SYMHC Classics: Building Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, Pt. 1

Published Oct 7, 2017, 5:21 PM

This classic episode dives into one of the most iconic Disney park attractions -- the Haunted Mansion. Its development process that was anything but smooth. Budget and scheduling issues and creative differences dogged the project for two decades.

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

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