By: Kristen Anderson
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Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride has its own fandom, which exists as a sub-genre of the massive Disney lovers community. Homage tattoos flood the #hauntedmansion hashtag on Instagram, people take yearly (or more) pilgrimages to visit the so-called “Happy Haunts,” there are independent businesses selling merch, and Haunted Mansion-themed ambient sound YouTube videos. Not bad for a property that’s been around for over 50 years.
It’s especially not bad for a property that doesn’t have a clear storyline besides, “Look at this—it’s spooky!” The Haunted Mansions in Disney theme parks in other parts of the world have clear narrative lines, but the iconic American edition is a grab bag of oddities. A 2003 movie attempted to fill in the blanks, but it...did not do well, let’s say. (It has a 13% score on the aggregated film rating site, Rotten Tomatoes).
The United States’ Haunted Mansions (there’s one in California’s Disneyland and one in Florida’s Disney World) are a mishmash of strange scenes that don’t take you through a continuous story as you pass through. What’s happening is open to speculation, which is fitting given the mysterious nature of the afterlife as a whole. But it completely rules. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about the fact that it’s pretty much made up of disparate scenes for a long time. It’s so visually and thematically appealing that the concept of plot hadn’t occurred to me.
You’re in the dark for the majority of the ride, seated while the disembodied voice of your “Ghost Host” narrates your journey throughout an opulent mansion with ghosts going about their business in its different rooms. The color palette is black with glowing blue, green, and purple dimly illuminating the various scenes, and it’s eerie and fun. The famous Disney Imagineers use shadows, holograms, and general genius trickery to make for an immersive experience that has captured the imaginations of millions long after they leave the mansion.
But still, many people wonder: what was that all about? It’s led to some fun theories and rumors online. While you wait to board the ride, you stand in a foyer known as The Stretching Room, which features a cool optical illusion that makes it look like the room grows around you. Some people speculate the plot implies that you’ve killed yourself in order to leave the room and explore the rest of the mansion, making YOU one of the ghosts haunting the estate. The theory is born of the fact that the Ghost Host’s voice suggests that you enter the mansion by going “his way” and the room is briefly illuminated to show a hanging body high above you. (It’s objectively nuts that this exists in the middle of the utopia that is Disney, by the way.)
There’s also the theory regarding the point at which the car you’re sitting in for your ride through the mansion, known as a Doom Buggy, suddenly turns to have you face backwards for a leg of the journey. This happens for the move from the estate to the outdoor graveyard, and fans speculate it’s meant to imply that you have jumped backward through a window in the mansion to the cemetery below. There’s nothing to support this other than creative thinking, but it’s fun, and I love it.
Of course, one room in the mansion seems to be a nod to a larger story: the attic, with its famous bride. The first-ever bride had a less clear storyline—just a visibly glowing, beating heart—but the current iteration featuring Constance Hatchaway tells more of a tale. She’s a woman in a wedding dress, holding a hatchet, reciting her vows, flanked by photos of her with five different grooms. The implication is that she’s a black widow—that she killed her husbands to get progressively richer, as indicated by the finer and finer jewelry she wears in the photos. There are hat boxes strewn about the attic with hats next to them, not inside them, implying that she’s keeping something else contained in them. Could it be the heads of her husbands? Those hat boxes are a nod to a connection to another iconic Haunted Mansion character, one even more mysterious.
The Hatbox Ghost is one of The Haunted Mansion’s most recognizable icons, but he wasn’t actually a part of the ride for a long, long time. The story goes that he was featured on the ride for about a week during its opening in 1969, but the developers weren’t happy with the technology for the illusion of his head disappearing from his shoulders and reappearing in the hatbox he carried. He was removed from the ride. However, he had already been used in promotional materials for the opening, so he became something of an icon, with people wondering where he was. There was speculation that he was never actually a part of the ride at all.
A vinyl album called The Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion released during the ride’s opening said that the Hatbox Ghost’s head appeared in the box he carried with every beat of the original bride’s visible heart, hinting at the illusion that didn’t quite work out. But in 2015, the Imagineers revived the Hatbox Ghost, giving him a triumphant return to the ride that he remains part of now. Could his appearance fit neatly into Constance’s storyline, making him her sixth victim—somehow carrying his own head in a hatbox rather than residing in the attic?
Of course, some of the Haunted Mansions worldwide leave less to the imagination when it comes to their storylines. An international outlier is the Tokyo Haunted Mansion, which park goers applaud as being most similar to the original 1969 opening version. It’s like a time capsule, beating heart bride, Hatbox Ghost and all—with a similarly hodgepodge storyline.
Hong Kong’s version of the Haunted Mansion is called Mystic Manor, and it has an entirely different vibe. You’ll find no happy haunts here; in fact, there are no references to ghosts or spirits at all. Rather than haunted, this house is enchanted. In traditional Chinese culture, many families worship their ancestors and pray to them for blessings, rather than regard ghosts as scary, so the ride was tweaked significantly to reflect the culture.
The storyline is that the house owner, Lord Henry Mystic, built the mansion in uncharted wilderness that's known for supernatural happenings... a particular interest of his. He calls this land Mystic Point. The mansion is where he displays unusual findings from his travels around the world, as well as those found by other members of his private club, the Society of Explorers and Adventurers. One of these items is a magical music box that, once open, brings everything in the house to life...and his mischievous pet monkey, Albert, does just that at the beginning of your journey through the manor.
Some of the things you encounter (set to a Danny Elfman score) are swinging suits of armor, paintings come to life, an animated crossbow that points right at you, and locusts swarming all over mummy sarcophagi. At one point, the wall breaks away and it looks like Albert is flying outside—but don’t worry, he gets back in and closes the music box just in time for things to go back to normal at the end of your visit.
But it’s Disneyland Paris’s Phantom Manor that might best scratch the itch for an authentic, original Haunted Mansion-esque experience with the benefit of some plot embellishment.
Located in Frontierland, a Wild West-themed park, Phantom Manor is made to look like a Western Victorian house with a Western plot to fit the theme. Vincent Price narrates the journey through the manor, which kind of looks like the Bates home from Psycho. It's a little scarier than its spooky-silly counterparts.
The story is that the mansion was home to the wealthy Ravenswood family: father Henry Ravenswood, his wife Martha, and their daughter Melanie. Henry got rich by striking gold in Big Thunder Mountain (a ride located in another part of the park), on land rumored to be home to the Thunder Bird, a powerful land spirit that manifests through earthquakes. Ravenswood didn't believe in the Thunder Bird legend, and he had his miners dig deeper and deeper into the land. He built his family’s mansion in Thunder Mesa with the money he made from the deal.
As Melanie got older, she drew suitors who wanted to take her away from Thunder Mesa. To keep her from leaving the mansion, Henry killed the first four men who came calling. But more followed. Eventually, Melanie decided to marry a man named Jake and leave, and though Henry planned to kill him, he never had the chance. Henry and Martha were killed in an earthquake, perhaps the Thunderbird’s work in revenge for ravaging Thunder Mountain.
Though the murderous Henry Ravenswood was dead, Jake was still killed. A mysterious phantom lured him to the attic of his bride’s home and hung him from the rafters. Melanie, downstairs and unaware, was left waiting for her groom to take her away to start a new life together. So all this time, Melanie has stayed in the house, all by herself in her wedding dress. She wanders around, still holding her bouquet and still hoping her groom will show up. The phantom who killed him torments her, laughing at her despair and inviting in his demonic friends to warp the house as it falls into disrepair.
The phantom’s identity wasn’t formally revealed until 2019, 27 years after the ride’s inception, when the long-speculated theory was finally confirmed: the evil spirit that killed Jake and remains in the house to mock Melanie is her father, the evil Henry Ravenswood.
While the international versions and their unique storylines rule, there just seems to be a spot in most Disneyheads’ hearts for the original, clear plot line or no. The same way that near-bloodless “cozy mysteries” are a popular form of murder-themed books and TV shows, The Haunted Mansion is like cozy horror. It’s comfortable, nostalgic, and fun.
Legend has it that Walt Disney used the word “plus” as a verb, telling Imagineers to “plus it” as a shorthand for taking something to the next level. Whether it’s the moving dioramas of the US versions or the fleshed-out tales internationally, fans around the world have definitely “plussed” their love of The Haunted Mansion.