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A stately Victorian manse

Originally planned to be a sort of decrepit, run-down vacated house on the outskirts of a New Orleans bayou which had been possessed by a family of ghosts, the Haunted Mansion eventually became a neat, trim Victorian manse intended to reflect a southern plantation-style homestead. Imagineer Ken Anderson actually discovered the architecture which he copied as the design for the house in a book by Francis Lichten in the Walt Disney Studios library, and that real house was located in Baltimore, Maryland. While Ken did his best to "haunt the place up" with squeaking bats in the belfry and long-buried human bones being exposed in the front yard, Walt Disney himself quickly extinguished that plan. Walt wanted the place to remain lovely - a sort of American version of the world-famous Trivoli Gardens which had capitvated him as he was developing Disneyland - and there was no room in the park for a moldering swamp or delapidated building. So the lovely Baltimore house was imitated quite convincingly in Disneyland's New Orleans Square.

Keeping with the New Orleans theme, the white mansion is captured forever in a turn-of-the-century moment, with fancy French Quarter-style wrought iron and fresh paint applied routinely. Though a fanciful color scheme was imagined during the construction process, the building was eventually painted in subdued tones - though even in its monochromatic color scheme, tricks of the trade were employed to make the shadows appear heavier, and the lighting more dramatic. In his book "Designing Disney," WED Imagineer John Hench makes the point: "We wanted to create an imposing Southern-style house that would look old, but not in ruins. So we painted it an off-white color with dark, cold blue-grey accents in shadowed areas such as the porch ceilings and wrought iron details. To accentuate the eerie, deserted feeling, I had the underside of exterior details painted in the same dark color, creating exaggerated, unnaturally deep cast shadows. Since we associate shadows with things hidden or half-hidden, the shadow treatment enhanced the structure's otherworldliness."

Gothic or go home

While Disneyland's Haunted Mansion most closely resembles Walt's personal vision, the other two Haunted Mansions (in Walt Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland) more closely resemble an ominous haunted castle, with large, imposing brick facades, heavy wrought iron, and landscaping that appears to have run amok. Where Disneyland's exterior theme relies on paint and cast iron, Walt Disney World's Mansion features heavy brick and patina. According to Imagineer Tony Baxter, the differences between the southern plantation look and the colonial fortress of Florida's facade are due, in part, to the existing architecture of the regions, and a desire to create something that doesn't seem too familiar to local guests (since Florida is in the south, and the look of that Victorian manor might be too commonplace a sight to the local population.)

The first line of thought regarding the architecture of the second Haunted Mansion - which was to be located in Liberty Square, a land in the Magic Kingdom which would bring New England to mind - was that it should be designed in a classical Federal style, reminiscent of some of the greater homes that could be found in New England in the nineteenth century, such as the Sullivan Dorr House in Rhode Island (which has been said to have inspired an early concept piece for the Haunted Mansion painted by Herb Ryman prior to 1970, pictured at left.) Herb's Federal style illustration didn't prove to be exactly what the team was searching for, however. It's likely that keeping in tune with Walt's original desire that the architecture of his haunted attractions be neat and trim, Herb created this concept with the understanding that the grounds would be properly maintained, leaving the "inside" to the spooks - but the attraction designers wanted the architecture to be more clearly related to the experience this time around.

Claude Coats and the team responsible for re-creating the Mansion in Walt Disney World went back to the studio library for research, poring over the company's resources - sucb as Samuel Sloan's definitive work, "The Model Architect". The search for an architectural style appropriate to Liberty Square, while different enough to indicate a place of dark fantasy, seemed to be answered by the gothic Perpendicular style of architecture. To quote Sloan:

The Perpendicular, or Florid style's principal characteristic is found in the window. The arch was much depressed, the mullions... were continued perpendicularly upwards and crossed by transoms. Indeed, throughout there was a tendency toward vertical lines... and a great increase of decoration. Every part of the structure both inside and out was loaded with rich carving, cut with great depth, minuteness and delicacy, but so abundant as to give the whole a meretricious effect - and hence cause the style to generally be considered a decadency.

The vertical linework in this type of architecture would lend itself to an imposing, tall facade. So sometime around 1970, Coats returned to Lichten's book (which had proved so useful to Ken Anderson back in 1957), and on page 59, he found what was undoubtedly a major inspiration for the updated look of the Haunted Mansion.

The same engraving, which can be seen below as it appears in Lichten, was published in 1847 in A. J. Downing's "Cottage Residences," which gives a little more insight into that particular engraving, which is described as a "pointed villa" designed by architect A. J. Davis for J. Rathbone, Esq. In his book, Downing described the structure as "undoubtedly one of the finest specimens of gothic architecture in this country." Rathbone nicknamed the estate "Kenwood," and it's likely that this architecture is one of the largest influences on the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion facade, despite the fact that the gothic mansion itself only stood from 1841 to 1867.

FoxxFur, writing in her blog "Passport to Dreams Old and New," returned to Lichten's book and discovered that the book probably played a significant role in Claude's research as he honed the final architectural design. "In short, here was a great find - an architectural style not too far outside Liberty Square's era which blended old world and new (to better mix Liberty Square and Fantasyland) and which would harmonize with the high Victorian interior already designed," FoxxFur wrote. To punctuate her point, FoxxFur quotes Francis Lichten from the copy accompanying the illustration: In truth the decaying structure conveys to the present-day observer the same sense of horror and mystery that the medieval ruin conveyed to the popular mind. Lacking the patina which the mellowing touch of time and nature give to the ruins of the middle ages, the abandoned Victorian Gothic domicile, its shoddy fabric disintegrating before one's eyes, has today become the artistic and literary symbol of "the haunted house".

International house of haunts

Though they are both based on the same blueprint, the Florida and Tokyo Haunted Mansions have a distinct personalities; the Walt Disney World version, located in the colonial-era section of the park called "Liberty Square," is surrounded by flora and commands the edge of the park upon which it sets, while the Tokyo Haunted Mansion, located in Fantasyland, feels slightly more gothic and imposing, perhaps due to large bronze griffins that are positioned to stare at each guest that enters the gateway that they appear to be guarding. The Tokyo Haunted Mansion also is located in a part of the country that receives snow on rare occasions, and can provide a novel chilly experience in more ways than one.

Weather, or not

The weather vanes that adorn the various Haunted Mansions also give clues to what lies ahead for visitors. While the Walt Disney World and Tokyo Mansions sport vanes in the shape of a bat, the vane atop Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is in the shape of a ship, which is one of the few remaining hints toward some of the early show concepts that related to a ghostly sea captain. To hear this story as it was told by the Imagineers of WED back in the '70s, click here.

This may be as good a time as any to debunk a related myth: It is regularly stated that the stone turrets placed atop the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion were designed to resemble chess pieces. There is no evidence that this was an intentional act - and the shapes are also quite common gothic architectural conceits, so the thought that the shapes are supposed to resemble some sort of supernatural game of chess is simply unfounded. Well - maybe unfounded is not the right word, as tour guides at Walt Disney World's "Keys to the Kingdom" behind-the-scenes tour used to actually make this claim regularly in the early aughts as part of their script. Steph, or "iluvstitch" on the WDWMagic forum, described the story she heard on the tour like this: "The Imagineers who worked on the ride always played chess. When they were making a model of the Haunted Mansion, one of them put some chess pieces on the top as a joke, but it looked good so they kept it that way [when they built the attraction]. The tour guide also said there's no knight on the roof because 'its always "night" inside the Mansion'." Pithy, clever - and false.

Build your own

There are many sculptural representations of the Haunted Mansion which have been sold over the years in various editions, many of which you can view on this web site, and most of which are either very expensive or very hard to find. However, one of the finest and most faithful sculptural versions of the Haunted Mansion can be yours for no cost at all - apart from the cost of a little dedication and hard work.

In 2004, theme park designer Ray Keim began a venture he calls "Haunted Dimensions," which is an online repository of incredibly detailed paper models that he has created and distributes for free. The models take a bit of time and dedication to complete, but once finished, they make wonderfully accurate replicas that will handily spookify any haunted bookshelf or tabletop. Ray has created both Disneyland and Walt Disney World paper models (as well as some other familiar haunts - including Disneyland Paris' Phantom Manor.) Visit HauntedDimensions.com to download your own copies and start building!

The unseen architecture

The actual Haunted Mansion ride building is, of course, separate from the realtively small facades (though midway through the Disneyland attraction's development, a walk-through floor plan which actually fit into the existing facade based on some of Ken Anderson's earliest layout ideas was considered, but then quickly discarded.) The example layout shown here is from the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, though it is similar in layout to the other two attractions as well. Note that the actual facade building visible from the park only contains the two load elevators (a.k.a. the "Stretching Rooms") and the surrounding equipment rooms. The rest of the attraction takes place in a large, well-hidden show warehouse painted dull green to blend with the vegetation concealing it. (Disney cleverly calls this color "No-see-um Green," and uses it often in the theme parks.) Many outside contractors were used to put the bones into the bodies of the attractions, so to speak - including R. M. Grissom Co., an electrical construction company based in Santa Ana which worked on both the Disneyland and Walt Disney World attractions, and R. L. Grosh and Sons Scenic Studio, a Hollywood-based company which was responsible for constructing most of the empty sets and scrims for Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. In the layout guide pictured here (which is copied from an early version of the Disneyland attraction's official "standard operating procedures"), the actual visible facade building is approximated in purple, and the Doom Buggy track is indicated in green. The numerals around the perimeter indicate exits from the building.

These aerial photos (Disneyland's at the left; Walt Disney World's at the right) demonstrate the true scale of the ride, in comparison to the relatively tiny facade buildings that give the Haunted Mansion its visible appearance.