Imaginary Worlds - The Haunted Mansion

Episode Date: October 19, 2017

The Haunted Mansion is one of the most beloved rides at the Disney theme parks, yet its development was anything but smooth. Walt Disney himself could never decide if the ride should be funny or scary, so he assigned "Imagineers" to develop both aspects. But the team fell into competing groups that argued for over a decade. Author Jeff Baham of the site Doom Buggies and David Mumpower of the site Theme Park Tourist explain how this tortured creative process lead to a masterpiece in theme park design. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The Moth is a great podcast to hear true stories told by people from all walks of life in front of live audiences. And The Moth is bringing you a very special episode about a galaxy far, far away. In honor of May the 4th, or Star Wars Day, they're going to feature hilarious and heartwarming stories about the way that Star Wars has changed people's worlds. Listen now by searching The Moth on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, or wherever you get your

podcasts. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Well, I feel like Santa Claus with a $17 million bundle of gift packages all wrapped in whimsy and sent your way over television with the help of 29 cameras. This is a live broadcast of the opening of Disneyland from July 1955. of the opening of Disneyland from July 1955. There is so much pomp and circumstance to this 90-minute program, it feels more like an inauguration. Even the governor of California, Goodwin Knight, addressed the crowd.

And as we dedicate this flag now, we do it with the knowledge that we are the fortunate ones to be Americans. But there's a lot of celebrating, too. There's a singing and dancing Davy Crockett. There are giant float parades with Minnie and Mickey Mouse. And they're going into the Mickey Mouse Theater. But the star of the show was Walt Disney, who would put everything he had, including selling his own house, to pay for this nostalgic slice of Americana

full of ice cream parlors and trolley cars. To all who come to this happy place, welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past. And here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. I never get tired of hearing Disney's voice. I mean, I know all the bad stories about him. The strike at his studio, which he handled very badly and ruined people's careers.

His cooperation with the FBI during the Red Scare. But then I hear that voice, and it's so calming. I mean, it's so reassuring. I just fall under his spell. A lot of people felt that way about Uncle Walt back then. That's why so many talented artists dedicated their entire careers to following his vision of a perfect world.

So a lot of the artists at the studio were surprised to learn that Walt felt something was missing from Disneyland. A haunted house. And the artists were like, a haunted house? In the middle of Davy Crockett and old-timey steamboats? What would that be like? How would that even work? Jeff Bam wrote a book about the making of the haunted mansion and he says as far as Walt was concerned, every kid fantasized about haunted houses as much as they imagined being a pirate in the Caribbean. When he was a young teenager in Kansas City

I know there was kind of a house there that was rumored to be haunted that he probably was aware of. So I think his experience just was always, you know, small town America, you know, it has the drugstore as the convenience store, you know, it has the lingerie store and it has the haunted house on the side of the corner, you know what I mean, up the hill. Now, throughout the 50s, Walt had been assembling a team of designers for a new company called Walt Disney Enterprises or WED. Today it's called Walt Disney Imagineering. Now remember, there was no such thing as theme park designer in the 1950s. He is inventing that career as we know it today. You know, the animation department, in fact,

started calling Walt's other company Cannibal Island because he would cannibalize his own animation department to build up his theme park. So two years after Disneyland opened, the first Imagineer that Walt assigned to the Haunted Mansion was Ken Anderson. Now, of course, Ken Anderson had come from animation, where storytelling was king. So the first thing he did was try to figure out the backstory for the Haunted Mansion. king. So the first thing he did was try to figure out the backstory for the Haunted Mansion. The original story for the Haunted Mansion was that a pirate named Captain Gore retired, and he went off to live a happy, idyllic existence. He found a young bride named Priscilla, and he was not that specific about his backstory, just that he was independently wealthy and he

could provide for her. That is David Mumpower. He's written about the origins of the Haunted Mansion for his site, Theme Park Tourist. So Priscilla, the bride, is told never go into the attic. Of course, it's a Pandora's box situation where she eventually goes into the attic. She finds vestiges of his old pirate life, puts two and two together. He grows enraged. He kills her. She in turn haunts him until he kills himself. And so Captain Gore is the narrator, the ghost host of the ride. So that's a lot of things at once here, but what you can really get from it is that is super dark for Disney. That's when Walt realized he had a problem. If the ride was too scary, kids wouldn't go on it. In fact, he already had that problem with his Snow White ride.

But if the ride was too silly, teenagers and adults would think it was just a lame haunted house. But David Mumpower says that debate, funny versus scary, is actually an old one because humor is a really important valve to release the tension in horror. Think about your favorite horror movies, your favorite horror television shows, your favorite horror books. Do you like the ones that are scary? Do you like the ones that are funny? Or do you like the ones that are a merger of the two?

And this was the debate that drove Disney for the body of a decade internally. Imagineers would take sides over and over again. Should this be scary? Should this be fun? And Walt Disney kind of switched sides a few times. And when the boss is ambivalent, that spills down to the bottom too. So the next Imagineers that Walt assigned to the project were two young guys, Yale Gracie and Roolly Crump. They were given no strict deadlines. We had a whole room to ourselves for over a year to do nothing but develop ghost illusions and special effects. That is Rolly Crump from a 2012 interview that the Walt Disney Museum posted to YouTube. Now, that is a pretty sweet gig,

being paid by Walt Disney for an entire year to come up with haunted house effects. They were having a blast. But the janitorial staff was getting really creeped out. Well, we got a call from personnel one day and they said, the janitors request that you leave the lights on when you leave at night. So Eel and I said, oh, OK. So what we did was we set up the ghost. We set up the monster. We set up two or three other gangs that we had.

And then we put the infrared beam right in the middle of the room. And then we left the lights on very low. But we had connected all the lights to the UV lighting so the stuff would go off. Well, sure enough, we came in the next day. And the ghost had been going all night long. And right in the middle of the stuff would go off. Well, sure enough, we came in the next day and the ghosts had been going all night long and right in the middle of the floor was a broom. And we got a call from Presolo saying, they're never coming back. Jeff Bam says that one of the tricks Roldy Crump and Yale Gracie were developing was

an old trick that dates back to Victorian theater, Pepper's Ghost. You know, you're looking through a piece of glass that has a reflection of a ghost in it, so all they have to do is turn off the light and the ghost disappears. Yeah, we're also collecting real ghosts to bring here. You believe in ghosts, don't you, Julie? No. You don't? Not really.

Well, let me take you over here and convince you that they do exist. That is Walt from a 1965 TV special. He's showing a woman named Julie, who he crowned Miss Ten-Year-Aversary of Disneyland, how Pepper's ghost will work in the Haunted Mansion. She's looking into a little black box. You peek right in this little thing here, and then you tell me what you see. Now peek in there. What do you see? An organ.

What's going on? It's playing. Yes. A ghost. A ghost is playing, sure. What kind of a ghost? A skeleton ghost. Yeah, well, we have all kinds of ghosts, you know.

Okay. Now you believe, I hope. I have to. Behind the scenes, things were not going as smoothly. The Imagineers had developed a lot of cool tricks, but they still needed an organizing principle. So they pitched a new story to Walt about a vicious family called the Bloods that were haunting this house of disrepair

that Walt had supposedly transported to Disneyland. Walt Disney basically didn't hear anything after disrepair. He kind of looks at him, he goes, you want to bring a blight into my beautiful park that I sold my dream home to build? That's never going to happen. And then he does this quote that you'll hear from time to time. We'll take care of the outside and let the ghosts take care of the inside.

And basically that was him saying, oh no, no, we're not going to put an ugly building in Disneyland. So finally, Walt pulls out the big guns. He assigns Mark Davis and Claude Coates to the Haunted Mansion. They were both legends that have worked on Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and many other classic animated films. But remember this debate about whether The Haunted Mansion should be scary or funny? Well, they split exactly on those lines. Mark Davis wanted it to be funny.

Claude Coates wanted it to be scary. But Jeff Bam thinks the difference between them really had more to do with their backgrounds from where they came from in animation. I think it was more characters. Is it going to be more based on characters or more based on the setting? Because they just that's what they both handled. You know, Claude Coates took his experience with layouts and background and took that into attraction.

So he would create the atmospheres and the settings for all these attractions to exist in. And Mark Davis, when he came from animation to Disneyland, Walt Disney tasked him to be more of a humorist, you know, bring some humor to our characters. And so he would create characters for the parks. Tell her about this thing here, will you, Mark? Well, this is our elongating, stretching room. And in this room, we also have some stretching portraits. That's Mark Davis and Walt Disney

from that TV special. These are some of the... You pull them down. You should see what happens when the room gets longer, you get this full-size portrait. Oh, dear. This is my favorite, yeah.

Oh. Now, at this point, it seemed like the Haunted Mansion was pretty far along, certainly to the point where Walt was excited to show all this stuff on national television. But then two events changed everything. First, Walt Disney got a contract designing rides for the World's Fair in New York. Now, if Walt Disney Imagineering was nicknamed Cannibal Island, the World's Fair was cannibalizing Cannibal Island. But Jeff Bam says it wasn't a complete break from working on Disneyland. Some of the technology they developed for the World's Fair, like the Omnimover, would

eventually end up in the Haunted Mansion. In fact, the idea of creating a chain, which is what the Haunted Mansion uses, a big chain of carriages so that none of them are separate. They all are connected and move together. Bob Gurr is the designer of that. And he got that idea by watching Ford's Magic Skyway at the World's Fair. And now, here to tell you about your journey is Walt Disney. Thank you, Mr. Ford, and hello, friends. I'll be riding along to point out some of the things

you're going to see from your front row seat in Mr. Ford's automobiles. Then something cataclysmic happened. Walt Disney died. His death came out of nowhere. Cancer diagnosis was sudden. He didn't tell his employees that he was sick. They just showed up to work in December of nowhere. Cancer diagnosis was sudden. He didn't tell his employees that he was sick. They just showed up to work in December of 1966

and heard the news. Most of the people I've spoken to that were working when Walt passed away said they literally had physical reactions. You know, most of them, some of them just drove around. You know, what do we, how do we even keep this company? What do we do? Where do we go? What do we work? Yeah. Walt Disney definitely was a guiding force. And Walt didn't have a number two guy. There was no heir apparent. That was done on purpose. Walt put together people that he thought might fight

with each other, but they didn't have to because he would take their ideas and say, well, I prefer this, and then they would go that way. And of all the projects in development, the Haunted Mansion was the most in need of Walt's guidance. How they found

their way out of the dark is just after the break. By 1967, there had already been advertising for the Haunted Mansion because it wasn't supposed to take this long. So rumors were spreading. The Haunted Mansion was starting to get a reputation as a true haunted house. You know, people, someone died in the construction and so they stopped working on it because it's haunted. Or someone went through it when they first built the house and they had a heart attack because it was so scary. So they didn't know what to do.

So they stopped making it. You know, different stories like that kind of started to pop up and they got bigger and bigger as the house sat there for years and years. Wait, was the house actually sitting there fully built, the outside? Yeah, from 1963. A good five, six years it was just there. Oh, you're kidding. I didn't realize that. I thought it was just like an empty lot or something. No, it looked like the Haunted Mansion, just with gates that were locked and assigned. So that's kind of why this mythology built up around it, because people were, you know, what's the deal here? It's obviously done. So why don't you just let us in? Right. Because remember, Walt said, I'll take care of the outside. You take care of the ghosts. Well, he took care of the outside. Meanwhile, on the inside, Claude Coates, the

background designer who thought the Haunted Mansion should be scary, and Mark Davis, the consummate character animator who thought the Haunted Mansion should be scary, and Mark Davis, the consummate character animator, who thought the Haunted Mansion should be funny, were no closer to coming to an agreement. I've had conversations with Alice Davis, Mark's widow, and just based on the idea of their personalities, I would think there were probably some disagreements that got heated from time to time. But how could you expect that not to be the case for everything they did at WED Enterprises? In modern terms, the best way I can describe that

is that's like if you're an apple and Wozniak and Jobs are fighting over something and you have to pick a side. It's that type of schism. David Mumpower thinks the unsung heroes in this battle were Roly Crump and Yale Gracie. Now, remember, they were the young guys that Walt Disney had assigned a decade earlier to come up with all these optical illusions like Pepper's Ghost. And actually, a lot of that stuff was supposed to be in this Museum of the Weird, which was going to be part of the Haunted Mansion, but that never came to fruition. Anyway, they're still working on the project. They're just much lower in the pecking order.

But David Mumpower says that lack of status actually worked in their favor. They're kind of in the situation where mom and dad are fighting and they're left to clean up. And so what they wound up doing was they didn't pick. I mean, just like many children in split families, they're like, I love both my parents. We can make this work. Wait, wait, wait. And that actually explains the genius of the Haunted Mansion is their refusal to pick. That's why it is what it is. They thought, let's do both. That is a marriage of two seemingly diametrically opposed ideas into one ride. And that's why it works so well. It's not too intense for children and it's not too intense for children,

and it's not too silly for adults. I should actually mention there's another Imagineer who really helped with this combined approach, Xavier Atencio. He wrote the script for the ride narration that kind of tied everyone's ideas together. And he wrote the lyrics to the song Grim Grinning Ghosts, which was composed by Buddy Baker, as you hear all throughout the ride. Now, interestingly, after all those years, they never settled on a backstory for the ride. It's a mishmash of all of their ideas, and the fans are still debating to this day who the characters are supposed to be. I actually think that works in favor of the ride, because all that mystery makes it feel really spooky. Now, Roley Crump may have been one of the people advocating

for the combined approach, but he still had his own opinions. Like, the ride opened in 1969, but when he was interviewed four decades later, he was still wishing it could have gone in a different direction. Of course, Walt wanted it as a walkthrough. After Walt passed away, operations panicked and made it a ride. But I personally feel that it should have been a walkthrough. But David Mumpower thinks the doom buggies, in the end, did justice to Raleigh Crump's other big contribution. Those optical illusions that he worked so hard to develop, they could never have worked on every single visitor with a walkthrough. Because they could control line of vision for people going through the ride.

They could set up certain special effects knowing people would never look in a place that would destroy the illusion. It was important for a second reason as well. Something we really haven't spoken about yet is the ghost host. That's audio narration. It is is recorded it cannot be adjusted so if you're in the wrong place the narration doesn't match the ride's going to fall apart completely when hinges creak in doorless chambers and strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls whenever candle lights flicker But I wanted to know when David goes to the ride, where does he see the influence of Mark Davis and Claude Coates? Is this haunted room actually stretching? Well, he says the first place we can see Mark Davis' work is the stretching room. And if you're one of the few people who's never been in the

Haunted Mansion, basically you walk into a little foyer and you see these paintings of these Victorian people. And then the room just gets lower and lower. And the paintings get longer and longer. And you discover they're actually portraits of how these people died. And every one of their deaths is basically a gag. Which is so Mark Davis. But the thing that a lot of people don't know about the stretching room is that it actually solves a practical problem. Because Walt Disney couldn't buy as much land as he wanted to in Anaheim, so a lot of the rides are underground. Now, how you get people

underground is easy. If you're on Pirates of the Caribbean, you suddenly just drop down into a waterfall. But how do you get a crowd of people under a mansion really quickly? And that's the genius of the stretching room is it solves a problem by creating something nobody had ever done before, where you're standing there and you're looking at something and it's just a sleight of hand distraction while an elevator takes you down a floor. Now, interestingly, Walt Disney World in Orlando is much bigger. They didn't need to bring you underground, but they simulated the stretching room anyway. I mean, it's not actually anything

where you have an elevator ride up or down. The room just literally lifts. But people want the stretching room experience, so even though it serves no functional utility, it still exists. And now a carriage approaches to take you into the boundless realm of the supernatural. After the stretching room, we get to the doom buggies.

And that's when we go into the haunted house itself. And that's where Jeff Bam says he sees Claude Coates' influence everywhere. Because it's all about the spooky atmosphere. From the ballroom, to the the attic to the rattling doors. A candelabra floating into you know, and it seems like the hallway goes on forever. That to me looks like a classic instance of Claude Coates.

Now my favorite part of the ride happens during this section in the middle. You see a human face in a crystal ball. That, of course, is Madame Leota. Serpents and spiders, tail of a rat, call in the spirits wherever they're at.

Now here's the thing that I think is so interesting and kind of spooky about Madame Leota. The woman you're looking at, Leota Toombs, has become a ghost. I mean, she passed away in 1991, but thanks to technology, she's still there. Awaken the spirits with your tambourine. I mean, it's not her voice. Her voice was dubbed over by an actress,

Eleanor Audley, who played Melissa Fenton in Sleeping Beauty. But the face is Leota Toombs. And who is Leota Toombs? One of the first women to work at Walt Disney Imagineering. And this is the part about Madame Leota that I think is really fascinating. Now, every year, they redo the Haunted Mansion ride to make it a holiday-themed after Nightmare Before Christmas. And they needed to reanimate Madame Leota. Of course, Leota Toombs had passed away. So they filmed Leota Toombs' daughter, Kim Irvine, acting the part. Kim Irvine is not hard to find. She works at Walt Disney Imagineering, just like her mother did.

They found out that the original Madame Leota film of Leota Tombs matches the bone structure of the new mold well enough that they don't have to ever change it out. So now Madame Leota that you see off the Holiday Times is actually a combination of both Kim Irvine and Leota Toomes together. Because she's probably about the same age that her mother was when her mother did that. They're pretty close, yeah. Now the final section of the ride, we leave

the haunted house itself and go into a graveyard. And the tone shifts again, from spooky to silly. Once you get out into the graveyard and everyone's having a great time, and you see jokes, you know, everyone's having a great time and you see jokes, you know, someone's drinking out of someone else's shoe or someone is, you know, there's a mummy and a guy standing next to him that can't hear anything he's saying. And,

you know, it doesn't matter if he hears what he's saying because the mummy's just mumbling anyways. You know, those kind of gags and jokes, those are the things that are very obvious. Mark Davis. But this is why I love the Haunted Mansion. Because it is not just the sum of its parts, it's more than the sum of its parts. So often we attribute great works of art to the vision of a single genius. But a lot of successful art that stands the test of time

is created by groups of people who fought with each other. Even when the Haunted mansion opened to the public, the designers didn't think it was perfect. They just thought it was the best of all possible solutions. And they kept tinkering with it for years afterward. But there's one thing that they all felt satisfied with. Walt wanted a haunted house at Disneyland. And they finally gave him one. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to David Mumpower

of the site Theme Park Tourist and Jeff Baim, whose site is doombuggies.com. He also wrote a book called The Unauthorized Story of the Haunted Mansion. Imaginary Worlds is part of the PandaPlay Network. You can like the show on Facebook.

I tweet at emalinski. My site is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Be sure to bring your death certificate if you decide to join us. If you decide to join us, make final arrangements now. We've been dying to have you.