October 21, 2013 • 27 mins
One of the most iconic Disney park attractions -- the Haunted Mansion -- had a development process that was anything but smooth. Budget and scheduling issues and creative differences dogged the project for almost two decades.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm Tracy Wilson, and today we are talking about
subject admittedly very near and dear to my heart and
(00:21):
one that I think it might startle people initially to
think about. It is a history I don'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 when people who are not
here in the room with us, which is everyone but
(00:43):
you and me and our producer Noel Uh, Holly has
on a Haunted Mansion T shirt. I do. I have
a my Hanta Mansion shirt, my Hantamasion 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.
(01:06):
Uh and it's uh it 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
(01:26):
a project that's taking forever, 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
(01:47):
I also love this story because of like the historic
visual effects techniques that were used and how many of
them still hold up and are and 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. Disneyland has only
(02:11):
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, partly because of
(02:33):
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, Walt Disney has become so legend legendary as
(02:55):
a visionary that a lot of the struggles that his
projects went through, and a lot of the struggles that
you 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 very
(03:16):
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 important to
(03:37):
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. It was not
always a juggernaut, no, not at all, and even the
project of the Hunted Mansion had many stops and starts, uh,
(04:00):
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. His first plan
was to make a park in Burbank, across the street
(04:22):
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 was founded
(04:43):
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
Walter 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 nine
to build Disneyland. UH. And that new company was actually
(05:06):
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 always
(05:27):
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 Walt hired the Stanford
Research Institute to survey Los Angeles and the surrounding area
(05:48):
for a hundred acre site that would be suitable for
what he and 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 an Anaheim and this location
met all of Walt's requirements. It had to be freeway accessible,
adjacent to or within Los Angeles and affordable. Yeah. And
(06:12):
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 theme park. And it actually led
(06:33):
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 four that
he would for host for them. This hour long weekly
series which was about Disneyland and also about sort of um,
you know, exploration of concepts in society and technology and storytelling. Uh.
(06:57):
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 now the same thing. They're all together. So
(07:18):
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, nineteen fifty five, Disneyland opened to the public.
It cost an estimated seventeen million dollars to build, which
(07:38):
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 dollars, So it was a lot of money. Uh.
And opening day any account you read of it, it
sounds insane. Uh. There was so much anticipation leading up
to the opening of the park because Disney at this
(07:59):
point had a six sucessful 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 concepts of you know,
storytelling and animation that they were even using counterfeit tickets
to get in. The park was overcrowded way past probably
(08:19):
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 Fahrenheits 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.
(08:40):
And there was fresh asphalts that had been poured as
late as the night before the park open, and it
hadn't all cured 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 even though uh. It was a
(09:02):
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 hand Mansion lives, is not there. That spot
(09:24):
on the map the map is blank. So even though
Walt had been interested in the Haunt House from the
absolute earliest meetings with Harper Goff, 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, what's the park did
(09:44):
get past those 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 seven, Walt put a studio animator named Ken Anderson
in charge of the project. It because Ken had worked
on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and Snow White Scary Adventures,
(10:05):
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, waltz Uh went public with the news of
the expansion. He talked about all of the things they
(10:26):
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 time,
(10:47):
and say, no, you know all the bombings and everything,
there are lots of ghosts sit down, have a place
to go. I'm building them a place to go. Just
kind of silly and odd, but also rearing. Yeah, I
don't know how I would be all about that if
I were living in Britain. I don't know how I
would feel about it if I were the interviewer even right, like, wait,
you're doing what but you know, let's talk about Hogwarts again.
(11:11):
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 from the outset that they wanted to
(11:32):
have this kind of old South Field 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, the Haunted Mansion that's in Disneyland.
(11:55):
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 John 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, there's a really strong resemblance to the Evergreen
(12:17):
House in all artists concept sketches for 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 in any kind of style
(12:40):
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 was pretty insist stant that
I have a perfectly groomed exterior, and there was disagreement
(13:05):
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 major inspirations for
the Haunted Mansion was the Winchester Mystery House. Uh. Anderson
(13:26):
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 look like,
with these ideas of rooms that don't go places and
architecture that doesn't always make sense together because as we know,
(13:50):
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. If anybody
has not been there, I highly recommend the Winchester House.
(14:10):
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. Shall we
take a second, Yeah, let's let's talk about Hawes for
a moment while we think about confusing ghosts and talking
about our response or something that's not confusing at all.
(14:32):
So let's get back to the Haunted Mansion. True to
this 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 misses on this whole story to wind up with
(14:53):
what guests are familiar with today, And even the ones
that we're about to talk about are not really what
guests are familiar with today. It took a lot what
what our 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 experience it.
It's super fun. Well it's but uh, but we will
(15:14):
talk in a bit about how things kind of ended
up having to change. So some of the discarded stories
are 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.
(15:36):
And this story centered on the captain who in some
versions and in some notes um has the name Gideon
Gorlea 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 that Anderson cooked up, her curiosity was
(15:59):
her undoing. She foolishly opened this chest that she found
in the attic and discovered that her beloved husband was
in flat 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 Monteado style if you've read that a Groland
(16:20):
Poe uh short story. And in other versions that Anderson
worked on, she was either locked into a c chest
or thrown down a well. Uh. And her haunting of
the captain in this story uh in this plotline 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
(16:43):
put together by Ken Anderson, featured this storyline that was
intended to really draw guests in by marrying the 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 led mere manner,
to Disneylands to create an authentic centerpiece for New Orleans Square,
(17:06):
but trickster spirits were forever wreaking havoc on the restoration
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
(17:26):
the whole thing. It actually featured Walt Disney himself acting
as a tour guide via prerecorded tape segments, and he
was leading guests to a ghost wedding, so it was
a 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
(17:48):
inspiration from the ninety nine Disney animated feature The Adventures
of Ichabod and Mr Toad. The second part of the
film was an adaptation of the legend of Sleepy Hollow
and and and 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
(18:09):
using folly effects to create the sound of the horseman's
hoof beats following guests along their tour. I'm imagining it,
like Monty Python, would not be funny or 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
(18:30):
Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula. The bride Mademoiselle Vampire, 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
(18:52):
the attraction, you will note that that is not the
story you see on the ride. No, uh, 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
(19:14):
effects uh. Almost from the moment that 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,
(19:35):
some of them were getting sketch treatments. But as they
were settling on this fourth storyline of the wedding uh
in nine, Walt put together what became a really famous
two man 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 artist and model builder,
(19:57):
and Roley Crump, which is a nickname for Roland, had
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
(20:19):
that a haunted house attraction would need. And Uh, this
pair of artists spent basically all of nine hold up together.
Uh 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
(20:41):
idea man, and then he would start to embellish and
expand on them, 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
(21:02):
for their prankishness. Yeah, 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
strown throughout the room. Once we got a call from
personnel asking us to leave the lights on because the
(21:24):
janitors didn't want to come in if it was dark. Well,
we did, but 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
(21:45):
to clean your own room because the janitors won't go
in there anymore. Those rotten boys. It is so like
the pranks you would expect like a teenage 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
(22:07):
cutting edge effects, most of the tricks that they were
employing were really 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
(22:30):
in an unseen area 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 Haunted Mansion today, like a lot of
the ghosts that you see are doing the Pepper's ghost illusion.
(22:51):
The year that Roally Crump and Yale Gracy spent together
in ninety nine culminated in this demo show where they
displayed a presentation of a version of the whole action.
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.
(23:16):
The Sea captain Is illusion is one that's talked about
a lot. UH. 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
(23:37):
it 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 Haunted Mansion
is rich, so we are taking two episodes rich and
(23:59):
and 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 follow up. But in the meantime, you have some
listener my own I do, indeed. Uh, this is a
short one, but it was so charming that I have
(24:21):
to read it. Uh. It comes from our listener Carissa,
which I hope I'm pronouncing correctly, and she's it's about
the Hope Diamond. She says, good afternoon, ladies. I just
finished listening to the Hope Diamond episodes. So many fun
facts in there. I saw the Hope Diamond when I
was fourteen in two thousand five, and as you mentioned
that many people are, I was a bit underwhelmed. In fact,
(24:42):
I remember the surrounding cases of huge, raw uncut stones
more if I have heard lots of other people say
as well. But it's the surrounding portions of that gallery
that they're really more blown away by than the Hope Diamond. However,
she says, one of my favorite memories was overhearing two
little girls behind me, I guess around age eight, admiring
the Hope Diamond and one saying to the other, that
(25:03):
must have cost a hundred, no a thousand dollars. Thanks
for the continuous flow of learning material. I think that's
so charming. Yeah, I love that kids. You know, I
have no sense of money or value. They would think
that the Haunted Mansion costs two thousand dollars to build.
I don't even know. I think it probably cost that
(25:23):
much just to run them a day to day basis
minimum power. Uh. But yeah, We're going to come back
to the the Hanted Mansion um in our next episode,
and we will finish the story which continues to take
some wild turns. This is mostly the fun lead up parts,
but if you would like to write to us, you
can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(25:45):
If you want to guess the value of anything that
we talk about just for fun, you can also connect
with us on Twitter at missed in History and on
Facebook dot com slash history class stuff. We're also at
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are
hanging away on Pinterest. Rest assured there's going to be
lost upon a mansion pins. Uh. If you would like
to learn more about what we talked about today, and
(26:07):
particularly right here at the end of the episode, you
can go to our website and type in the words
Pepper's Ghost and you get an article called how do
they make those projections of dead celebrities and politicians? Because
they also use Pepper's Ghost, it's just a little more
technologically tweaked. Yeah, which is pretty cool. I love that
an old technology or an old theater trick is still
(26:28):
used today and it blows people away and makes them
incorrectly identify things as holograms. Yeah, they're not holograms, they're
not their their reflections, but they're really cool looking reflections. Uh.
So If you would like to do that or learn
about almost anything else you can think of, you can
absolutely do that at our website, which is how Stuff
Works dot com for more on this and thousands of
(26:53):
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Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm Tracy Wilson, and today we are talking about
subject admittedly very near and dear to my heart and
(00:21):
one that I think it might startle people initially to
think about. It is a history I don'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 when people who are not
here in the room with us, which is everyone but
(00:43):
you and me and our producer Noel Uh, Holly has
on a Haunted Mansion T shirt. I do. I have
a my Hanta Mansion shirt, my Hantamasion 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.
(01:06):
Uh and it's uh it 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
(01:26):
a project that's taking forever, 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
(01:47):
I also love this story because of like the historic
visual effects techniques that were used and how many of
them still hold up and are and 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. Disneyland has only
(02:11):
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, partly because of
(02:33):
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, Walt Disney has become so legend legendary as
(02:55):
a visionary that a lot of the struggles that his
projects went through, and a lot of the struggles that
you 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 very
(03:16):
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 important to
(03:37):
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. It was not
always a juggernaut, no, not at all, and even the
project of the Hunted Mansion had many stops and starts, uh,
(04:00):
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. His first plan
was to make a park in Burbank, across the street
(04:22):
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 was founded
(04:43):
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
Walter 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 nine
to build Disneyland. UH. And that new company was actually
(05:06):
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 always
(05:27):
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 Walt hired the Stanford
Research Institute to survey Los Angeles and the surrounding area
(05:48):
for a hundred acre site that would be suitable for
what he and 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 an Anaheim and this location
met all of Walt's requirements. It had to be freeway accessible,
adjacent to or within Los Angeles and affordable. Yeah. And
(06:12):
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 theme park. And it actually led
(06:33):
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 four that
he would for host for them. This hour long weekly
series which was about Disneyland and also about sort of um,
you know, exploration of concepts in society and technology and storytelling. Uh.
(06:57):
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 now the same thing. They're all together. So
(07:18):
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, nineteen fifty five, Disneyland opened to the public.
It cost an estimated seventeen million dollars to build, which
(07:38):
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 dollars, So it was a lot of money. Uh.
And opening day any account you read of it, it
sounds insane. Uh. There was so much anticipation leading up
to the opening of the park because Disney at this
(07:59):
point had a six sucessful 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 concepts of you know,
storytelling and animation that they were even using counterfeit tickets
to get in. The park was overcrowded way past probably
(08:19):
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 Fahrenheits 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.
(08:40):
And there was fresh asphalts that had been poured as
late as the night before the park open, and it
hadn't all cured 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 even though uh. It was a
(09:02):
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 hand Mansion lives, is not there. That spot
(09:24):
on the map the map is blank. So even though
Walt had been interested in the Haunt House from the
absolute earliest meetings with Harper Goff, 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, what's the park did
(09:44):
get past those 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 seven, Walt put a studio animator named Ken Anderson
in charge of the project. It because Ken had worked
on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and Snow White Scary Adventures,
(10:05):
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, waltz Uh went public with the news of
the expansion. He talked about all of the things they
(10:26):
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 time,
(10:47):
and say, no, you know all the bombings and everything,
there are lots of ghosts sit down, have a place
to go. I'm building them a place to go. Just
kind of silly and odd, but also rearing. Yeah, I
don't know how I would be all about that if
I were living in Britain. I don't know how I
would feel about it if I were the interviewer even right, like, wait,
you're doing what but you know, let's talk about Hogwarts again.
(11:11):
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 from the outset that they wanted to
(11:32):
have this kind of old South Field 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, the Haunted Mansion that's in Disneyland.
(11:55):
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 John 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, there's a really strong resemblance to the Evergreen
(12:17):
House in all artists concept sketches for 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 in any kind of style
(12:40):
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 was pretty insist stant that
I have a perfectly groomed exterior, and there was disagreement
(13:05):
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 major inspirations for
the Haunted Mansion was the Winchester Mystery House. Uh. Anderson
(13:26):
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 look like,
with these ideas of rooms that don't go places and
architecture that doesn't always make sense together because as we know,
(13:50):
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. If anybody
has not been there, I highly recommend the Winchester House.
(14:10):
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. Shall we
take a second, Yeah, let's let's talk about Hawes for
a moment while we think about confusing ghosts and talking
about our response or something that's not confusing at all.
(14:32):
So let's get back to the Haunted Mansion. True to
this 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 misses on this whole story to wind up with
(14:53):
what guests are familiar with today, And even the ones
that we're about to talk about are not really what
guests are familiar with today. It took a lot what
what our 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 experience it.
It's super fun. Well it's but uh, but we will
(15:14):
talk in a bit about how things kind of ended
up having to change. So some of the discarded stories
are 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.
(15:36):
And this story centered on the captain who in some
versions and in some notes um has the name Gideon
Gorlea 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 that Anderson cooked up, her curiosity was
(15:59):
her undoing. She foolishly opened this chest that she found
in the attic and discovered that her beloved husband was
in flat 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 Monteado style if you've read that a Groland
(16:20):
Poe uh short story. And in other versions that Anderson
worked on, she was either locked into a c chest
or thrown down a well. Uh. And her haunting of
the captain in this story uh in this plotline 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
(16:43):
put together by Ken Anderson, featured this storyline that was
intended to really draw guests in by marrying the 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 led mere manner,
to Disneylands to create an authentic centerpiece for New Orleans Square,
(17:06):
but trickster spirits were forever wreaking havoc on the restoration
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
(17:26):
the whole thing. It actually featured Walt Disney himself acting
as a tour guide via prerecorded tape segments, and he
was leading guests to a ghost wedding, so it was
a 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
(17:48):
inspiration from the ninety nine Disney animated feature The Adventures
of Ichabod and Mr Toad. The second part of the
film was an adaptation of the legend of Sleepy Hollow
and and and 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
(18:09):
using folly effects to create the sound of the horseman's
hoof beats following guests along their tour. I'm imagining it,
like Monty Python, would not be funny or 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
(18:30):
Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula. The bride Mademoiselle Vampire, 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
(18:52):
the attraction, you will note that that is not the
story you see on the ride. No, uh, 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
(19:14):
effects uh. Almost from the moment that 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,
(19:35):
some of them were getting sketch treatments. But as they
were settling on this fourth storyline of the wedding uh
in nine, Walt put together what became a really famous
two man 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 artist and model builder,
(19:57):
and Roley Crump, which is a nickname for Roland, had
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
(20:19):
that a haunted house attraction would need. And Uh, this
pair of artists spent basically all of nine hold up together.
Uh 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
(20:41):
idea man, and then he would start to embellish and
expand on them, 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
(21:02):
for their prankishness. Yeah, 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
strown throughout the room. Once we got a call from
personnel asking us to leave the lights on because the
(21:24):
janitors didn't want to come in if it was dark. Well,
we did, but 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
(21:45):
to clean your own room because the janitors won't go
in there anymore. Those rotten boys. It is so like
the pranks you would expect like a teenage 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
(22:07):
cutting edge effects, most of the tricks that they were
employing were really 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
(22:30):
in an unseen area 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 Haunted Mansion today, like a lot of
the ghosts that you see are doing the Pepper's ghost illusion.
(22:51):
The year that Roally Crump and Yale Gracy spent together
in ninety nine culminated in this demo show where they
displayed a presentation of a version of the whole action.
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.
(23:16):
The Sea captain Is illusion is one that's talked about
a lot. UH. 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
(23:37):
it 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 Haunted Mansion
is rich, so we are taking two episodes rich and
(23:59):
and 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 follow up. But in the meantime, you have some
listener my own I do, indeed. Uh, this is a
short one, but it was so charming that I have
(24:21):
to read it. Uh. It comes from our listener Carissa,
which I hope I'm pronouncing correctly, and she's it's about
the Hope Diamond. She says, good afternoon, ladies. I just
finished listening to the Hope Diamond episodes. So many fun
facts in there. I saw the Hope Diamond when I
was fourteen in two thousand five, and as you mentioned
that many people are, I was a bit underwhelmed. In fact,
(24:42):
I remember the surrounding cases of huge, raw uncut stones
more if I have heard lots of other people say
as well. But it's the surrounding portions of that gallery
that they're really more blown away by than the Hope Diamond. However,
she says, one of my favorite memories was overhearing two
little girls behind me, I guess around age eight, admiring
the Hope Diamond and one saying to the other, that
(25:03):
must have cost a hundred, no a thousand dollars. Thanks
for the continuous flow of learning material. I think that's
so charming. Yeah, I love that kids. You know, I
have no sense of money or value. They would think
that the Haunted Mansion costs two thousand dollars to build.
I don't even know. I think it probably cost that
(25:23):
much just to run them a day to day basis
minimum power. Uh. But yeah, We're going to come back
to the the Hanted Mansion um in our next episode,
and we will finish the story which continues to take
some wild turns. This is mostly the fun lead up parts,
but if you would like to write to us, you
can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(25:45):
If you want to guess the value of anything that
we talk about just for fun, you can also connect
with us on Twitter at missed in History and on
Facebook dot com slash history class stuff. We're also at
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are
hanging away on Pinterest. Rest assured there's going to be
lost upon a mansion pins. Uh. If you would like
to learn more about what we talked about today, and
(26:07):
particularly right here at the end of the episode, you
can go to our website and type in the words
Pepper's Ghost and you get an article called how do
they make those projections of dead celebrities and politicians? Because
they also use Pepper's Ghost, it's just a little more
technologically tweaked. Yeah, which is pretty cool. I love that
an old technology or an old theater trick is still
(26:28):
used today and it blows people away and makes them
incorrectly identify things as holograms. Yeah, they're not holograms, they're
not their their reflections, but they're really cool looking reflections. Uh.
So If you would like to do that or learn
about almost anything else you can think of, you can
absolutely do that at our website, which is how Stuff
Works dot com for more on this and thousands of
(26:53):
other topics. Because it has to works dot com m
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Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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