Things You're Just Supposed to Know

Most of the time, Long-Forgotten assumes that readers are already familiar with basic facts
about the Haunted Mansion. If you wanna keep up with the big boys, I suggest you check out
first of all the website, Doombuggies.com. After that, the best place to go is Jason Surrell's book,
The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic (NY: Disney Editions; 2015). That's the
re-named third edition of The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies (NY:
Disney Editions, 2003; 2nd ed. 2009). Also essential reading is Jeff Baham's The Unauthorized
Story of Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion (USA: Theme Park Press, 2014; 2nd ed. 2016).

This site is not affiliated in any way with any Walt Disney company. It is an independent
fan site dedicated to critical examination and historical review of the Haunted Mansions.
All images that are © Disney are posted under commonly understood guidelines of Fair Use.

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Sunday, May 2, 2010

"Things Fall Apart; The Centre Cannot Hold"

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For a May 2012 update to this discussion, read this.

When Yeats wrote that line of "The Second Coming," I think he had something a little bigger in mind than the subject of this post, but I'm borrowing it anyway.  If the argument presented here holds up, it should go a long way toward convincing the skeptics that the HM is art, because dadgummit, it acts like art.

One of the best-known factoids about the HM is that Walt Disney himself nixed the idea of presenting it as a dilapidated old house.  He did NOT want anything that looked shabby or neglected at Disneyland.  The basic look of the building did not change much, but it went through a grubby stage before it emerged as the neat and pristine building you see today.  That story can be briefly told with just four pictures, so why not throw it in right here?

The first Imagineer to do serious work on a haunted house at DL was Ken Anderson.  Ken saw this picture of the Shipley-Leydecker house in Baltimore, liked it, and sketched it as an abandoned house.



Imagineer Sam McKim overpainted Anderson's sketch in 1958, and ta da, the first icon of the Haunted Mansion was created.  For some, this is still the all-time classic image.


This is when Walt put his foot down:  "We'll take care of the outside, and let the ghosts take care of the inside," he supposedly said.  Sheesh.  Okay, it's back to the kept-up look of the original Shipley-Leydecker house.  For our fourth picture, any shot will do if it shows how neat and clean the HM looks.


Well so what?  Well, if you're one of the original Imagineers, you now have to decide more deliberately how you're going to handle the theme of decay.  How do you get to the cobwebs and the peeling wallpaper?  I mean, you can't very well have people walk through those immaculate, freshly-painted doors and run smack into falling plaster and crumbling woodwork.  Gotta ease folks into it.

Let's leave that problem to fester for awhile, as we abruptly turn our attention to a separate issue:  The storyline of the HM.  Many hardcore fans are adamant that there is no official backstory for the Haunted Mansion.   And to a certain extent that is true.  Marc Davis was indeed opposed to the idea of "telling a story" in a ride, insisting that a set of experiences is a better approach.  Take Pirates of the Caribbean.  There's no plot, only a set of scenes showing the sacking of a Caribbean port by a pack of pirates.  And yet there is still some narrative logic to the show, beginning with the attack and ending with burning the town.  The same it true for the HM.  There's no plot, but it does act like a three-act play, as many have noted.

  • Act One:  Unseen ghosts try unsuccessfully to "cross over" from the other side.
  • Act Two:  Madame Leota lends her expertise and opens the gates, so to speak.
  • Act Three:  Finally able to materialize, the fun-loving ghosts decide it's time to party.

When you think about it, it's pretty clear that Mdm L is the central figure in this play and in the HM.  She's literally the center of attention in the center of a big room in the center of the ride.  Before her, no ghost is visible.  That seems to be an ironclad rule in the show.  After her, you can see almost all of them.

There's a joke built into all of this, too.  The unseen ghosts of Act One are frightening.  They seem hellbent on breaking through, and you wonder if they're angry at you and intend to do you harm should they succeed.  So you're properly scared.  But when they finally make it, you discover that they have no interest in you whatsoever, that they're just a bunch of fun-loving spooks, happy to socialize with each other once they are able to materialize.  And you!  You were so scared, you sap.


Within Act One, there is a noticeable progression.  At first they are content to glower at you (Staring Busts) or to make ugly, scary faces at you (Changing Portraits) or to try to disorient you by manipulating the fabric of the building itself (Stretching Gallery), but as you make your way upstairs, they kick it up a couple of notches:  making noise, banging violently, sounding angry.  Act One actually climaxes with the shadow of a claw-like hand coming down on you, just before you enter the Séance circle.



If we look for a pivot point within Act One where things begin to turn really nasty, I would choose the Conservatory.  There we encounter a ghost who is extremely upset at finding himself still trapped in his mortal frame, and so long as he is unable to break free of his physical prison, he is trapped by the physical confines of the coffin.  I guess this is pretty sucky if you're a ghost, because he is in a state of panic and is trying to break through using brute force, ready to snap off the lid of the coffin if that's what it takes.  (And just to clear up a misconception, he is a ghost, albeit a ghost having some unusual difficulty in shuffling off his mortal coil. He's not a zombie or some poor devil buried alive.  In a now-deleted piece of narration originally heard at that point, the GH says, "All our ghosts have been dying to meet you; this one can hardly contain himself.")

Okay, let's go back to the issue we began with and trace the decay of the building, and as we go along let's take note of what is happening in the three-act structure of the ride.

The results are fascinating.

The foyer, the stretching gallery, and the changing portrait hall are all as clean and well-preserved as the exterior.  (Our description follows the DL version; the WDW version is a little different, but the same general observations hold.)  No tattered curtains, no peeling paint, not so much as one cobweb.



(pics by photomatt)

None of this was inevitable.  It would have been easy enough to shroud the stretchroom gargoyles with cobwebs, for example.

Next comes Limbo (the doombuggy loading area), and here are the first signs of neglect, but not of decay.  The spiders have had the run of the place for a long time.  Although this area is described as a "limbo of boundless mist and decay" in the narration of the "Story and Song" album, this alleged decay is nowhere in evidence.  The bannisters, the newel posts, the candelabras, the gryphon sculptures—all are in fine shape.



You know what?  A Webster, a rag, and a little Lemon Pledge, and this place has possibilities.

The same holds true all the way through the Séance circle—with one exception.  It's rarely noticed, I'm sure, but there's something wrong in the Conservatory.  Can't see it?  Alright, let's get a flash photo.  See it now?


Those two broken window panes have been there since the Mansion opened.  This is literally the first tear in the fabric of the building that we have encountered since entering the house.  And isn't that interesting:  below it a ghost is trying to break through his physical constraints, something we haven't seen prior to this point.  As we proceed down the hall, though, it is clear that we have a lot of frustrated ghosts around.  In another piece of original narration now deleted, the Ghost Host assesses the situation:  "Unfortunately, they all seem to have trouble getting through.  Perhaps Madame Leota can establish contact; she has a remarkable head for materializing the disembodied."  He's right, she does, and they do (materialize, that is).  We go out on a balcony and see the happy ghosts stretching their ectoplasmic muscles.  The building, however, is a shocking mess!

The wallpaper is peeling.




Again, there's nothing accidental about it.  None of that peeling paper is real; it's all painted on.  The back wall of the Ballroom is nothing but a huge mural.

The curtains are tattered.

(pic by pantheragem)


The woodwork is rotting away.



As we leave the balcony and go through the Attic, nothing improves.  The windows are in sad shape, just as the blueprints demand they be.


So the first cracks in the building appear at the first sign that the ghosts want OUT, and once they're out, the building immediately falls into an advanced state of decrepitude.  In fact, it looks pretty much like what you'd expect a house to look like that's been abandoned since the close of the 19th century.

Hmm.  What's going on here?  It has something to do with common notions about spirit possession, methinks (notions with very respectable pedigrees, I might add).  In the Gospels, Jesus encounters a poor soul known as the "Gadarene demoniac," a man who lives among the tombs and is possessed by thousands of demons, apparently.  As Jesus begins to exorcise him, the demons beg not to be sent away into the open country but to be allowed to enter a nearby herd of pigs.  Permission is granted, but a fat lot of good is does them, since the possessed pigs panic and drown themselves in the nearby sea. (See Mark 5:1-13 for one version.)  Of interest is the fact that the Gospel writers feel no need to explain any of this to their readers.



Okay, let's flash forward 2000 years.  Admittedly, we are going from the sublime to the ridiculous, but still, in the early version of the HM narration that forms the basis for the "Story and Song" narrative, the Ghost Host explains to Mike and Karen about the Raven character, who still has a speaking role at this point.  A malevolent spirit has "taken possession of that poor, wretched, Raven's mortal being," and the kids need to be on their guard because "it may want to better itself."  Again, the author (in this case X Atencio) feels no need to elaborate on these notions.  It seems to be common knowledge—and has been for a long time—that malevolent spirits (or demons) want very much to possess humans, but failing that, they'll take an animal as a poor substitute.

What happens if they can't get a human or an animal?  That appears to be the predicament of the more benign spirits, the kind who aren't wicked enough to forcibly seize for themselves men or beasts.  If they are in need of some kind of surrogate body, they all have to go to an option which is even less satisfactory than an animal—a building, for example.  In yet another unused, early script for the Ghost Host narrative, we hear about such things:


"Inside and outside, and even between the walls of this possessed manor, are ghosts, brought here from the darkest tombs of the earth."

Is this getting too weird?  Stick with me a bit longer.  If the Haunted Mansion is serving as a surrogate body for a legion of otherwise disembodied spirits, that would explain why the building itself acts like an organic, living body.  It has walls that stretch.  It has doors that bulge and breathe.



There are countless faces looking out from the woodwork and the wallpaper, as every Mansion fan knows.






Like any house, this one is a dead shell of wood, but unlike others, this one is alive with spirits.  Kinda like the dead body in the Conservatory, isn't it?  But by adopting the Mansion as their surrogate body, the spirits seem to have kept it in an unnatural state of preservation.  Once they leave its walls, it immediately sinks into a normal state of corruption.  Cool, eh?

A haunted house is a bad substitute for having one's own body, albeit a ghostly one.  They hate it in there.  After Madame Leota releases the ghosts from the building itself, and they are finally able to materialize, is it any wonder that the good spirits are in such good spirits?

So... what we have is a thought-provoking interplay and integration between (1) the simple task of showing a house falling into decay and (2) presenting a three-act play about grim grinning ghosts (finally able to) come out and socialize.  The final product is far richer and more intelligent than a haunted house ride requires.  I don't think the Imagineers consciously and deliberately thought through this whole thing as I've tried to explain it here, but I do think they relied on their artistic instincts as to what "felt right" and what provided the most satisfactory haunted house experience possible.  To that end, they drew upon ideas running through the general culture and gave them fresh expression in a highly original manner.  When you're dealing with talents of this caliber, that sort of thing just happens.

Humans are fascinated and mystified by the relationship between body and spirit, and here we see yet another proof of that interest, presented in a manner lighthearted and entertaining, but not thoughtless.  It's getting difficult to avoid that l'il old "A" word, isn't it?


22 comments:

  1. Very excellent post, and intriguing line of reasoning at play here. I would agree this likely wasn't 100 percent mapped out by the original designers, which makes it partly "accidental"...and in that case, the end result having this kind of underlaid narrative depth is even more impressive given it was a somewhat random confluence of planned elements and "hey, that would be cool to do..." design work.

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  2. Much depends on how you view the artistic process. Think of the volumes written about Hamlet, for example. Did Shakespeare actually, consciously think of all that stuff? Of course not. So is it accidental, or coincidental? Of course not. You can call it "artistic instinct," or "inspiration," or whatever you like, but the idea is that good artists can sense whole worlds of meaning wordlessly and (almost) instantly, and convey it successfully. The broken pane in the Conservatory resonated somehow with the reality of the scene, and the scene feels right in the place it was put within the context of the whole HM. These instincts/inspirations were probably never articulated, but they were grounded in a gut-level grasp of what they were putting together. The artist doesn't even have to "know" what it is he knows. That's how I look at it, anyway.

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  3. Hi HBG2,
    A very intriguing post! I do want to point out however that there are cobwebs in the rafters of the stretching gallery if that counts.
    I love the new blog, keep up the good work!
    -MG

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  4. Hmm. Checking photos, I can't see any cobwebs up there. Maybe I would with some different photos? It wouldn't surprise me if a few REAL cobwebs show up now and then and tend to be left alone, but if so, I'm not counting them.

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  5. I see a cobweb in the floor of the Foyer in that fisheye photo. Not a real cobweb, but a design element.

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  6. Thank you for this flabbergastingly fantastic post!

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  7. You're welcome. I'm glad you're enjoying the blog so much.

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  8. Can you help me with any information about the amazing artist Roy Rulin? Thanks! Great post!

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  9. In the WDW version of the attraction, there is a shadow of a ghost playing a piano before the Leota scene. That is the first ghost you can see in that attraction.

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  10. Ah, but you DON'T really see him, do you? Only his shadow. He himself is not his shadow, any more than you are your shadow. He himself is sitting on the piano stool, utterly invisible but casting a shadow in the moonlight.

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  11. But if he is invisible but still casting a shadow, he must be of the supernatural realm. What is your theory of what he is? Supernatural or living human?

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  12. He's a ghost. Why he casts a shadow—who knows? But you can't see him, therefore he hasn't "materialized."

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  13. I see what you are saying. You are saying that even though we see something, it has not fully materialized so the rule holds true that they don't fully materialize till after Leota. It is the same with the floating candle. We know something strange is happening but we can not see anything because nothing has materialized yet. You have schooled me again!

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  14. Brilliant analysis. Artists have to make many choices when they create an aesthetic experience, and good artists tend toward those choices which support weighty, emotional, meaningful themes.

    I will add, though, that Pirates of the Caribbean most certainly exhibits a thematic story along the same lines.

    You start off in the recent past, the Bayou restaurant, and continue into the past. After the Fall/falls, the pirates arrive, and in each scene, their drunken debauchery becomes increasingly depraved.

    Finally, we descend into a fiery hell, where the pirates are imprisoned and (are soon to be) destroyed through their foolish wickedness.

    Having learned our lesson, we gradually return to the modern age.

    Many rides take the riders through time like this, establishing cause-and-effect story lines (with strikingly moral themes) throughout the park. Which is one of the reasons why the Disney parks are so awesome -- they have a moral weight in their stories which goes far beyond the "Weeeeeee... oh, I'm gonna barf" experience of typical "theme" parks.

    The entire Disneyland park is a giant, sort-of time machine, from the far left (Jungle Cruise) continuing clockwise (as on the Railroad) up through the future of Tomorrowland (which is one reason why the "future that never was" re-theming strikes such a sour note). The railroad ride ends with a view of the Grand Canyon, so we can see how the past (dinosaurs) effects the present - reinforcing that whole giant time machine thing.

    And so on. Anyway: there is a story in Pirates, just like the Haunted Mansion.

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  15. But the difference between Pirates and the HM is that the Mansion doesn't force you to imagine being in some other time or place. It's right here, right now, in a haunted house. To me, it is the most convincing of all the Disney attractions, because all it asks you to imagine is that the house is haunted by real ghosts.

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  16. I think that it makes sense that the HM is storyline-less. We are being talked to by a Ghost Host as we are visiting a ghostly retirement home. It seems like a tour. In the real world, tours don't normally have a storyline, and isn't this supposed to be like a reality with ghosts?

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    1. That's a shrewd observation. Tours by their very nature are poor vehicles for storytelling. At best, you get a string of completely independent mini-stories that explain the various items seen on the tour.

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  17. As a young boy in South West Baltimore the Shipley Lydecker house was known as the Lydecker Mansion and was used as a VFW post. It was torn down some time in the nineteen sixties I believe if memory serves me. I know it was there in the early 50's and gone by the 70's. I lived two blocks from it from 1938 to 1971. It was located between Mc Henry and Pratt streets to the south and north respectively with Franklintown Rd. to the west. I do not recall for sure if it faced Franklintown Rd. or Mc Henry but I think it was Franklintown Rd. Franklintown would have existed when the mansion was built were as Mc Henry, named for the same man as Fort Mc Henry, would not have been extended that far west of the city until the the very late 1800's and more likely the early 1900's. My home, 139 Willard street did not have row houses until some time just after 1900. The old man, in his 60's or 70's that lived next door at 137, said that the land to the west of Willard, when he moved in the new house, was farm land with cows in pasture.
    Allen E. Ford











    d.

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  18. In the flash photo of the attic window, on the plank that bore the brunt of the camera flash's fury, I swear to god I see the face of Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera. Does anyone else see this?

    I am NOT saying this is intentional, or anything other than a Rorshackian reflection of the power of suggestion, but nevertheless it's spew-kie!

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    1. Good eye. There used to be a P of the O poster in the attic at WDW. Don't know if it's still around. https://www.flickr.com/photos/29883059@N05/48962957333/in/dateposted-public/

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  19. I am unclear as to the implication of the “sheesh.”

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    1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sheesh

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