]

  An interesting point of trivia presents itself regarding opening day. Disneyland Cast Members—the title Disney gives to its employees to remind them that they are always “on stage,” representing the company—were able to preview the attraction for two evenings after park hours. The attraction was open to them on August 7 and 8 from 7:00 p.m. through midnight. The next day, the attraction opened to the public, and Disneyland’s attendance record was made seven days after that. But nearly all of the newspaper reports from the Haunted Mansion’s opening list the official date of the opening as August 12. And a press “sneak preview” was held on August 11. However, today, Disneyland itself claims August 9 as the attraction’s birthday, so what to believe? Most likely, August 12 was chosen as a safe target for the attraction to be opened to the public, and was advertised as such in press releases and the scheduling of the press event, though the public was probably ushered in starting on August 9, immediately following the successful soft opening on August 7 and 8.