There it would have sat, just off Main Street, USA – a dirt, dead end road with a church, a cemetery and, looming behind, dilapidated, the old Blood Family home (or Gracey family or whoever). Children would run up and peek in the windows in hopes of seeing something ghastly, or dare each other to enter at night. And now, you can enter too – of course, you may just never come out.

    This was the atmosphere evoked by Harper Goff circa 1953 when he drew “Church, Graveyard and Haunted House” as part of his early studies for Main Street, USA. One would never have known what it was going to turn into: the cluttered, cozy interiors of this early Main Street bear more a resemblance to the Macomb County summoned by Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird than the gingerbread, blinking fantasy “Boom Town” guests pass through today. Of course, this was back when Disneyland was going to be a roughly triangular plot of land only a few acres square across from the Disney Studio in Burbank. Walt’s ghost house would have to wait.

    And the 1955 opening of the park came and went and in a few weeks so did its one millionth guest, and immediately the park swelled. A fireworks display appeared. The Jungle Cruise gained new animals and foliage (early photographs reveal the ride to be shockingly spare). Main Street gained its’ cars and carriages, Tomorrowland its Astro Jets, Fantasyland its Storybookland, and so on. The first ten years of Disneyland exhibit a growth rate rarely attributed to any theme park, and one never equaled at the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ again.


    And in 1958, when Disneyland guests were first riding a caterpillar down a rabbit hole in Fantasyland, Ken Anderson wrote a proposal for the Haunted House which included an encounter with the headless horseman and a quick escape when horror’s greatest icons show up for a ghostly wedding. Meanwhile, Sam McKim was repainting an Anderson concept. The result, a mammoth, southern antebellum Mansion in a grove of windswept, moss-draped trees and a lawn of weeds, would prove a crucial turning point. This famous image prompted the Walt Disney quip, much repeated: “We’ll take care of the outside and the ghosts can take care of the inside.” Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion would be immaculate.

    But another deadline was looming. The 1964 – 65 New York World’s Fair. Just one year earlier Disneyland had unveiled the eccentric, revolutionary Enchanted Tiki Room in Adventureland, then the most sophisticated and extensive use of “Audio-Animatronics” ever conceived. Walt was preparing to top himself in 1964 with three attractions destined for New York: Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress, and It’s a Small World.

    It’s a Small World proved the most useful in the long run. Besides introducing the most maddening theme song in Disney’s long history, the flat-bottomed boats which carried guests through the attraction became the brilliant solution to Disney’s next big project: the Pirates of the Caribbean. Originally conceived as a walk-through attraction under New Orleans Square called The Rouge’s Gallery, the massive throughput of Small World convinced Disney to use the same system to increase capacity for Pirates. It would be the last attraction he would work on.

    New Orleans Square opened in 1965 at Disneyland, officially an expansion of Fronteirland (New Orleans was, if you recall, the “Paris of the American West”…), with nary an attraction in sight. Pirates was there, and inside and far below the guests’ feet, out of sight, Imagineers were constructing the elaborate series of caves and caverns which open the attraction (conceived as a last minute, cheap fix by Marc Davis to use up the space formerly occupied by what was once the Rouge’s Gallery). The Haunted Mansion was there too, not far beyond the Disneyland Railroad station. Its iron gates were closed tight, and outside hung a sign which hinted at the horrors within. The attraction would not be open for another four years.


    If that makes it seem as if the project was full speed ahead, it wasn’t. With Walt Disney’s death in 1966, the WED team no longer had a head decision-maker to veto ideas he didn’t like. The Haunted Mansion, WED’s “maiden voyage”, so to speak, would have to evolve out of a team of decision-makers. Out of these competing visions would the final attraction’s quirky, incongruous nature arise.

    The final attraction may be roughly split into half, with the first half a showcase for the creepy, atmospheric designs of Rolly Crump, Ken Anderson, and Yale Gracey. Gracey designed effects for most of Disney’s shows and attractions, including the original “burning city” effect at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean that a fire marshal found so realistic he nearly shut down the ride.  Marc Davis’ lighter second half includes the famous séance, ballroom, attic, graveyard, and hitch-hiker gags. He also contributed the comical portraits to the expanding galley. Says Davis:

“You know that the first guys who worked on it could never sell it to Walt because they were trying to tell a story about this bride who was left standing at the altar, and the groom who had died a horrible death... The thing was, with this kind of attraction (and Walt agreed), that this was not a story telling medium. These attractions at Disneyland and Disney World are experiences – but they are not stories! You don’t have a story that starts at the beginning and goes until the end.”

    Indeed, original walk-through attraction concepts did try to tell a story. One version has Pricilla, the bride of a pirate, discovering her husband’s murderous activities and being dispatched in the attic with, according to various sources, a fall from the window or an axe. One version has her being thrown down a well, which is seen overflowing with blood! Another version stars the “Blood Family”, who make a hobby of murdering unwary travelers with their spike-adorned, falling bed canopy, also dropped. Another story has the “historical mansion” disassembled and brought to Disneyland to be restored, but one worker is walled up alive accidentally.

    Echoes of all these ideas still remain in the attraction, but as show writer X. Atencio says:

“Yale Gracey had come up with some real interesting illusions that had a beginning and end, because they thought they’d have a walk-through of this… They determined that it had no capacity, not very many people would go on this.”

    The final show would utilize the Omni Mover system used in the “Adventure Thru Inner Space” attraction designed for the 1967 re-opening of Tomorrowland. This system uses an endless chain of moving cars, thus creating a need for an ongoing show that plays for an audience that never ends. The Haunted Mansion is among the most efficient rides at Disneyland because of this. The attraction consists of hundreds of endlessly looping audio tracks, usually a minute in length. The music tracks are all of the same song played in various keys and on instruments to create a different tone per room. This brilliant sound design, compliments of Buddy Baker with lyrics and narration by Atencio, plays simultaneously throughout the attraction to provide a seamless “fade” between musical zones. Atencio:

“We had the music going and everything [in the graveyard], and I said, ‘Walt, I apologize, you can’t understand what they’re saying’. He said, ‘X, it’s like a cocktail party. You tune in on this conversation, you tune in on that. Each time they come in they’ll hear something new.’ I said why the hell didn’t I think of that?!”

    The final version, after many trials and tribulations, opened, incongruities and all, on August 9, 1969 at Disneyland to record attendance levels. It is today among the park’s most frequently attended and beloved attractions, and remains a “gold standard” in the haunted attraction industry. It is one of the few attractions to appear in all four Disney parks, and the only one to appear in a different “land” in each.