See Ya Real Soon: The Haunted Mansion

The holidays come earlier every year, don't they? By the time this posts, Disneyland's Halloween Time will have begun, meaning the Haunted Mansion will be occupied by Burtonian forces. We won't be able to enjoy its normal mode until sometime after the New Year.

Even apart from the seasonal wonkiness, it's a real shame that the Haunted Mansion is functionally unavailable for such a large slice of the year, because it's...how to put this?

Really effin' awesome.

 So. Effin'. Awesome.

But I probably don't need to tell you that, if you're the kind of person who reads Disney theme park blogs to begin with. The Haunted Mansion is quite simply the most beloved attraction in the history of Disney parks. Other rides may garner longer queues, claim grander reputations, or boast more fashionable characters, but the Haunted Mansion has the most devoted fans. A subset of Disney park aficionados are interested first and foremost in the Mansion, giving it a status entirely apart from the institution that spawned it. No other feature of the parks has such an extensive line of dedicated merchandise. No other inspires as many blogs. No other has fanfiction written about its mythos.

In a park full of rides, shows, and themed environments that work amazingly well together, the Haunted Mansion is one—maybe the only one—that can stand on its own.*

This, however, is not sufficient to account for its popularity. Why is the Haunted Mansion the ride with the following? Why not Space Mountain, usually considered the thrillingest of the thrill rides? Why not Pirates of the Caribbean, which is technically a superior work of theme park art? Why not any of a number of newer and/or faster rides?

Probably because everyone loves a ghost story.

Unlike most of the newer attractions, the Haunted Mansion doesn't really tell a story...at least not one about its (former?) inhabitants. Fans have gone to some lengths to try and extract a definitive backstory from “clues” scattered around the attraction's exterior and interior, but all they really have to work with is bits and pieces of baggage from the extraordinary number of revisions the Mansion went through in its journey from Blue Sky to opening. None of the stuff about the bloodthirsty pirate captain or the jealous spurned medium is, as they say, “canon.” There is no official explanation as to how the house even became haunted in the first place.

No, the Haunted Mansion doesn't tell us its backstory...but boy howdy, does it ever suggest such a story. No, not just a story. More than one. More than two. More than ten.

How many altogether?

Let's call it...999.

The mere existence of a ghost automatically hints at an interesting story. According to the most widely accepted lore on the subject, ghosts don't just happen randomly, but signify that the person so transformed lived an extraordinary life, died an extraordinary death, or both. At the very least, becoming a ghost means that a person died with unfinished business...and it's always interesting or emotionally affecting unfinished business, not humdrum stuff like returning a library book.** Either way, if you have a ghost, the question inheres in the situation: Why do you have a ghost? (And also, often: How can you stop having a ghost? In that case, the first answer usually suggests the second.)

A surprising amount of the aforementioned fanfiction isn't really about the Haunted Mansion per se, but is rather a tale of someone's exceptional life and/or death, ultimately resulting in their shade taking up residence there. (Fin.) I don't think it's mere coincidence that so many fans go in the same direction with their ideas, nor do I think they're just all copying each other. I think the Mansion inspires such stories by its very nature. We're told outright that nearly four digits' worth of spooks call it home, but on the ride itself we only ever see a fraction of that total, so what about the rest? Fertile ground indeed for speculation and creativity!

Maybe someone should point out to Bob Chapek and his posse that the most successful Disney theme park attraction of all time is not one based on a pre-existing movie or other IP, but the one that inspires mythmaking on the part of the guests.

Which brings me to my next point, which is that the Haunted Mansion doesn't just suggest hundreds of individual personal stories, but a lot of nebulous lore. It feels like a place with a lot more going on than we can see...which is of course true of any effects-heavy attraction, but the Haunted Mansion might be the one case where a peek behind the scenes has the potential to enhance the magic rather than spoiling it.

Long-Forgotten Haunted Mansion is a blog*** dedicated to chasing down all the inspiring influences, discarded ideas, concept art, rough drafts, and other past phases of the Mansion's development. The blogster, HBG2, is a real treasure of the Disney theme park fandom for his diligence in unearthing (heh) and analyzing all this stuff. He observes that the conceptual divide between the secret history of the Haunted Mansion as a theme park attraction (a real place) and the secret history of the Haunted Mansion as a haunted mansion (a fictional setting) is a fuzzy one indeed. It may not be a literal house, but it is a literal building, and it really does have doors that lead to surprising places, sealed-off passageways, and other architectural oddities similar to those often found in haunted house mysteries. The tricks of the Imagineer's art and the turbulent process of the attraction's development have resulted in a place with real, not just pretend, twists and turns and secrets and relics of the forgotten past.

Perhaps some of the ghosts are real too...?

Speaking of the hypothetical reality of ghosts, that's another thing HBG2 points out: the Haunted Mansion asks much less of your suspension of disbelief than most other Disney attractions. Other rides may ask you to temporarily believe in pixies or the Force or that you have been suddenly transported through space and time. All the Haunted Mansion expects you to believe, in order to make the premise work, is that ghosts exist...and maybe you already do. Lots of people believe in ghosts.

If you're one of them, surely you've wondered from time to time whether any genuine spirits have taken up residence there. It advertises itself as a “retirement home” for ghosts; what if some of the real thing (assuming any exist) have taken it at its word? And from time to time, someone will post a “true ghost encounter” story on a Disneyland message board, the veracity often supported by a statement such as “I've been on that ride thousands of times and have every inch of it memorized and that has never happened before!”

We mustn't get too excited, of course. Any number of mundane explanations, from a software glitch to a Cast Member taking an ill-advised shortcut, could account for such an “encounter.” But you never know!

That's what a lot of the Haunted Mansion's appeal boils down to, isn't it? You never know. Real ghost or Cast Member prank? Scrapped effect or promotional-only photo? Did that lady really scatter her son's ashes in the load area, or is that an urban legend? Snopes and other fact-checking resources can only go so far in quelling the rumors, which pop up again, mushroom-like, after a suitable resting period, perhaps having mutated in the meantime. The Haunted Mansion is far too hospitable a soil for such things.

I could keep rambling on in this vein indefinitely, but we all have other things to be getting on with, so I'll close with my own addition to the lore. This really happened, and it happened to me, pretty much exactly as I present it here:

Some years ago, I was at Disneyland with a large group of friends, so I was in an especially waggish mood. We rode the Haunted Mansion in the morning, and I had Phineas (the carpetbagger with the big top hat) as my Hitchhiking Ghost. So I pretended to steal his hat. After we got off the ride, I asked all my friends to admire my new ghost hat. Much later in the day, we went on the ride again. I got Phineas again......and......

His hat was missing.

Mere coincidence? Or a ghostly trickster playing along with me?

You never know.

It's a gift that keeps on giving, our Haunted Mansion. No Sandy Claws is required.

* This is obviously not to say that it should.

** Though to be fair, that sort of thing would get taken care of by the deceased's survivors while going through their belongings, so it wouldn't be unfinished for long.

*** An amazing blog. My feelings will not be hurt if you put this post on hold while you go roam around there for a while, it's so good.