The Haunted Mansion

Ride summary

Guests first pass through the front gate of the old Southern mansion and stroll through its gardens, where they spot a pet cemetery and a carriage pulled by a horse that cannot be seen. The instrumental version of the ride's theme, "Grim Grinning Ghosts," plays in the background. Once inside the entrance hall, a deep, unseen voice introduces himself as the Ghost Host, voiced by Disney Legend Paul Frees. A wall slides open, and the Ghost Host guides guests into an octagonal art gallery.

Inside are four paintings, each showing a person from the chest upward. The wall closes behind them, and the room begins to stretch upward. As it rises, the portrait frames grow longer, revealing the darkly funny fates of the people in the paintings. This Stretching Room is actually an elevator that moves guests beneath the railroad berm to the main attraction.

The Ghost Host dares guests to "find a way out" and laughs, then adds, "Of course, there's always my way." The room goes pitch black. The ceiling disappears, and a flash of lightning reveals the Ghost Host's skeleton hanging by a noose from the rafters. The room darkens again, a scream rings out, and the sound of breaking bones follows.

The Ghost Host apologizes for scaring the guests "prematurely" as dim lights return and another wall opens. He then leads them into a portrait corridor that connects the Stretching Room to the loading area. This hallway is actually a tunnel under the Disneyland Railroad, linking the front building to the ride building. The portraits on the right briefly transform into spooky versions of themselves whenever lightning flashes through the windows on the left.

The Ghost Host mentions that "we have 999 happy haunts here" with "room for 1000." At the end of the corridor, two busts seem to watch guests as they pass, thanks to the Hollow-Face illusion. In the loading area, black vehicles called Doom Buggies travel down one staircase and up another to the second floor, while fog fills the back of the room. Most guests board their Doom Buggies from a moving carpet that matches the vehicles' speed, but both the carpet and the Doom Buggies stop when loading or unloading guests in wheelchairs.

A brightly lit exit corridor is available here as the official wheelchair exit, leading to an elevator that returns guests to the mansion's entrance.

History

The Haunted Mansion’s origins go back further than Disneyland itself, to the very first Imagineers Walt Disney hired. In 1951, the earliest known drawing of the planned park showed a main street, green fields, a western village, and a carnival. Disney Legend Harper Goff then sketched a crooked street that led away from main street, passing a peaceful church and graveyard, with a run-down manor looming on a hill above everything. Walt assigned Imagineer Ken Anderson to build a story around Goff’s idea.

Plans soon called for a New Orleans-themed area in the small space between Frontierland and Adventureland. Within weeks, a souvenir map included New Orleans Square, promising a thieves’ market, a pirate wax museum, and a haunted house walk-through. Anderson studied New Orleans and old plantations, eventually basing his design on the Shipley-Lydecker House in Baltimore, Maryland. He produced a drawing of an antebellum manor—overgrown with weeds, surrounded by dead trees and bats, with boarded doors and windows, and a screeching cat as a weathervane.

Walt rejected the idea of a rundown building in his park. He visited the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, and was fascinated by its stairs that led nowhere, doors opening onto walls, and strange holes and elevators. Anderson then imagined several possible stories for the mansion: a ghostly sea captain who killed his nosy bride and hanged himself, a family cursed by misfortune, and a ghostly wedding party featuring Disney villains and spooks.

In 1961, handbills handed out at Disneyland’s main entrance announced a 1963 opening for the Haunted Mansion. Construction started a year later, and the exterior was finished in 1963. A 1965 episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color previewed the attraction, but it did not open until 1969. The six-year delay was largely due to Disney’s work on the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair and a redesign of the attraction after Walt Disney’s death in 1966.

Other versions

At Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland, the Haunted Mansion undergoes a seasonal makeover called Haunted Mansion Holiday, running from Halloween through Christmas since 2001. This transformation draws inspiration from Tim Burton’s 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas. Each year, the ride closes in mid-August for a few weeks while crews swap out many props and Audio-Animatronics for characters and themes from the movie. It reopens in late August as the holiday version, then closes again in early January to restore the original attraction, which reopens later that month. The Magic Kingdom in Florida does not offer a holiday edition; its regular Haunted Mansion operates straight through the holiday season.

Disneyland Park Paris has Phantom Manor, located in Frontierland. This is a reimagined take on the Haunted Mansion, featuring a Western Victorian house built in the Second Empire architectural style, modeled after the Fourth Ward School House in Virginia City, Nevada. The attraction uses a Western-themed storyline to match its Thunder Mesa and Frontierland setting. Instead of the English narration by Paul Frees heard at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, Phantom Manor features Vincent Price throughout.

Hong Kong Disneyland’s Mystic Manor opened in spring 2013 in Mystic Point. Unlike the Haunted Mansion or Phantom Manor, it avoids references to departed spirits or the afterlife, a choice made to align with traditional Chinese cultural beliefs. The ride is built around the Society of Explorers and Adventurers mythos first introduced at Tokyo DisneySea. It tells the story of Lord Henry Mystic and his monkey Albert, who finds an enchanted music box that brings inanimate objects to life. When Albert opens the box, all the house’s artifacts come alive. The exterior is a large Victorian mansion in an elaborate Queen Anne style, and the experience uses a trackless ride system with a musical score by Danny Elfman.

In popular culture

Back in the 1970s, Lakeside put out a 3-D board game called "Walt Disney World's Haunted Mansion Game." Its standout feature was a set of dancing figures connected like gears; when you turned them, the game board would shift into one of four different layouts. Fast forward to January 2014, and Marvel Comics launched "Seekers of the Weird," a five-issue miniseries under the Disney Kingdoms imprint. That story was built around the Museum of the Weird, which came from Rolly Crump's unused early concepts for the ride.

Two years later, in 2016, another miniseries hit the shelves, this time directly based on the Haunted Mansion itself. Also in July 2014, Disney Television Animation announced they were working on an animated special about the attraction. It was originally going to be run by "Phineas and Ferb" writers Joshua Prett and Scott D. Peterson, with Gris Grimly as art director and executive producer. Later, the project was reworked as a possible mini-series for Disney XD, with Shannon Tindle as executive producer, but a shake-up at Disney Branded Television in 2017 put the whole thing on hold.

Over on ABC's "Once Upon a Time," Madame Leota showed up in the second half of the seventh season, played by Suzy Joachim. Between 2016 and 2019, Disney Press released "Tales from the Haunted Mansion," a four-volume horror anthology for kids. These books were framed as selections from the Mansion's library, narrated by its librarian, Amicus Arcane, and included everything from classic horror homages to origin stories for the Mansion's ghostly crew.

In the 2018 movie "The Predator," there's a scene where characters step into a big elevator room, and a security guard recites part of the Haunted Mansion script: "is this haunted room actually stretching?" That same year, in October 2018, reports surfaced that Magic Kingdom had become a popular spot for families to scatter the ashes of their loved ones, with the Haunted Mansion being the top choice. Disney made it clear this was unacceptable and illegal, warning that anyone caught doing it would be kicked off the property.

In the video game "Disney Magic Kingdoms," players can unlock the Bride, the Hatbox Ghost, the three Hitchhiking Ghosts, Madame Leota, and Pickwick as limited-time characters during Halloween events.