October 7, 2017 • 26 mins
This classic episode dives into one of the most iconic Disney park attractions -- the Haunted Mansion. Its development process that was anything but smooth. Budget and scheduling issues and creative differences dogged the project for two decades.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, it is both time for a classic episode and
it is the start of our season of folloween programming. Uh.
There was recently a loss in the Disney family. Imagineer
ex Atencio, who had a hand in many of the
projects in the Disney Parks and really impacted the magic
that lives there in many ways, recently died. So to
owner him and remember him, We're going to air our
(00:23):
two episodes about the development and building of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
Katy's will appear over this Saturday and next Saturday. And
one quick note. When we recorded this episode, a lot
of Holly's research was from the original edition of the
book about the mansion's history by Jason Serell, and that
one had a little error in it. Initially, Evergreen House
(00:45):
in Baltimore was cited as the architectural inspiration for Disneyland's
Haunted Mansion, but it's actually the Shipley Ladaker House, also
in Baltimore that sparked the design, So keep that in
mind as you listen, and now take a little trip
to disney Land with us. Welcome to you stuff you
(01:09):
missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and
today we are talking about subject admittedly very near and
dear to my heart and one that I think it
(01:30):
might startle people initially to think about. It is a
history item't but it really has quite a fascinating history
all of its own. And that is Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
Where those of you at home, which is everyone, maybe
not they might be on the go maybe, so why
people who are not here in the room with us,
which is everyone but you and me and our producer
(01:52):
Noel Uh. Holly has on a Haunted Mansion T shirt.
I do. I have a my hauntamasioned shirt, have my
Haunt imasioned ring. I really love the Honey Mansion. My
house has a lot of Honey Mansion. Theming um and
it is one of those things that when you read
about the history of how this project came to fruition,
it's a little bit enlightening, uh and it's uh it
(02:14):
sort of creates for me, I know, kind of a
lens through which viewing like some of the trials and
tribulations that happened in like anyone's modern day to day
work life, and kind of a different way and it
gives a perspective of like, no, everybody has these issues,
you know, like if you have a project that's taking forever,
(02:35):
if you have like a thing that you want to
do but you get excited and then it gets put
away and it never comes to fruition. Those things happen
all the time to everybody. And I think, uh, you know,
we don't because the Disney Company has become so huge,
we don't think about that ever having happened in the
context of Disney, but in fact, it was happening all
the time. Well, and I also love this story because
(02:56):
of like the historic visual effect techniques that were used
and how many of them still hold up and are
in used today. So uh, for younger listeners, it's probably
really easy to think about Disneyland and Walt Disney World
as places that have been around forever, but they really haven't. Uh.
(03:17):
Disneyland has only been around since the nineteen fifties and
Disney World open in the early nineteen seventies, but the
ideas for those parks go back quite a bit further.
One of the iconic attractions at all Disney parks is
the Haunted Mansion, and as any Disney file will tell
you each attraction in the parks has its own story,
but the Haunted Mansion's history is particularly steeped in legends,
(03:40):
partly because of the supernatural theming, which leads to all
kinds of ghost stories and horror. Yeah, and as I
was saying earlier, the story of Disneyland and the development
of the mansion is also a really good one to
look at because it showcases how, um, you know, even
great success has a lot of failure along the way.
I think, um, you know, all Disney has become so
(04:01):
legend legendary as a visionary that a lot of the
struggles that his projects went through, and a lot of
the struggles that he went through trying to get things done, Uh,
they get glossed over or they get overlooked completely, but
he had a lot of bumpy rides, and regardless of
whether you view him and the Disney Company in a
positive or negative light, And that's like almost could be
a podcast on its own, because there are people it's
(04:23):
very polarizing for some people. But the sheer number of
achievements that he managed in his life is really impressive.
But when you actually look at how it all happened,
a lot of the stories of that great success. They
have nothing to do with luck or you know, blind
good fortune. They're really like the result of hard work
and perseverance and really pushing through, which I think is
(04:43):
important to remember because again it's become such a huge company,
we think of it as just being a powerful entity,
and we forget that it there were baby steps in
the beginning. Well, for many people alive today, Disney has
always been a juggernaut. For the entirety of their existence
was not always each other, not no, not at all,
And even the project of the Hunted Mansion had many
(05:05):
stops and starts, uh, both with them without Walt. So
we're gonna first started off by talking about a quick
overview of kind of the birth of Disneyland. In nineteen
fifty one, Disney had an idea for a park to
give families something to do to get together in southern California.
(05:25):
His first plan was to make a park in Burbank,
across the street from the Disney studios. Even in the
first series of concepts sketches that Walt asked director Harper
Goff to do, there was always a haunted house and
all of them. And it first started as a part
of a group that also had a church in a graveyard,
and on December sixteenth of ninety two, Walt Disney Incorporated
(05:49):
was founded by Disney to build the park. UH. The
name changed almost immediately to W E. D Enterprises. UH.
Some people will say WED and the w E D
stands for Alter Elias Disney, but today we actually know
that entity as the as Walt Disney Imagineering. So it
went through a few name changes, but it originally started
in to build Disneyland. UH. And that new company was
(06:13):
actually staffed up with a lot of the artists and
the visionaries from Walt's movie studio, even though they had
not worked on a theme park before. UH. And that
higher to bring in movie industry people and animators may
seem odd when you think about it, but Walt's whole
idea was that they were going to be telling stories
in three dimensions instead of two, and since story was
(06:33):
always going to be the focus, professional storytellers, to him,
seemed like the exact right people for these jobs. These
ideas quickly became way too big for the eleven acre
plot of land that he initially had in mind, so
the focus shifted to Los Angeles in three, Walt hired
the Stanford Research Institute to survey Los Angeles and the
(06:54):
surrounding area for a hundred acre site that would be
suitable for what he in the W E. D Team
had in mind. And that's how they found Disneyland's home.
It was a hundred and sixty acre Orange Grove and
Anaheim and this location met all of Waltz requirements. It
had to be freeway accessible, adjacent to or within Los
(07:15):
Angeles and affordable. Yeah. And you know, nowadays, the Disney
Company is huge. That is so huge that it's really
hard for most people and even me to think about
it ever having shallow pockets. But at the time, it
was a very different story. Uh. You know, Walt was
really struggling to figure out how he was going to
finance this huge vision of his and to build a
(07:38):
theme park. And it actually led to the genesis of
the television series Walt Disney's Disneyland. Uh. That show came
out of the need for funding and Walt struck a
deal with ABC in nineteen fifty four that he would
for post for them this hour long weekly series which
was about Disneyland and also about sort of um, you know, exploration,
(08:00):
concepts in society and technology and storytelling. Uh. And in
exchange for him hosting this, ABC was funding the construction
of the theme park project. And just as a side note,
ABC eventually became part of the Disney Company UM decades
down the road. So the partnership to start in the
fifties but went on for a long time and now
(08:22):
the same thing. They're all together. So once the funding
and location were secured, construction started and went on at
a really breakneck pace. They broke ground on July nineteen
fifty four, and just a year later, on July fifteenth,
ninety five, Disneyland opened to the public. It cost an
(08:47):
estimated seventeen million dollars to build, which may not it
sounds like a lot, but I think nowadays if a
similar project were built, it would be in the billions
and billions. Yeah, that was seventeen million, nineteen fifty five dollar,
so it was a lot of money. Uh. And opening
day any account you read of it, it sounds insane. Uh.
(09:08):
There was so much anticipation leading up to the opening
of the park because Disney at this point had a
successful animation studio. He had already made a name for
himself in terms of entertainment. Uh. And so many people
were so excited at this thought of an entire park
devoted to this concept of you know, storytelling and animation
that they were even using counterfeit tickets to get in.
(09:29):
The park was overcrowded, way past probably what was a
smart capacity. The temperature was a problem. They were in
the middle of a heat wave in California and it
was a hundred and ten degrees fahrenheit. Uh. And on
top of it being super hot, there was a plumber
strike going on, so not all of the water fountains
had been hooked up, so people couldn't get a quick
drink of water to help deal with the heat. UM.
(09:53):
And there was fresh asphalt h that had been poured
as late as the night before the park open and
it hadn't all properly because of the heat conditions, and
so there are stories of people's shoes sinking into the
asphalts because it had this weird rubbery texture to it,
but it was sticky. But even though uh, it was
(10:14):
a bumpy opening day and was super overcrowded, and a
few weeks after it things were still a little bit crazy,
but the problems got ironed out and things picked up,
and pretty quickly the park became really really popular. But
if you look at a map from those first days,
you'll see that New Orleans Square, which is the area
where the hind Mansion lives, is not there. That spot
(10:36):
on the map is blank. So even though Walt had
been interested in the Haunted House from the absolute earliest
meetings with Harper Golf, it wasn't part of the initial launch,
and it wasn't long before Walt's mind turned back to
the Haunted House that had been part of the Disneyland
original plan. Yeah, once the park did get past those
(10:57):
initial bumps, it really became apparent that it was going
to have to expand quickly to meet demand. Uh, and
so Walt went right back to that Haunted House idea.
In ninety seven, Walt put a studio animator named Ken
Anderson in charge of the project. Because Ken had worked
on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and Snow White Scary Adventures,
(11:17):
which are both kind of so called dark rides because
they have a lot of low light trickery and effects,
he was the natural choice to helm the haunting of
what would soon become the New Orleans Square section of
the park, and While Ken was working on research for
this project, Walt uh went public with the news of
the expansion. He talked about all of the things they
(11:39):
were going to add to this new New Orleans Square area,
and he even told a BBC interviewer in that he
was building a retirement home for ghosts who may have
been displaced from their original haunts during the war. So
he was kind of trying to contextualize the concept to
um being as he was in Great Britain at the
(11:59):
time and say, no, you know, all the bombings and everything,
there are lots of ghost sit down the place to go.
I'm building them a place to go. Just kind of
silly and odd. Yeah, I don't know how I would
feel about that if I were living in Britain. I
don't know how I would feel about it if I
were the interviewer either, right, like, wait, you're doing what
(12:21):
but you know, let's talk about Hogwarts again. What if
something happened to Hogwarts? Where would all those ghosts? Yeah, So,
while kept detailing his plans for a park expansion with
various news outlets, including shops and restaurants that would join
the Haunted House in this newly defined area of the Park,
and Ken kept looking for design inspirations. So they knew
(12:43):
from the outset that they wanted to have this kind
of Old South feel to the area that would become
New Orleans Square, and so Anderson sought out Louisiana plantation
houses for design inspiration. Uh. You know, they knew they
wanted this Antebellum look. But it turned out that the
house that really sort of provided the most inspiration for um,
(13:05):
the Haunted mansion that's in Disneyland. Other ones have different
architectural styles. Uh. It was actually a house that is
on North Charles Street in Baltimore, Maryland, called the Evergreen House.
And this is a house that had been bequeathed to
Johns Hopkins University in two uh, and it really did
provide the picture perfect image of what Anderson and Disney
had in mind. And the Disneyland Haunted Mansion bears a
(13:28):
really strong resemblance to the Evergreen House in all artists
concept sketches from the house up to the house was
dilapidated and broken down with this sort of overgrown, unkempt landscape,
which is really what you would probably expect for a
haunted house. But this approach really didn't go over well
with Walt. He couldn't reconcile having this broken down house
(13:51):
in any kind of style settled within the otherwise christine
surroundings of Disneyland. So there's a now famous quote, which
I also find so charming. This is from Walt, and
he said, we'll take care of the outside and let
the ghosts take care of the inside. Uh So, no
matter how haunted the house was going to be, he
(14:11):
was pretty insistent that I have a perfectly groomed exterior,
and there was disagreement about it. But rather than dig
in on this issue of the exterior design, Kenny Anderson
just figured he would move over and focus on interior
for a while and they would kind of table that discussion.
And I'm sure it will come as a surprise to
none of our listeners to hear that one of the
(14:33):
major inspirations for the Haunted Mansion was the Winchester Mystery House. Uh.
Anderson had actually toured the Winchester House in San Jose
on a weekend getaway while this issue of pristine versus
ramshackle exterior had been debated, and you know, almost immediately
upon the tour, uh he realized that this was really
what the inside of their Haunted Mansion should kind of
(14:55):
look like. With these ideas of rooms that don't go
places and architecture that doesn't always makes sense together because
as we know, the Winchester House was built by Mrs
Winchester constantly under construction in an effort to confuse spirits
that might be angry about the Winchester family fortune coming
from weapons that had killed them. So that's an interesting house.
(15:20):
If anybody has not been there, I highly recommend the
Winchester House. So we have an episode on it. We do, uh,
and it is really clear if you've been to the
Haunted Mansion that there's a link there stylistically. So let's
get back to the Haunted Mansion. Yeah. True to this
(15:41):
initial concept that the theme park was going to be
a way to just tell stories in three dimensions, the
Haunted Mansion had to have a compelling story to go
in the attraction. But it took a few hits and
missus on this whole story to wind up with what
guests are familiar with today, and even the ones that
we're about to talk about are not really what guests
(16:03):
are familiar with today. It took a lot what what
are guests familiar with today if people have never gone,
are we going to talk about it? Then we'll kind
of get there at the end. We won't dig too
deep into that because you know, we've got to experience.
It's super fun. Well but uh, but we will talk
in a bit about how things kind of ended up
having to change. So some of the discarded stories are
(16:24):
really fun though. So Kenna Anderson, bless him, was just
working his tail off. He first put together a story
treatment that featured It was all centered around this sea
captain named Captain Bartholome you Gore, and it was a
walkthrough tour that was led by George Butler Beauregard. And
this story centered on the captain, who in some versions
and in some notes um has the name Gideon Gorlea
(16:48):
and then earned the nickname of Gore through his behavior
because in these he brought his bride Priscilla to the mansion.
But Priscilla was apparently a curious lass and in this
version him that Anderson cooked up. Her curiosity was her undoing.
She foolishly opened this chest that she found in the
attic and discovered that her beloved husband was in flat.
(17:09):
In fact, Black Bart the pirate. Uh. And after she
makes this discovery and has this revelation, she vanished. Uh.
So in some versions of the story, poor Priscilla is
bricked into the cellar by her husband, sort of cask
of a Monteato style if you've read that a Grand
Poe uh short story. And in other versions that Anderson
worked on, she was either locked into a c chest
(17:32):
or thrown down a well. Uh. And her haunting of
the captain in this story uh in this plot line
led him to hang himself in the house's rafters. And
so all of this is part of what makes the
Haunting of the Haunted House. The second version, which was
also put together by Ken Anderson, featured this storyline that
was intended to really draw guests in by marrying the
(17:53):
real world with the mythology. And in this version, the
tour guide would explain to guests that the Disney Company
had moved an entire plantation mansion, which was blood mere manner,
to Disneylands to create an authentic centerpiece for New Orleans Square,
but trickster spirits were forever wreaking havoc on the restoration
(18:14):
of the house. Also featured in this tale was a
deceased construction worker who haunted the site, which was abandoned
after his untimely death. That one didn't hit either. Back
to the drawing board, and Anderson did a third approach,
and this one was really a much lighter approach to
the whole thing. It actually featured Walt Disney himself acting
(18:34):
as a tour guide via prerecorded tape segments, and he
was leading guests to a ghost wedding, so it was
so much simpler storyline. But that way they could incorporate
lots of ghosts without having to work up lots of
backstory for each of them, because they were all just
attendants at this wedding. His fourth story idea took its
inspiration from the nine nine Disney animated feature The Adventures
(18:56):
of Ichabod and Mr Toad. The second part of the
film was an adaptation of the legend of Sleepy Hollow,
and Anderson thought the story needed to have the headless
horseman provide sort of fertile ground for this haunted mansion storyline,
So a great deal of this treatment involved using folly
effects to create the sound of the horseman's hoof beats
(19:17):
following guests along their tour I'm imagining it like Monty
Python would not be funny or would not be scary.
It would be very silly. Well that's scary, and silly
comes up yes later on. So the wedding concept was
also there, and this idea and the guests were famous
monsters like Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula. The bride Mademoiselle Vampire
(19:39):
would get a case of the jitters, not sure whether
she wanted to marry most of your boogeyman, and just
as the chaos was reaching a fever pitch, a tour
guide would escort the park guests outside to safety. And
this fourth version of the story was the one that
was approved to go forward, although if you are a
fan of the attraction, you will note that that is
not the story you see on the rind. No. Uh,
(20:02):
there's a part of me that wishes we could go
to an alternate history and see that version because it
sounds really fun. They're just picturing this panicky vampire bride.
Uh and allegedly, uh the escape was going to be
through one of the fireplaces, which could have been a
potentially really cool effect. Uh. Almost from the moment that
(20:22):
Walt decided to expand Disneyland and build the Haunted Mansion.
He had designers working on ideas for the detail elements
of the attraction, while Ken Anderson focused on the structural design. Yeah,
he had had lots of concept sketches being made throughout
and as all of these different storylines were being put together,
some of them were getting sketch treatments. But as they
(20:43):
were settling on this fourth storyline of the wedding UH
in nine, Walt put together what became a really famous
chwoan team that generated many of the effects and moments
that really make the Haunted Mansion a crowd favorite even today.
Yale Gracie was a background on artist and model builder,
and Rolely Crump, which is a nickname for Roland, had
(21:04):
been working at the studios as an in between her.
Crump had this fondness for creating kinetic sculpture, so odd
mobiles and other kind of pieces of moving art. I
love those, by the way, and the story goes that
Walt thought these two had just the right crossover of
interests to make an ideal pairing to create the illusions
that a Haunted House attraction would need. And uh this
(21:28):
pair of artists spent basically all of n hold up together.
They were in on one floor of a building just
reading ghost stories. They were testing out illusions that they
were coming up with together. And when Crump talks about it,
he routinely credits Gracie as being like the idea man,
and then he would start to embellish and expand on them,
(21:49):
and they would refine all of this together. So it
sounded like it was. It really was a very fruitful
and pretty enjoyable pairing. I think that's clear from the
story we're about to tell. The pair became really really
well known for their fantastical exploits and um for their prankishness. Yeah,
(22:09):
and Jason Cerell's book about the Haunted Mansion's history, Rolly
Crump tells the story of an incident that was created
by all of this experimenting combined with with pranking. Yale
had all his ghosts and magic strewn throughout the room.
Once we got a call from personnel asking us to
leave the lights on because the janitors didn't want to
come in if it was dark. Well, we did, but
(22:33):
we rigged the room. We put in an infrared meme
and when it was tripped, the room went to black
light and all the ghost effects came on. When we
came in the next morning, all the effects were still running,
and there was a broom in the center of the floor.
Personnel called and said, you'll have to clean your own
room because the janitors won't go in there anymore. Those
(22:54):
rotten boys. It is so like the pranks you would expect,
like a t and age kid. So one of the
interesting things, UH and historically significant things about the work
that Gracie and Crump were doing together is that even
though they were put together to create cutting edge effects,
most of the tricks that they were employing were really
(23:16):
really old school. They both had an interest in magic tricks,
and they used a lot of tricks that had been
part of magic shows and theatrical sleight of hand for decades,
including the illusion that is known as Pepper's Ghost, which
is from the mid eighteen hundreds, and that's a setup
where action that is taking place in an unseen area
(23:36):
UH that the audience can't see, is reflected off a
pane of glass that they can see, and it creates
this look of translucent, floating images that look like ghosts.
And they used that and that's still used in the
Hounty mansion today, like a lot of the ghosts that
you see are doing the Pepper's Ghost illusion. The year
that Roally Crump and Yale Gracie spent together in nineteen
(23:58):
fifty nine culminated in the demo show, where they displayed
a presentation of a version of the whole attraction. And
the demo was a huge hodgepodge of tricks and ideas,
and even though they were working with Anderson's fourth story
plan involving the Ghoulish Wedding, they had brought in some
elements from the abandoned plots as well, including the Sea Captain. Uh.
(24:20):
The Sea captain Is illusion is one that's talked about
a lot. This illusion that the pair created involved a
rain soaked ghost showing up there was water, there was
a flooding effect in the room, The Captain's doomed bride
would materialize, and the water would then recede and leave
only these unearthly blobs of moisture behind it. And it
(24:42):
is one of those super famous, often spoken of moments
that the people who witnessed it will still in interviews
kind of wax rhapsodic about it and how it was
one of the most amazing things they have ever seen
in their lives. Um, and with that, we're actually going
to cliffhang you a little bit. The haunting mention is rich,
so we are taking to episodes is rich and and
(25:04):
the moment of that we're pausing. There's kind of its
own cliffhanger. This whole thing got tabled for a little while. Yeah,
and we'll talk about how that all came to be,
uh in our next episode, which is a travel up. Hey.
Since uh, these episodes that we're sharing our past classics,
(25:24):
we have some updated information that will supersede the contact
stuff you've heard before. If you want to email us,
our email address is History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com, and you can find us across the spectrum
of social media as Missed in History. You can also
find us at missed in History dot com, and you
can visit our parent company, how stuff Works at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(25:52):
of other topics because it how staff works dot com.
Hey, it is both time for a classic episode and
it is the start of our season of folloween programming. Uh.
There was recently a loss in the Disney family. Imagineer
ex Atencio, who had a hand in many of the
projects in the Disney Parks and really impacted the magic
that lives there in many ways, recently died. So to
owner him and remember him, We're going to air our
(00:23):
two episodes about the development and building of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
Katy's will appear over this Saturday and next Saturday. And
one quick note. When we recorded this episode, a lot
of Holly's research was from the original edition of the
book about the mansion's history by Jason Serell, and that
one had a little error in it. Initially, Evergreen House
(00:45):
in Baltimore was cited as the architectural inspiration for Disneyland's
Haunted Mansion, but it's actually the Shipley Ladaker House, also
in Baltimore that sparked the design, So keep that in
mind as you listen, and now take a little trip
to disney Land with us. Welcome to you stuff you
(01:09):
missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and
today we are talking about subject admittedly very near and
dear to my heart and one that I think it
(01:30):
might startle people initially to think about. It is a
history item't but it really has quite a fascinating history
all of its own. And that is Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
Where those of you at home, which is everyone, maybe
not they might be on the go maybe, so why
people who are not here in the room with us,
which is everyone but you and me and our producer
(01:52):
Noel Uh. Holly has on a Haunted Mansion T shirt.
I do. I have a my hauntamasioned shirt, have my
Haunt imasioned ring. I really love the Honey Mansion. My
house has a lot of Honey Mansion. Theming um and
it is one of those things that when you read
about the history of how this project came to fruition,
it's a little bit enlightening, uh and it's uh it
(02:14):
sort of creates for me, I know, kind of a
lens through which viewing like some of the trials and
tribulations that happened in like anyone's modern day to day
work life, and kind of a different way and it
gives a perspective of like, no, everybody has these issues,
you know, like if you have a project that's taking forever,
(02:35):
if you have like a thing that you want to
do but you get excited and then it gets put
away and it never comes to fruition. Those things happen
all the time to everybody. And I think, uh, you know,
we don't because the Disney Company has become so huge,
we don't think about that ever having happened in the
context of Disney, but in fact, it was happening all
the time. Well, and I also love this story because
(02:56):
of like the historic visual effect techniques that were used
and how many of them still hold up and are
in used today. So uh, for younger listeners, it's probably
really easy to think about Disneyland and Walt Disney World
as places that have been around forever, but they really haven't. Uh.
(03:17):
Disneyland has only been around since the nineteen fifties and
Disney World open in the early nineteen seventies, but the
ideas for those parks go back quite a bit further.
One of the iconic attractions at all Disney parks is
the Haunted Mansion, and as any Disney file will tell
you each attraction in the parks has its own story,
but the Haunted Mansion's history is particularly steeped in legends,
(03:40):
partly because of the supernatural theming, which leads to all
kinds of ghost stories and horror. Yeah, and as I
was saying earlier, the story of Disneyland and the development
of the mansion is also a really good one to
look at because it showcases how, um, you know, even
great success has a lot of failure along the way.
I think, um, you know, all Disney has become so
(04:01):
legend legendary as a visionary that a lot of the
struggles that his projects went through, and a lot of
the struggles that he went through trying to get things done, Uh,
they get glossed over or they get overlooked completely, but
he had a lot of bumpy rides, and regardless of
whether you view him and the Disney Company in a
positive or negative light, And that's like almost could be
a podcast on its own, because there are people it's
(04:23):
very polarizing for some people. But the sheer number of
achievements that he managed in his life is really impressive.
But when you actually look at how it all happened,
a lot of the stories of that great success. They
have nothing to do with luck or you know, blind
good fortune. They're really like the result of hard work
and perseverance and really pushing through, which I think is
(04:43):
important to remember because again it's become such a huge company,
we think of it as just being a powerful entity,
and we forget that it there were baby steps in
the beginning. Well, for many people alive today, Disney has
always been a juggernaut. For the entirety of their existence
was not always each other, not no, not at all,
And even the project of the Hunted Mansion had many
(05:05):
stops and starts, uh, both with them without Walt. So
we're gonna first started off by talking about a quick
overview of kind of the birth of Disneyland. In nineteen
fifty one, Disney had an idea for a park to
give families something to do to get together in southern California.
(05:25):
His first plan was to make a park in Burbank,
across the street from the Disney studios. Even in the
first series of concepts sketches that Walt asked director Harper
Goff to do, there was always a haunted house and
all of them. And it first started as a part
of a group that also had a church in a graveyard,
and on December sixteenth of ninety two, Walt Disney Incorporated
(05:49):
was founded by Disney to build the park. UH. The
name changed almost immediately to W E. D Enterprises. UH.
Some people will say WED and the w E D
stands for Alter Elias Disney, but today we actually know
that entity as the as Walt Disney Imagineering. So it
went through a few name changes, but it originally started
in to build Disneyland. UH. And that new company was
(06:13):
actually staffed up with a lot of the artists and
the visionaries from Walt's movie studio, even though they had
not worked on a theme park before. UH. And that
higher to bring in movie industry people and animators may
seem odd when you think about it, but Walt's whole
idea was that they were going to be telling stories
in three dimensions instead of two, and since story was
(06:33):
always going to be the focus, professional storytellers, to him,
seemed like the exact right people for these jobs. These
ideas quickly became way too big for the eleven acre
plot of land that he initially had in mind, so
the focus shifted to Los Angeles in three, Walt hired
the Stanford Research Institute to survey Los Angeles and the
(06:54):
surrounding area for a hundred acre site that would be
suitable for what he in the W E. D Team
had in mind. And that's how they found Disneyland's home.
It was a hundred and sixty acre Orange Grove and
Anaheim and this location met all of Waltz requirements. It
had to be freeway accessible, adjacent to or within Los
(07:15):
Angeles and affordable. Yeah. And you know, nowadays, the Disney
Company is huge. That is so huge that it's really
hard for most people and even me to think about
it ever having shallow pockets. But at the time, it
was a very different story. Uh. You know, Walt was
really struggling to figure out how he was going to
finance this huge vision of his and to build a
(07:38):
theme park. And it actually led to the genesis of
the television series Walt Disney's Disneyland. Uh. That show came
out of the need for funding and Walt struck a
deal with ABC in nineteen fifty four that he would
for post for them this hour long weekly series which
was about Disneyland and also about sort of um, you know, exploration,
(08:00):
concepts in society and technology and storytelling. Uh. And in
exchange for him hosting this, ABC was funding the construction
of the theme park project. And just as a side note,
ABC eventually became part of the Disney Company UM decades
down the road. So the partnership to start in the
fifties but went on for a long time and now
(08:22):
the same thing. They're all together. So once the funding
and location were secured, construction started and went on at
a really breakneck pace. They broke ground on July nineteen
fifty four, and just a year later, on July fifteenth,
ninety five, Disneyland opened to the public. It cost an
(08:47):
estimated seventeen million dollars to build, which may not it
sounds like a lot, but I think nowadays if a
similar project were built, it would be in the billions
and billions. Yeah, that was seventeen million, nineteen fifty five dollar,
so it was a lot of money. Uh. And opening
day any account you read of it, it sounds insane. Uh.
(09:08):
There was so much anticipation leading up to the opening
of the park because Disney at this point had a
successful animation studio. He had already made a name for
himself in terms of entertainment. Uh. And so many people
were so excited at this thought of an entire park
devoted to this concept of you know, storytelling and animation
that they were even using counterfeit tickets to get in.
(09:29):
The park was overcrowded, way past probably what was a
smart capacity. The temperature was a problem. They were in
the middle of a heat wave in California and it
was a hundred and ten degrees fahrenheit. Uh. And on
top of it being super hot, there was a plumber
strike going on, so not all of the water fountains
had been hooked up, so people couldn't get a quick
drink of water to help deal with the heat. UM.
(09:53):
And there was fresh asphalt h that had been poured
as late as the night before the park open and
it hadn't all properly because of the heat conditions, and
so there are stories of people's shoes sinking into the
asphalts because it had this weird rubbery texture to it,
but it was sticky. But even though uh, it was
(10:14):
a bumpy opening day and was super overcrowded, and a
few weeks after it things were still a little bit crazy,
but the problems got ironed out and things picked up,
and pretty quickly the park became really really popular. But
if you look at a map from those first days,
you'll see that New Orleans Square, which is the area
where the hind Mansion lives, is not there. That spot
(10:36):
on the map is blank. So even though Walt had
been interested in the Haunted House from the absolute earliest
meetings with Harper Golf, it wasn't part of the initial launch,
and it wasn't long before Walt's mind turned back to
the Haunted House that had been part of the Disneyland
original plan. Yeah, once the park did get past those
(10:57):
initial bumps, it really became apparent that it was going
to have to expand quickly to meet demand. Uh, and
so Walt went right back to that Haunted House idea.
In ninety seven, Walt put a studio animator named Ken
Anderson in charge of the project. Because Ken had worked
on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and Snow White Scary Adventures,
(11:17):
which are both kind of so called dark rides because
they have a lot of low light trickery and effects,
he was the natural choice to helm the haunting of
what would soon become the New Orleans Square section of
the park, and While Ken was working on research for
this project, Walt uh went public with the news of
the expansion. He talked about all of the things they
(11:39):
were going to add to this new New Orleans Square area,
and he even told a BBC interviewer in that he
was building a retirement home for ghosts who may have
been displaced from their original haunts during the war. So
he was kind of trying to contextualize the concept to
um being as he was in Great Britain at the
(11:59):
time and say, no, you know, all the bombings and everything,
there are lots of ghost sit down the place to go.
I'm building them a place to go. Just kind of
silly and odd. Yeah, I don't know how I would
feel about that if I were living in Britain. I
don't know how I would feel about it if I
were the interviewer either, right, like, wait, you're doing what
(12:21):
but you know, let's talk about Hogwarts again. What if
something happened to Hogwarts? Where would all those ghosts? Yeah, So,
while kept detailing his plans for a park expansion with
various news outlets, including shops and restaurants that would join
the Haunted House in this newly defined area of the Park,
and Ken kept looking for design inspirations. So they knew
(12:43):
from the outset that they wanted to have this kind
of Old South feel to the area that would become
New Orleans Square, and so Anderson sought out Louisiana plantation
houses for design inspiration. Uh. You know, they knew they
wanted this Antebellum look. But it turned out that the
house that really sort of provided the most inspiration for um,
(13:05):
the Haunted mansion that's in Disneyland. Other ones have different
architectural styles. Uh. It was actually a house that is
on North Charles Street in Baltimore, Maryland, called the Evergreen House.
And this is a house that had been bequeathed to
Johns Hopkins University in two uh, and it really did
provide the picture perfect image of what Anderson and Disney
had in mind. And the Disneyland Haunted Mansion bears a
(13:28):
really strong resemblance to the Evergreen House in all artists
concept sketches from the house up to the house was
dilapidated and broken down with this sort of overgrown, unkempt landscape,
which is really what you would probably expect for a
haunted house. But this approach really didn't go over well
with Walt. He couldn't reconcile having this broken down house
(13:51):
in any kind of style settled within the otherwise christine
surroundings of Disneyland. So there's a now famous quote, which
I also find so charming. This is from Walt, and
he said, we'll take care of the outside and let
the ghosts take care of the inside. Uh So, no
matter how haunted the house was going to be, he
(14:11):
was pretty insistent that I have a perfectly groomed exterior,
and there was disagreement about it. But rather than dig
in on this issue of the exterior design, Kenny Anderson
just figured he would move over and focus on interior
for a while and they would kind of table that discussion.
And I'm sure it will come as a surprise to
none of our listeners to hear that one of the
(14:33):
major inspirations for the Haunted Mansion was the Winchester Mystery House. Uh.
Anderson had actually toured the Winchester House in San Jose
on a weekend getaway while this issue of pristine versus
ramshackle exterior had been debated, and you know, almost immediately
upon the tour, uh he realized that this was really
what the inside of their Haunted Mansion should kind of
(14:55):
look like. With these ideas of rooms that don't go
places and architecture that doesn't always makes sense together because
as we know, the Winchester House was built by Mrs
Winchester constantly under construction in an effort to confuse spirits
that might be angry about the Winchester family fortune coming
from weapons that had killed them. So that's an interesting house.
(15:20):
If anybody has not been there, I highly recommend the
Winchester House. So we have an episode on it. We do, uh,
and it is really clear if you've been to the
Haunted Mansion that there's a link there stylistically. So let's
get back to the Haunted Mansion. Yeah. True to this
(15:41):
initial concept that the theme park was going to be
a way to just tell stories in three dimensions, the
Haunted Mansion had to have a compelling story to go
in the attraction. But it took a few hits and
missus on this whole story to wind up with what
guests are familiar with today, and even the ones that
we're about to talk about are not really what guests
(16:03):
are familiar with today. It took a lot what what
are guests familiar with today if people have never gone,
are we going to talk about it? Then we'll kind
of get there at the end. We won't dig too
deep into that because you know, we've got to experience.
It's super fun. Well but uh, but we will talk
in a bit about how things kind of ended up
having to change. So some of the discarded stories are
(16:24):
really fun though. So Kenna Anderson, bless him, was just
working his tail off. He first put together a story
treatment that featured It was all centered around this sea
captain named Captain Bartholome you Gore, and it was a
walkthrough tour that was led by George Butler Beauregard. And
this story centered on the captain, who in some versions
and in some notes um has the name Gideon Gorlea
(16:48):
and then earned the nickname of Gore through his behavior
because in these he brought his bride Priscilla to the mansion.
But Priscilla was apparently a curious lass and in this
version him that Anderson cooked up. Her curiosity was her undoing.
She foolishly opened this chest that she found in the
attic and discovered that her beloved husband was in flat.
(17:09):
In fact, Black Bart the pirate. Uh. And after she
makes this discovery and has this revelation, she vanished. Uh.
So in some versions of the story, poor Priscilla is
bricked into the cellar by her husband, sort of cask
of a Monteato style if you've read that a Grand
Poe uh short story. And in other versions that Anderson
worked on, she was either locked into a c chest
(17:32):
or thrown down a well. Uh. And her haunting of
the captain in this story uh in this plot line
led him to hang himself in the house's rafters. And
so all of this is part of what makes the
Haunting of the Haunted House. The second version, which was
also put together by Ken Anderson, featured this storyline that
was intended to really draw guests in by marrying the
(17:53):
real world with the mythology. And in this version, the
tour guide would explain to guests that the Disney Company
had moved an entire plantation mansion, which was blood mere manner,
to Disneylands to create an authentic centerpiece for New Orleans Square,
but trickster spirits were forever wreaking havoc on the restoration
(18:14):
of the house. Also featured in this tale was a
deceased construction worker who haunted the site, which was abandoned
after his untimely death. That one didn't hit either. Back
to the drawing board, and Anderson did a third approach,
and this one was really a much lighter approach to
the whole thing. It actually featured Walt Disney himself acting
(18:34):
as a tour guide via prerecorded tape segments, and he
was leading guests to a ghost wedding, so it was
so much simpler storyline. But that way they could incorporate
lots of ghosts without having to work up lots of
backstory for each of them, because they were all just
attendants at this wedding. His fourth story idea took its
inspiration from the nine nine Disney animated feature The Adventures
(18:56):
of Ichabod and Mr Toad. The second part of the
film was an adaptation of the legend of Sleepy Hollow,
and Anderson thought the story needed to have the headless
horseman provide sort of fertile ground for this haunted mansion storyline,
So a great deal of this treatment involved using folly
effects to create the sound of the horseman's hoof beats
(19:17):
following guests along their tour I'm imagining it like Monty
Python would not be funny or would not be scary.
It would be very silly. Well that's scary, and silly
comes up yes later on. So the wedding concept was
also there, and this idea and the guests were famous
monsters like Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula. The bride Mademoiselle Vampire
(19:39):
would get a case of the jitters, not sure whether
she wanted to marry most of your boogeyman, and just
as the chaos was reaching a fever pitch, a tour
guide would escort the park guests outside to safety. And
this fourth version of the story was the one that
was approved to go forward, although if you are a
fan of the attraction, you will note that that is
not the story you see on the rind. No. Uh,
(20:02):
there's a part of me that wishes we could go
to an alternate history and see that version because it
sounds really fun. They're just picturing this panicky vampire bride.
Uh and allegedly, uh the escape was going to be
through one of the fireplaces, which could have been a
potentially really cool effect. Uh. Almost from the moment that
(20:22):
Walt decided to expand Disneyland and build the Haunted Mansion.
He had designers working on ideas for the detail elements
of the attraction, while Ken Anderson focused on the structural design. Yeah,
he had had lots of concept sketches being made throughout
and as all of these different storylines were being put together,
some of them were getting sketch treatments. But as they
(20:43):
were settling on this fourth storyline of the wedding UH
in nine, Walt put together what became a really famous
chwoan team that generated many of the effects and moments
that really make the Haunted Mansion a crowd favorite even today.
Yale Gracie was a background on artist and model builder,
and Rolely Crump, which is a nickname for Roland, had
(21:04):
been working at the studios as an in between her.
Crump had this fondness for creating kinetic sculpture, so odd
mobiles and other kind of pieces of moving art. I
love those, by the way, and the story goes that
Walt thought these two had just the right crossover of
interests to make an ideal pairing to create the illusions
that a Haunted House attraction would need. And uh this
(21:28):
pair of artists spent basically all of n hold up together.
They were in on one floor of a building just
reading ghost stories. They were testing out illusions that they
were coming up with together. And when Crump talks about it,
he routinely credits Gracie as being like the idea man,
and then he would start to embellish and expand on them,
(21:49):
and they would refine all of this together. So it
sounded like it was. It really was a very fruitful
and pretty enjoyable pairing. I think that's clear from the
story we're about to tell. The pair became really really
well known for their fantastical exploits and um for their prankishness. Yeah,
(22:09):
and Jason Cerell's book about the Haunted Mansion's history, Rolly
Crump tells the story of an incident that was created
by all of this experimenting combined with with pranking. Yale
had all his ghosts and magic strewn throughout the room.
Once we got a call from personnel asking us to
leave the lights on because the janitors didn't want to
come in if it was dark. Well, we did, but
(22:33):
we rigged the room. We put in an infrared meme
and when it was tripped, the room went to black
light and all the ghost effects came on. When we
came in the next morning, all the effects were still running,
and there was a broom in the center of the floor.
Personnel called and said, you'll have to clean your own
room because the janitors won't go in there anymore. Those
(22:54):
rotten boys. It is so like the pranks you would expect,
like a t and age kid. So one of the
interesting things, UH and historically significant things about the work
that Gracie and Crump were doing together is that even
though they were put together to create cutting edge effects,
most of the tricks that they were employing were really
(23:16):
really old school. They both had an interest in magic tricks,
and they used a lot of tricks that had been
part of magic shows and theatrical sleight of hand for decades,
including the illusion that is known as Pepper's Ghost, which
is from the mid eighteen hundreds, and that's a setup
where action that is taking place in an unseen area
(23:36):
UH that the audience can't see, is reflected off a
pane of glass that they can see, and it creates
this look of translucent, floating images that look like ghosts.
And they used that and that's still used in the
Hounty mansion today, like a lot of the ghosts that
you see are doing the Pepper's Ghost illusion. The year
that Roally Crump and Yale Gracie spent together in nineteen
(23:58):
fifty nine culminated in the demo show, where they displayed
a presentation of a version of the whole attraction. And
the demo was a huge hodgepodge of tricks and ideas,
and even though they were working with Anderson's fourth story
plan involving the Ghoulish Wedding, they had brought in some
elements from the abandoned plots as well, including the Sea Captain. Uh.
(24:20):
The Sea captain Is illusion is one that's talked about
a lot. This illusion that the pair created involved a
rain soaked ghost showing up there was water, there was
a flooding effect in the room, The Captain's doomed bride
would materialize, and the water would then recede and leave
only these unearthly blobs of moisture behind it. And it
(24:42):
is one of those super famous, often spoken of moments
that the people who witnessed it will still in interviews
kind of wax rhapsodic about it and how it was
one of the most amazing things they have ever seen
in their lives. Um, and with that, we're actually going
to cliffhang you a little bit. The haunting mention is rich,
so we are taking to episodes is rich and and
(25:04):
the moment of that we're pausing. There's kind of its
own cliffhanger. This whole thing got tabled for a little while. Yeah,
and we'll talk about how that all came to be,
uh in our next episode, which is a travel up. Hey.
Since uh, these episodes that we're sharing our past classics,
(25:24):
we have some updated information that will supersede the contact
stuff you've heard before. If you want to email us,
our email address is History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com, and you can find us across the spectrum
of social media as Missed in History. You can also
find us at missed in History dot com, and you
can visit our parent company, how stuff Works at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(25:52):
of other topics because it how staff works dot com.
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