To Find a Way Out

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Major revision Nov 11, 2020. See far below.

.                                                                               1963 publicity shot.  The back reads:
. "WAITING FOR THE GHOSTS -- Disneyland's Haunted Mansion rises in Frontierland beside the Rivers of America.  Slated as a major attraction
.  for the future, the Mansion will be peopled by the world's most famous ghosts now being rounded up by Walt Disney's artists and craftsmen."

The familiar white building that we see today was constructed a full half century ago by artists and engineers planning a very different attraction than what actually went into it.  Major changes were made to the grounds and to parts of the interior before the ride finally opened seven years later.  Before even a year had gone by, they drew up new plans for the enclosed queue area to the south of the house.  It's a place we have come to know well.  We did a post on the modest and whimsical "family plot" that used to be there and another post on the ornate and monumental "lost graveyard" that was originally going to be there but was never built.

What is, what was, and what might have been.

Today's post is essentially a sequel to the Lost Graveyard post, reflecting information taken from old photos and 1962 blueprints that were unknown to me until recently.  It turns out there are still more surprises in the history of that queue area, a history that is clearer now than ever before, and I've uncovered a few other long forgotten goodies, including what is more or less a second "lost graveyard."  Here's a summary:

On the grounds of the Haunted Mansion are two sites that were originally graveyards but which have been altered beyond recognition, for reasons known today only to a few.  There are hidden passageways leading to both sites that were extremely important at the time they were built, intended to serve a central and essential purpose, but which today are infrequently used and unknown to most people.  The exit for one of these secret passages is hidden from view, seldom seen by any visitors today.  Visible remnants of these older structures remain, having been incorporated into new structures or put to different use altogether.  These are changes that happened so long ago that there are very few people still alive who can explain them, or who even know about them.  They are part of a narrative unrecorded and long forgotten, a history unknown even to the Mansion's current occupants (i.e. Disney employees). 

These mutations all stem from pragmatic, logistical issues which arose in the construction and subsequent operation of a popular theme park ride.  In other words, none of it has anything to do with the imaginative world of the attraction itself.  But if so, why does it almost feel like it does?  With a few nips and tucks, that red paragraph could serve as background material for the plot of an interesting haunted house mystery.


This Old House

I briefly alluded to this phenomenon in an older post about The Missing Door.  You will recall that the HM blueprints call for a door in a wall across from the Conservatory, but at Disneyland the door isn't there.  In any other ride, a missing door like this would barely be of interest even to the most hardcore Disney freaks, but at the Mansion, a missing door is instantly romantic, easily absorbed into the imaginative world of the ride itself.  You might ask yourself what the ghosts were up to as easily as you might ask yourself what the Disney architects were up to.

It's just the nature of the beast.  With a haunted house, the house qua house is part of the story.  When you read about some haunted hotel somewhere, it's not just that some guy committed suicide and now haunts, it's that some guy committed suicide in this very room and now haunts this building.  That window right there is mysteriously found open all the time, etc.  Unlike Pirates or Small World, if the park engineers fiddle with the grounds around the Haunted Mansion, there is a tendency for the changes to be sucked into the backstory of the ride if possible.  And consider this Disneyan observation:  Is there any other attraction where the prospect of "a backstage tour" somehow or other feels like it might make the fantasy more vivid rather than less, even though you should know better?  It's because the house is not separable from the show.

Maybe that's why a real-world historical probe like this one appeals to more than just DL history geeks.  In some strange way it seems to augment the experience of the attraction.  It enhances the pleasurable illusion that this is a very old house with a shadowy past.  Thanks to the freakishly long and convoluted history of the original Anaheim Mansion, it has an archaeological depth that is simultaneously genuine and feels like it belongs to the attraction's imaginary world.

All of this is unintentional of course, but in even the finest art, some things are just dumb luck.


A Tale of Two Courtyards

At the time I wrote "The Lost Graveyard," it wasn't completely clear to me how that cemetery was connected to the rest of the attraction.  Also, I ignored the similar enclosure on the other side of the house that begged for its own explanation.  But now, thanks to new information and some stimulating observations by a friend I call Lonesome Ghost, things are much clearer.  There are not one but two "lost graveyards," and what is more, anyone can still get to them from inside the Mansion, and in much the same way that they would originally have been entered.

You can get to one of them today by not being bold enough.

You can get to the other one by being much, much too bold.

You will recall from our Does Size Matter? post that when the building went up in 1962, plans called for a walk-thru haunted house in duplicate in order to handle the crowds, two complete versions of the attraction side-by-side.  Already in 1957-58, Ken Anderson had come to realize that a single walk-thru wouldn't hack it, but until the fall of 1967 (a full decade later!), no satisfactory mode of conveyance had been settled upon.  In the meantime the default was still the walking tour.  By doubling capacity, that option had managed to stay alive as a realistic possibility.

The two stretching galleries would have marked the beginnings of the separate shows.  Apparently, the two tours would have gone up the middle, side-by-side, done their thing outside the berm, and then turned outward and returned along the outer perimeters inside of the show building.  They would have been mirror images of each other, in other words.  But what about the exits for the two tours?  Ironically, I think the basic concept for those exits is most clearly and simply articulated in plans drawn up for another Haunted Mansion, one which was never built.

It's funny how a lot of Disney fans have never heard of the "St. Louis Project."  In 1963 and 1964, Walt was considering building a small version of Disneyland in St. Louis, taking up an entire city block, four stories high—all of it indoors.  The park would have included a Haunted Mansion, with a smaller scale building on a hill above ground but a complete attraction inside the hill and below ground.  There was to be only one stretching elevator, but apparently there would still have been two tours below ground, culminating in two exits into two courtyards.  Check out this blueprint, and notice that you can see partial indications of the tunnels leading up from underground into the two exit courtyards.

With that in mind, check out this rarely seen 1962 blueprint for the Anaheim HM (color added):

There are many interesting things here, but for the present, notice the two exit courtyards, much like the St. Louis
layout.  We know they're exits for the attraction not only by the "exit" arrows, but by the presence of the turnstiles.

On this blueprint they're called gardens, but as we shall see, even in

1962 they were really going to be cemeteries, as on this 1965 blueprint:

What was actually built closely resembled the '62 print above.  Here's a 1965 aerial view we've seen before:

Here's a rare, ground-level photo of the southern (left) side in the above photo, from the summer of '65:

pic by Paul Penna

 

Today, the square courtyard on the right in the aerial photo is still the site of the exit area for the ride,

while the trapezoidal courtyard on the left is the site of our now-familiar "lost graveyard."

The trapezoid is still accessible from inside by means of an emergency exit, which empties into a trench-like structure:

That "emergency exit" is nothing less than the original main exit for

the Haunted Mansion walk-thru intended for the left (southern) side.

(Regions Beyond)

You will recall that the whole place would have been down at that trench level, and the courtyard would have been a spill area after the walk-thru, a grandiose graveyard in which you could mill around until you exited through the turnstiles, as in that blueprint above.  It's essentially the way Ken Anderson conceived the finale for his Ghost House.  We knew most of that.  What we now know is how everybody got into the place.

You can still use that original exit without there being an emergency:  It's also the "chicken exit" from the changing portrait hall.  Yep, if you're yeller, you can use one of the exits actually intended as a main exit for the attraction in 1962.  That's the one you see if you're not bold enough.

It stimulates the imagination to realize that these plain hallways and stairs would
likely have been fully themed to the rest of the house if the original plans had held.
(Bear in mind also that Rolly Crump was the main interior decorator at this point!)

(original pic by Datameister)

Unlike the trapezoid on the south side, the square courtyard on the north not only became a cemetery but remained one.

In a way, this too is a lost graveyard.  Lost, because we don't know exactly what they intended to put in there when it was built—with one important exception—and lost because most of the courtyard is generally closed to the public.  Today, the zig-zag path of exit from the top of the speed ramp to the doorway into the open air is dressed out to look like three adjacent crypts.  The large structure outside of the courtyard at the top is roofing/access over the speed ramp, cleverly disguised as a big sarcophagus slab, and it lies in the older and more "secret" of the two pet cemeteries.  Oh all right, I guess it's worth a quick look, since many of you have never seen it and never will.

In this photo you can see how the exit tunnel is cleverly made up to look like several distinct crypts.  On

the far right, that's the back of the final exit crypt you're looking at.  They use the area behind it for storage.

(pic by Datameister)

Some of this is clearer (and frankly, better-looking) in photos taken before the mid 90s, which is approximately when they put in a lot of new fencing.  Alas, they replaced the original "lost graveyard" ironwork atop the wall——the top actually being at ground level from this side.  Oh, and your eyes are not deceiving you; the animal grave markers sometimes get moved around.  Nobody seems to care much where they are.  Or if we want to approach it in the spirit of this post's opening paragraphs, "What are those pranky spirits up to?"  *insert your leapfrog joke here*

Enough of that.  Of greater relevance to the present subject is the small crypt to which the emergency exit leads, marked with an asterisk on the map above.  (The smaller unit above it is just a storage closet.)  What's so special about that crypt, back there where no one can even see it?

The main exit for the northern HM walk-thru was likewise by means of what is today an

emergency exit, not the current exit approached from inside by an ascending speed ramp.  

Today, it's not only an emergency exit, it's also used by park security if they have a very naughty guest down below.  This ain't no chicken exit, bruddah.  If you are so exceedingly bold (and stupid, and evil) as to try to pilfer something, you're sure to get caught and whisked up the stairs, out of that little crypt, and interrogated right there in the lower right hand corner of the courtyard.  That's what happened August 13, 2006, when a couple of teenage rocket scientists snatched a wicker suitcase from the attic as they went by.  With walls and lockable gates all around, that corner of the courtyard is a semi-secure, makeshift holding cell until the cops show up, if it comes to that.  Not exactly San Quentin, but at least there will be no sudden dashing off and losing oneself in the crowds.  Oh, and there is no truth to the rumors that there used to be iron rings bolted into the masonry there and bloodstains on the wall, no truth at all.  (How do these things get started, I wonder.)

Psst, hey, wanna see some forbidden mysteries?  You know you do.  Come, we're going back towards the exit, against the flow, you might say.  However, we'll casually hang a right around the corner rather than go into the exit crypt.  Dee dee dum dee dee...lovely day...dee dee dum

(L: Regions Beyond, R: Allen Huffman.  The lamp was added in 2006)

Curses, a locked gate!  Let's make like ghosts and magically pass through as if it weren't there.  What are those stains on the dirt in

the corner?  Rumor has it . . . never mind, but yeah, that's the area.  As we peek around the corner, we glimpse a wooden door...

(L: Allen Huffman; R: Regions Beyond (top) Datameister (bottom))

. . . and there it is: the little crypt that marks the emergency exit.  (On this particular day, one of the double door-gates
was left open, and you can see what the area back there is used for.)  Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

(pix by some guy)

It's out of sight back here now, but in 1962 this handsome little crypt was going to serve as the main exit for the right-side walk-thru.
We can't open the door, but Sandy Duncan did, in her 1974 Disneyland special, so I was able to cobble together a photo from that.

I was curious, so I 'shopped that other door closed, just to see how it looks.  Heh.  Imagine standing there guilty with this as the visual backdrop
while big, unsmiling security men debate among themselves whether to call in the Anaheim police or simply throw you out of the park.

Stairing into the Abyss

.              Before going any further, I had better justify my confident assertions that these

.              emergency exits were going to be the original main exits.  Back to the blueprints.

We've seen that one before, in our Does Size Matter? discussion.  Let's blow up the pink area this time.

There are three staircases.  Two of them are "stairs up to open graves," and one is "stairs up to mausoleum."

AND HERE IS WHERE THE MAJOR REVISION BEGINS

In the original post, I argued that one staircase led to what is now the emergency exit on the south, one led to the emergency exit on the north, and the third remained a mystery. I thought so because of the uncanny line-up between two of the staircases and the openings in the walls for the exits. That argument proceeded as follows:

...and if you line up that blueprint with this one . . .

. . . the pink staircase lines up PRECISELY with the opening for the emergency exit on the right,

and the green staircase lines up PRECISELY with the opening for the emergency exit on the left.

But as impressive as that line-up is, I now think that the three staircases in that blueprint all go to the southern graveyard, thanks to the discovery that there were actually THREE exits planned for each of the two walk-thrus (see the 2020 sequel to this post HERE). The line-up with those exits works also:

In other words, that side-view blueprint is probably showing only the staircases for the southern cemetery. The exits to the northern one are on some other blueprint somewhere. This explains the language better: two of them do indeed go to "open graves" and the third goes to a "mausoleum," which is a fitting term, because at this point a more elaborate crypt was planned than the flush-to-the-wall doorway they eventually built, as you can see in the blueprint sketch above.

We now join our original post, in progress...

Among other things, we discover that this "mausoleum" was probably going to be part of the original "lost cemetery."
And incidentally, note that the door is exactly like the door on the emergency exit crypt in the other courtyard.

( pic by Regions Beyond.  A bit of micro-trivia: The rings used to be the doorknobs. Sometime in the last 10 years
they were replaced with regular door handles, and the rings were moved up.  I just thought you should know. )

Moreover, it seems probable that this entire wall of crypts should be included along with the
"mausoleum," as both of those jogs in the height of the wall are indicated on the 1962 blueprint.

Behold, the only part of the "lost graveyard" that was ever realized.

(pic by Regions Beyond)

And you know, it's hardly changed.  Originally the tombs were blank...

. . . and if we want to get reeeeally picky, the light fixture has changed, twice.

Photos of the original are hard to find. It apparently didn't last long.

What they replaced it with was absolutely gorgeous and lasted for a long time.

Allen Huffman

Sometime in the latter 2000's, that one was replaced with something sturdier and more people-proof. 

Here's a side-by-side, with the current incarnation on the left, the gorgeous older one on the right.

Otherwise, no changes.

Over on the other side, that little crypt which today is an emergency exit is the only thing there today that we know was part of the original plans for this area.  We know this because it was part of a WED model of the Mansion and its grounds, which model is most familiar to us from the 1965 "Tencennial" TV program.  The model was already several years old even then, since the house reflects a design that was obsolete by the end of 1961.

You can see parts of both courtyards in the model.  The northern one, in the foreground, is only half

visible, and the crypt cannot be seen, but luckily, this isn't our only photography.  When they did a photo

shoot of Rolly Crump's "Museum of the Weird" maquettes, they spread them out on the same table top.

And guess what?

Bingo.

You can also see the opening in the wall in this 1962 construction photo:

Behold, the only known part of the other lost graveyard that was realized.

Here's something fun:  During the construction of Splash Mountain, excavation came up right to the edge of this enclosure, giving us a once-in-a-lifetime view of the courtyard from the northern side, a point of view not too terribly different from that of the photos of the model we've been looking at.  The original exit crypt is prominent in these pix, and dig how the contours of the exit staircase are visible in the exposed dirt.

(main pic from Outside the Berm)

The Missing Brick Wall

.      Let's return to the current exit crypt, set back inside the mouth of what we now

.      know was a cemetery courtyard to be accessed through a different crypt entirely.

Curiously, the face of that crypt is exactly where a short brick wall was originally.

Let's superimpose this modern view on a photo from 1966 and . . . fade away.

(This photo sequence is adapted from this original Davelandweb photo, which contains a distracting and irrelevant sign that I have photoshopped out.)

So if you stand in the doorway of the exit crypt and think, "There used to be a brick wall right here," isn't there something vaguely . . . I don't know . . . Cask of Amontillado-ish about it?  See, this is a good example of the Missing Door effect.   With any other attraction, "There used to be a wall where this doorway is now located" is the blandest sort of park trivia.  But at the Mansion, your imagination may take a playfully perverse turn, treating that real-world factoid as part of the attraction's make-believe world, toying with loose connections and possible correlations, all quite unseriously of course.  Come to think of it, aren't there crypts in there where the reverse is true; that is, crypts that used to have open doorways that are now bricked up?  Intriguing . . . intriguing.  No doubt there is a long forgotten story behind all of this.

"Oh yeah, right, a backstory.  And I suppose I'm the Sea Captain now.  Enough.  I'm innta here.  I'm throwing in the trowel."

Got Concept Art?

We have a nice piece of concept artwork for the "lost graveyard" on the south side; viz, that striking watercolor near the top of this post which was a star feature in the previous post on the subject.  Do we have anything similar showing what the north side graveyard would have looked like?  Not that I'm aware of.  There IS a graveyard there, of course: the current exit crypt complex.  But that can't be the original layout.  The small courtyard is clogged with bulky structures, dividing the space inefficiently and creating areas difficult to access (which are today used for storage or break areas).  Among these, the only structure we know was going to be there is the emergency exit crypt.

But don't despair quite yet.  We DO have one piece of artwork which I suspect is widely unrecognized for what it actually depicts.

In his well-known and well-loved artwork for the "Story and Song" booklet, Collin Campbell gives us this illustration, supposedly depicting the exit crypt into which Mike and Karen must go in order to escape from the graveyard.  ("That's a crypt!  That's the one by the fence!  It's the way out!" exclaims Karen.  How in hell she would know this, no one explains.)  Oddly enough, the model for Collin's exit crypt from the inside to the outside is none other than the actual crypt that would lead you from outside to inside if you went into it.  Everything's backwards, in other words.

In the montage below, take note in Campbell's painting not just of the crypt but of the brick wall alongside of it, topped with decorative ironwork, and compare all that with the actual exit crypt (lower right).  In that modern picture, the greenery above the wall is too thick to let us see the house, but let's make like silly spooks and manipulate space and time.  Let's (1) back away from the opening, and let's (2) return again to 1966.  There.  Now the house is visible (lower left).  Compare it to the house in Campbell's painting.  There is just no doubt.

We've emphasized on more than one occasion Campbell's extreme

conservatism in rendering anything based on others' concepts.

You can almost bet there is a Marc Davis sketch (or something) behind Collins' artwork.  Even the ghoul on the right in this very

painting is nothing more than an elongated but extremely faithful version of a photo of a basic, Blaine Gibson, pop-up head model.

And yet there are a number of things in Campbell's 1969 painting which correspond to nothing in that exit complex today, including a depiction of an open grave.  Could some old concept art for the northern cemetery be behind it?  It isn't much, but at this point conjectures based on the Campbell painting plus what happens to be in the courtyard today are all we've got to help us visualize this other lost graveyard.

Conclusions

We began the post by pointing out the unintentional but genuine archaeological depth possessed by this possessed manor, built half a century ago. Cryptic alterations* that actually have bland, unmagical, Glendale-ish explanations nevertheless make the Haunted Mansion seem that much more mysterious (if you know about them, and now you do).  The ghost show put on before you consists of the sort of fabricated authenticity you get with any good quality dark ride, but with the Disneyland Haunted Mansion you also get the opposite: a vaguely but pleasantly enhanced sense of age and secrecy springing not from the imaginations of storytellers but from the odd and accidental, clumsy, real-world history of the place.

* Hell yes that pun is intentional.

For a sequel to this study that confirms some of its findings, go here.