April 24, 2020 • 25 mins
This hist fave is from 2013. 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.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, listeners. This episode is part of our new playlist
to help everybody get through these times we're living in.
It's our host faves playlist. Yeah, these are just some
of our personal favorites, ones that we had a particular
affinity for, and because these are stressful and trying times,
we tried to stick to the ones that weren't quite
(00:22):
as dour. So hopefully they'll give you a little lift,
Stay safe. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson, and today we are talking
(00:45):
about subject admittedly very near and dear to my heart
and one that I think it might startle people initially
to think about. It is a history item, but it
really has quite a fascinating history all of its own,
and that is Disneyland's Haunted Man. Where those of you
at home, which is everyone, maybe not they might be
(01:05):
on the go, maybe so when people who are not
here in the room with us, which is everyone but
you and me and our producer knoll Uh Holly has
on a Haunted Mansion T shirt. I do. I have
a my Honteamasion shirt, have my Hontemasion ring, I really
love the Honey Mansion. My house has a lot of
Honey Mansion. Theming um and it is one of those
(01:28):
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 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.
(01:49):
And it gives a perspective of like, no, everybody has
these issues, you know, like if you have 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
(02:09):
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 of like the historic visual effects techniques that
were used and how many of them still hold up
and are in use today. So uh. For younger listeners,
(02:31):
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 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
(02:52):
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 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
(03:12):
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 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
(03:35):
bumpy rides, and regardless of whether you view him in
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 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
(03:57):
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 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
(04:18):
the entirety of their existence. It was not always juggernaut, No,
not at all. And even the project of the Hunted
Mansion had many 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.
(04:39):
In nine 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 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
(04:59):
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 nineteen fifty two, Walt Disney
Incorporated 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
(05:20):
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 two to build Disneyland. UH. And that new
company was 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,
(05:42):
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 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
(06:04):
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 surrounding area 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.
(06:26):
It was a hundred and sixty acre Orange Grove and 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 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
(06:47):
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 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
(07:09):
ABC in nine 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. And in
exchange for him hosting this, ABC was funding the construction
(07:29):
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 it's a partnership to start in
the fifties, but went on for a long time and
now the same thing. They're all together. So once the
(07:54):
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 may not
(08:15):
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
(08:35):
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. The park was overcrowded, way past probably
(08:55):
what was a smart capacity. The temperature was a problem.
They were in the middle of a heatway ave 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 and there was fresh asphalt that had been
(09:19):
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. But even though, uh, it was
a bumpy opening day and was super overcrowded, and a
(09:41):
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
on the map is blank. So even though Walt had
(10:03):
been interested in a haunted 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, once the park did get past those
initial bumps, it really became apparent that it was going
(10:23):
to have to expand quickly to meet demand, UH, and
so Walt went right back to that haunted house idea.
In n 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,
which are both kind of so called dark rides because
they have a lot of low light trickery and effects,
(10:46):
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
were going to add to this new New Orleans Square area,
and he even told a BBC interviewer in that he
(11:08):
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,
and say, no, you know all the bombings and everything,
there are lots of ghosts sit down the place to go.
I'm building them a place to go. Just kind of
(11:29):
silly and odd, but as Yeah, I don't know how
I would feel about that if I were living in Britain,
how I would feel about it if I were the
interviewer ether right, like, wait, you're doing what 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
(11:52):
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 have this kind of old
South Field to the the area that would become New
(12:12):
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. Other ones have different
architectural styles. Uh, it was actually a house that is
(12:35):
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 ninety 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 House in all
artists concept sketches from the house up to the house
(12:59):
was dilapid. It hadn't 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 settled within the
otherwise christine surroundings of Disneyland. So there's a now famous
(13:22):
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 insistent that I have a perfectly groomed exterior,
and there was disagreement about it. But rather than dig
(13:42):
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 Street House. Uh.
Anderson had actually toured the Winchester House in San Jose
(14:04):
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
(14:25):
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.
If anybody has not been there, I highly recommend the
(14:45):
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, Shall we
take a second, Yeah, let's let's talk about Hawes from
while we think about confusing ghosts and talk about our
response or something that's not confusing at all. True to
(15:17):
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
what guests are familiar with today, And even the ones
that we're about to talk about are not really what
(15:38):
guests are familiar with today. It took a lot What
are 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 experience.
It is 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
(15:59):
are really fun though. So ken 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 Gorge Butler Beauregard.
And this story centered on the captain, who in some
versions and in some notes um has the name Gideon
(16:23):
Goerlea 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, um, her curiosity
was her undoing. She foolishly opened this chest that she
found in the attic and discovered that her beloved husband
(16:45):
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 Montiato style if you've read
that a Grolan po uh short story. And in other
versions that Anderson worked on, she was either locked into
(17:07):
a c chest 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
(17:29):
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 blood
mere manner, to Disneylands to create an authentic centerpiece for
New Orleans Square, but trickster spirits were forever wreaking havoc
(17:49):
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 did
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 as a tour guide via prerecorded tape segments,
(18:13):
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
to gets inspiration from the ninety nine Disney animated feature
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad. The second part
(18:35):
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 following guests along their tour. I'm imagining
(18:56):
it like Monty Python would not be funny or it
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 in this idea, and
the guests were famous monsters like Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula.
The bride, Mademoiselle Vampire, would get a case of the jitters,
(19:17):
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 ride. No. Uh,
(19:38):
there's a par to 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. Ah. Almost from the moment that
(19:58):
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
(20:19):
were settling on this fourth storyline of the Winding 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,
and Rolely Crump, which is a nickname for Roland, had
(20:40):
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 Haunted House attraction would need. And uh, this pair
(21:04):
of artists spent basically all of nine 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,
(21:25):
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,
(21:45):
and Jason Cerell's book about the Haunted Mansion's history, Rolely
Crump tells this 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
(22:09):
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.
(22:30):
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 cutting edge effects.
Most of the tricks that they were employing were really
(22:52):
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
(23:12):
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
Honey 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 Gracy spent together in nineteen
(23:34):
fifty nine culminated in this demo show where they displayed
a presentation of a version of the whole attraction. And
this 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.
(23:56):
The Sea Captain Is illusion is one that's talked about
at 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 it
(24:17):
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 until the Haunted Mansion
is rich, So we are taking too episodes is rich,
(24:39):
and 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. Thank you so much for joining
(25:00):
us today for this classic. If you have heard any
kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are
l during the course of the episode. That might be obsolete.
It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our
email address again. You can now reach us at History
podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're all
over social media at missed in History and you can
subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the
(25:23):
I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, listeners. This episode is part of our new playlist
to help everybody get through these times we're living in.
It's our host faves playlist. Yeah, these are just some
of our personal favorites, ones that we had a particular
affinity for, and because these are stressful and trying times,
we tried to stick to the ones that weren't quite
(00:22):
as dour. So hopefully they'll give you a little lift,
Stay safe. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson, and today we are talking
(00:45):
about subject admittedly very near and dear to my heart
and one that I think it might startle people initially
to think about. It is a history item, but it
really has quite a fascinating history all of its own,
and that is Disneyland's Haunted Man. Where those of you
at home, which is everyone, maybe not they might be
(01:05):
on the go, maybe so when people who are not
here in the room with us, which is everyone but
you and me and our producer knoll Uh Holly has
on a Haunted Mansion T shirt. I do. I have
a my Honteamasion shirt, have my Hontemasion ring, I really
love the Honey Mansion. My house has a lot of
Honey Mansion. Theming um and it is one of those
(01:28):
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 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.
(01:49):
And it gives a perspective of like, no, everybody has
these issues, you know, like if you have 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
(02:09):
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 of like the historic visual effects techniques that
were used and how many of them still hold up
and are in use today. So uh. For younger listeners,
(02:31):
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 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
(02:52):
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 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
(03:12):
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 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
(03:35):
bumpy rides, and regardless of whether you view him in
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 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
(03:57):
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 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
(04:18):
the entirety of their existence. It was not always juggernaut, No,
not at all. And even the project of the Hunted
Mansion had many 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.
(04:39):
In nine 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 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
(04:59):
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 nineteen fifty two, Walt Disney
Incorporated 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
(05:20):
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 two to build Disneyland. UH. And that new
company was 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,
(05:42):
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 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
(06:04):
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 surrounding area 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.
(06:26):
It was a hundred and sixty acre Orange Grove and 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 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
(06:47):
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 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
(07:09):
ABC in nine 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. And in
exchange for him hosting this, ABC was funding the construction
(07:29):
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 it's a partnership to start in
the fifties, but went on for a long time and
now the same thing. They're all together. So once the
(07:54):
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 may not
(08:15):
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
(08:35):
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. The park was overcrowded, way past probably
(08:55):
what was a smart capacity. The temperature was a problem.
They were in the middle of a heatway ave 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 and there was fresh asphalt that had been
(09:19):
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. But even though, uh, it was
a bumpy opening day and was super overcrowded, and a
(09:41):
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
on the map is blank. So even though Walt had
(10:03):
been interested in a haunted 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, once the park did get past those
initial bumps, it really became apparent that it was going
(10:23):
to have to expand quickly to meet demand, UH, and
so Walt went right back to that haunted house idea.
In n 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,
which are both kind of so called dark rides because
they have a lot of low light trickery and effects,
(10:46):
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
were going to add to this new New Orleans Square area,
and he even told a BBC interviewer in that he
(11:08):
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,
and say, no, you know all the bombings and everything,
there are lots of ghosts sit down the place to go.
I'm building them a place to go. Just kind of
(11:29):
silly and odd, but as Yeah, I don't know how
I would feel about that if I were living in Britain,
how I would feel about it if I were the
interviewer ether right, like, wait, you're doing what 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
(11:52):
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 have this kind of old
South Field to the the area that would become New
(12:12):
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. Other ones have different
architectural styles. Uh, it was actually a house that is
(12:35):
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 ninety 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 House in all
artists concept sketches from the house up to the house
(12:59):
was dilapid. It hadn't 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 settled within the
otherwise christine surroundings of Disneyland. So there's a now famous
(13:22):
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 insistent that I have a perfectly groomed exterior,
and there was disagreement about it. But rather than dig
(13:42):
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 Street House. Uh.
Anderson had actually toured the Winchester House in San Jose
(14:04):
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
(14:25):
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.
If anybody has not been there, I highly recommend the
(14:45):
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, Shall we
take a second, Yeah, let's let's talk about Hawes from
while we think about confusing ghosts and talk about our
response or something that's not confusing at all. True to
(15:17):
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
what guests are familiar with today, And even the ones
that we're about to talk about are not really what
(15:38):
guests are familiar with today. It took a lot What
are 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 experience.
It is 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
(15:59):
are really fun though. So ken 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 Gorge Butler Beauregard.
And this story centered on the captain, who in some
versions and in some notes um has the name Gideon
(16:23):
Goerlea 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, um, her curiosity
was her undoing. She foolishly opened this chest that she
found in the attic and discovered that her beloved husband
(16:45):
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 Montiato style if you've read
that a Grolan po uh short story. And in other
versions that Anderson worked on, she was either locked into
(17:07):
a c chest 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
(17:29):
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 blood
mere manner, to Disneylands to create an authentic centerpiece for
New Orleans Square, but trickster spirits were forever wreaking havoc
(17:49):
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 did
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 as a tour guide via prerecorded tape segments,
(18:13):
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
to gets inspiration from the ninety nine Disney animated feature
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad. The second part
(18:35):
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 following guests along their tour. I'm imagining
(18:56):
it like Monty Python would not be funny or it
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 in this idea, and
the guests were famous monsters like Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula.
The bride, Mademoiselle Vampire, would get a case of the jitters,
(19:17):
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 ride. No. Uh,
(19:38):
there's a par to 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. Ah. Almost from the moment that
(19:58):
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
(20:19):
were settling on this fourth storyline of the Winding 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,
and Rolely Crump, which is a nickname for Roland, had
(20:40):
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 Haunted House attraction would need. And uh, this pair
(21:04):
of artists spent basically all of nine 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,
(21:25):
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,
(21:45):
and Jason Cerell's book about the Haunted Mansion's history, Rolely
Crump tells this 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
(22:09):
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.
(22:30):
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 cutting edge effects.
Most of the tricks that they were employing were really
(22:52):
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
(23:12):
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
Honey 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 Gracy spent together in nineteen
(23:34):
fifty nine culminated in this demo show where they displayed
a presentation of a version of the whole attraction. And
this 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.
(23:56):
The Sea Captain Is illusion is one that's talked about
at 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 it
(24:17):
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 until the Haunted Mansion
is rich, So we are taking too episodes is rich,
(24:39):
and 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. Thank you so much for joining
(25:00):
us today for this classic. If you have heard any
kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are
l during the course of the episode. That might be obsolete.
It might be doubly obsolete because we have changed our
email address again. You can now reach us at History
podcast at i heart radio dot com, and we're all
over social media at missed in History and you can
subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the
(25:23):
I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.