Making Faces

(pic by Michael Hansen)

The old Master himself, Yale Gracey (with modest assistance from Rolly Crump), is credited with coming up with two different ways of creating a ghostly face, one by looking at the convex side of a blank mask ("the Leota effect") and one by looking at the concave side ("the Lucretia effect"). The latter is my own suggested term for what is sometimes called the "follow-you bust" effect, or any number of other clunky titles. [Edit: Richard Kaufman points out to me that the illusion itself has a long history and is commonly called the "hollow man" illusion. "Hollow face" and "hollow mask" are also common.] "The Leota effect" is actually anachronistic, inasmuch as Leota herself has not been done via "the Leota effect" for a very long time. The Singing Busts and Little Leota, however, still use the classic Leota effect, which involves projecting an animated facial image onto a blank white dummy face, so perhaps we should re-christen it "the Little Leota effect" or something like that, but alas, "the Leota effect" has been so standard for so long that it's probably an exercise in futility to try to change it now.

What's not obvious at first is how intertwined the two effects were, both in their original development and later on, when the Imagineers tried to improve both effects in the late 1980s and early 90s. Indeed, so confident were those guys in their new technology that they even conceived of using it to create a take-home souvenir, but that never materialized.

Today's post contains at least one bombshell revelation, along with a bunch of long-forgotten history, in some cases forgotten because it involves plans that either came to naught or half a page of scribbled lines (I'm feeling kinda Pink Floydish lately. Halloween of this year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of their classic album, Meddle, which immediately captured my imagination in 1971 and still lives there rent free.)

The Lucretia Juarez Effect

As many of you know, that sour-faced old spinster who glowers at you in the changing portrait hall (alongside an equally grumpy but nameless man with a Moe Howard haircut) is Aunt Lucretia. That's her official name. Originally, she was going to be part of the singing bust ensemble in the graveyard. Instead she ended up here in the portrait hall and on the mantelpiece in the ballroom. That's all been talked about before. Also well-known is the story of how Yale and Rolly supposedly invented the Lucretia effect. As Rolly tells it, he and Yale were messing around with a Lincoln mask, working out the beginnings of what would eventually lead to the Leota effect, when they noticed the weird optical illusion created by the convex side, and starting from there the two worked out the Lucretia effect (Surrell, Haunted Mansion [3rd ed], 81; Baham, Unauthorized, 89).

Here's a sketch from Yale's notebooks, clearly showing the effect exactly as it is today:

I don't doubt that Rolly is being truthful here, but the fact is, he and Yale were NOT the first to create this effect and put it to use in a haunted house environment. (That's the bombshell I was talking about.) It had already been in use for years in "El Sito Mysterio," a typical "gravity hill"* attraction at Frontier Village amusement park in San Jose, California. The park opened in 1961 and closed in 1980. "El Sito" was not one of the original '61 attractions but was built a few years later.

Before there was Lucretia, there was Juarez. Here he is in a 1968 photo:

Photos from: Bob Johnson, Frontier Village (Charleston: Arcadia, 2013), 50-51

UPDATE! Found a color photo of "Juarez":

I actually saw "Juarez" sometime in the 60s and was so amazed that I lagged behind when the group went to the next room so that I could get up close for a better look, only then figuring out how the effect was done. A few years later, when the HM opened, I immediately recognized the same effect in the portrait hall, but I forgot where I had seen Juarez, although I remembered that it was in one of those "Mystery Shack" attractions. I only ran across his photo in the Frontier Village book a week ago, solving a personal mystery that had baffled me for over half a century. Whether Juarez originated at Frontier Village or came from elsewhere, I don't know. I only know that he was there years before the Haunted Mansion opened.

Someone might argue that Yale saw Juarez while doing research into haunted house attractions, but I rather suspect that this is a case of the same illusion being discovered independently by parties unknown to each other. Any one with a Halloween mask can easily see it.

Lucretia in the 1980s and 1990s

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Imagineers tried to use the great strides in computer technology to improve both the Lucretia and the Leota effects. The basic catalyst was the fact that photographic and videographic images could now be captured in computer files, opening up lots of new possibilities.

The first thing they did, however, was try to fix a very low-tech problem. Like they say, one picture is worth a thousand words:

The solution to this problem was to (1) round the edges of the cutout hole and (2) make the face shallower. 

They worked out the visibility angles in great detail, before and after.

Basically, change this . . . 

to this . . . 

(A link allowing a download of the entire patent can be found on this page.)

But they didn't do it. Why not? I have no idea. It wouldn't have cost much, and the positive results were meticulously worked out in the patent. The only thing I can think of is the confident belief that few people look at the busts long enough for the effect to fail. So why bother?

It's true enough that first-time visitors are going to stop looking at the busts and start looking into the room they are beginning to enter as they round the bend, well before Lucretia's nose gets pinched, but still, why not fix this thing for those of us who are not new to the ride but know it well and like to examine these details more carefully?

While they were at it, the Imagineers came up with two more ideas on the same patent application, ideas made possible by the new technology available. One of them revived the Gracey-Crump experiment of projecting animation onto the convex side of the follow-you busts while still viewing it from the concave side (i.e., having projectors inside the wall rather than a simple light bulb). That way they could add moving eyes and some limited animation to the mouths and eyebrows for Lucretia and her consort. The Imagineers even wanted to add audio, so that the busts would talk! This idea too came to nothing. My guess is that it either didn't look as good as they thought it would, or else they didn't want that much overtly ghostly manifestation so early in the ride. It does get uncomfortably close to violating the iron-clad "no ghosts shall be visible before Leota" rule, so yeah, I'm glad they didn't do this.

The third idea was to let guests pose for a photo somewhere (after the ride?), and print the photo on a sheet of thin plastic, which would then be heated and vacuformed over a generic face, and then trimmed, giving you a life-size mask imprinted with your face on it that you could use to make a Lucretia effect of your own, featuring your own face! Again, it never happened. Perhaps it didn't look as good as they hoped. Really, how would you find a face mold that worked for everybody, even roughly? Nowadays, of course, they could have a couple of dozen face molds, and the camera could include simple facial recognition software that would automatically select the face mold closest to the guest and rotate the appropriate mold into position for the vacuforming process. I wonder, however, whether the whole thing was rejected not because of technical shortcomings but because it essentially gives away the secret of one of the best and simplest illusions in the Mansion.

Still, one must admit that it would've been a pretty cool souvenir.

Leota in the 1980s and 1990s

As Rolly's account makes clear, the Lucretia effect and the Leota effect were created more or less simultaneously. Here again is a sketch from Yale's notebooks that clearly shows the Leota effect:

But right next to it is a sketch proving that they were also experimenting with projecting a face onto the concave side of the mask, actually foreshadowing the "interior projection" method which eventually came into use for Madame Leota.

By the late 1980s, new technology enabled the Imagineers to fix an old problem with the Leota effect. More radically, it made it possible to introduce a method of presentation similar to Yale and Rolly's experimental idea.

The old 16mm film loop cartridges were replaced with a captured image on laser disc. The loops used to break every few months and needed continual replacing. That's why so many film strips (usually incomplete) show up in the collector's market. It's actually pretty amazing that they lasted as well as they did, running upwards of 16 hours a day. The bin-loop system operated in controlled, dust-free cabinets, which not only increased durability, but reduced noise.

Anyway, concurrent with the laser disc came improved fiber optic technology, leading to the first attempt at an interior projection for Leota. (A link allowing the download of this entire patent can be found on this page.)

That first-generation interior-projected Leota debuted in the early 1990s and gave her kind of a "moon"

 face, not as bright or sharp as the old method and more distorted. Still, this version lasted until 2001.

You can get a pretty good look at her in this clip from a 1997 Discovery Channel special (with Tony Baxter):

Again, all of this history is pretty well known. What is less noticed is the fact that the interior-projection Leota enabled the Imagineers to reach back and realize original proposals for the Séance Circle that were impossible in 1969.

As initially conceived, the carpet under Leota was supposed to be animated with rippling and flapping, and the table with Leota's ball on it was naturally expected to wobble around accordingly. You can see this on one of the effects blueprints, which shows the carpet undulating:

You can also see the concept in Collin Campbell's artwork for the "Story and Song" album:

Why didn't they do this? Well, Imagineers like Marc Davis had a tendency to come up with cool ideas and then deliver them to Yale Gracey without the faintest idea how to realize the effects. That was Yale's job. Usually he succeeded, but sometimes he was stumped. A good example is the See-Saw royal pair in the graveyard. They are supposed to disappear as they go down, but Yale apparently couldn't come up with a way to do that, so it didn't happen.

One suspects that the wild scene you see in Campbell's artwork came to grief over the fact that Leota had to be absolutely stationary if you were going to project a face onto her. They somewhat compensated by making the carpet at least look like it was hovering in midair, although few visitors notice this and just assume the "floor" must be very dark. (And we've all heard the story about the guy who hopped the rail to get to Leota, only to fall about 10 feet and break his leg. That's when the safety screens went in.)

Anyway, with an interior-projected Leota, it became possible to incorporate at least some of the animation that couldn't be done before. It was all so subtle that many riders never noticed it, and as the years go by all memory of it threatens to dissolve into the land of the long forgotten. Be it here known to one and all that the table gently pitched and rolled during the decade or so in which the first-generation interior-projected Mdm L operated. Check these video clips from 1997 and 1999:

When they returned to the original, better looking, front-projected "Leota effect"

in October of 2001, the moving table effect also came to an end, sad to say.

The 21st Century: Floating Leota

 

Lucretia is exactly where we left her, unchanged since she left Yale Gracey's hands, so we're done there, but for the sake of completeness, a few words should probably be said about Leota's final chapters.

Floating Leota concept art by Chris Turner

The first attempt at floating Leota debuted in 2005 at Disneyland, and for the life of me, I can't imagine what they were thinking. It was essentially a projected image aligned with the moving target of the Leota ball. However sophisticated the equipment involved, anyone with half a brain should have been able to tell that it wouldn't work. It requires pinpoint precision, and any moving, physical, mechanical object is going to be subject to friction, wear, stretching (in the support lines), and all the vagaries of electric motors. Of course they couldn't keep the damn thing in acceptably accurate alignment. By 2007 they had abandoned this method for a new interior-projection system that really worked. Unlike its 1990s predecessor, the face really looks good, thanks to much improved technology. WDW got this one first, then DL.

One could argue that floating Leota is another attempt to bring back the more fully animated room that the Séance Circle was intended to be, but personally, I prefer the original, stationary Leota on the table, for thematic reasons. She is the central point of reference in the entire ride. She should be a fixed star in the midst of this mad and whirling firmament. But that's another post:

• Floating Leota (2005) has never gotten anything more than a lukewarm response. The change felt, and still feels, wrong. Here's where treating this thing like a work of art proves its worth. What had always been the calm, stabilizing center of the ride was now simply another floating object. Everything about her—her chronological placement in the show flow, her pivotal position in the three-act play that is the Haunted Mansion, even her physical location in the room—announces that "here is the center, the eye of the storm." Nothing was gained and something was lost when she took flight.

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*Gravity Hill is a common label for the hundreds of similar attractions around the world that use crazily-built shacks and tilted landscaping to produce a variety of optical illusions that seem to defy gravity and distort dimensions. The "Magnetic Mystery Mine" on WDW's Tom Sawyer Island, designed by Marc Davis, is a gravity hill attraction. Davis also drew up plans for a Fun House for the Fort Wilderness Campground that included gravity hill illusions, but that one was never realized. Knott's had a very good one for many years called "The Haunted Shack."

Footsteps into the Unknown

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Updated June 19, 2020

The highlight of the 2007 "Rehaunting" of the WDW Haunted Mansion (as it was called) was the addition of the "Grand Staircase" (as it was called):

Martin's Videos

It was the first time a "phantom footprints" effect had been incorporated into any of the Mansions, even though there had been plenty of interest in this sort of ghostly effect in the earliest years of the ride's development. A previously unknown example of exactly this interest has recently come to light. More about that later. First, some typical LF background...


     Mysterious Footprints

Mysterious footprints come in a variety of flavors, of course. There are the sort known as
"the Devil's hoof prints," such as appeared perhaps most famously in Devon, in 1855:  

Then there are anomalous human footprints, appearing where they shouldn't be . . .  

Then there are cryptozoological examples, like Bigfoot.
Bigfoot prints are . . . well, big footprints.

The Devil's footprints in Devon defied natural law, going up to walls and continuing on the other side as if the wall wasn't there, and going up and down steep rooflines (as in the illustration above). That feature will be significant in the discussion to follow.

But what about GHOSTS?

I was getting to that. Within ghost lore, inexplicable footsteps are a long-standing feature (or should we say, "long-walking feature"?). Footprints are less common than footfalls; that is, the sound of footsteps. As we have seen (well, heard), an elaborate "ghostly footsteps" effect was planned for the Endless Hallway and Corridor of Doors area, but they gave it the boot, mere months before opening. It's not surprising that they wanted to include such an effect, as phantom footfalls are VERY common in the literature on hauntings and poltergeist activity. They are often among the first of many strange occurrences, the opening movement to a symphony of the bizarre.

Still, visible prints are also common enough. If you Google "ghosts" or "haunted" and add "wet footprints" or "strange footprints," you'll get a lot of hits. I especially like the report of a security guard quitting his job in the middle of the night after witnessing wet footprints appear, walking into the lobby of a (very, very) haunted Gap warehouse in Groveport, Ohio.

Like I say, there are plenty of more-or-less credible-sounding reports of anomalous footprints (e.g. HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE). The prints are usually watery or dirty, but sometimes bloody, and yes, sometimes glowing. The closest account I've seen to something resembling the effect found in the Mansion's "Grand Staircase" is this one on Reddit, posted in 2013:

Glowing footprints....has anyone else ever seen them?

I am submitting this question on behalf of my roommate. He is now thirty years old and about 20 years ago, while on a class trip to a campsite in NJ, he witnessed glowing footprints standing right next to his bed. The lights were off and he just happened to look down on the floor and saw two glowing footprints next to his bed. They were positioned as if someone was standing over him. He at first thought that his boots were glowing (he was ten years old and couldn't fathom any other explanation). After he stared at them for a minute though, he realized that they were indeed glowing footprints standing next to his bed.

He kind of freaked out and called his classmates attention to it (there were about 10 other kids sleeping in the same cabin). ALL of the other students witnessed the same thing and they got scared and turned the lights on. The footprints were not visible with the lights on but as soon as they turned the lights out, they reappeared. And to make it even stranger, throughout the night, the footprints made their way to a wall and eventually disappeared (apparently through the wall?).

My roommate is NOT the type to imagine things and is not into the paranormal at all. He is 100% sure of what he and the other students saw that night. When he talks about it he only says, "you know how you run through all of your life experiences in your head right before you die? Well, that experience is bookmarked as one of the strangest, most inexplicable things in my entire life."

So yeah, Im just wondering if anyone else has ever experienced anything similar?

EDIT: Thanks for the input guys. He is quite sure that it was not anything that anyone tracked into the cabin. They were two perfectly formed footprints standing right next to his bed. As the night went on, they changed positions gradually until they were literally standing in front of the wall. And then....they just disappeared as though they walked right through the wall. The footprints were always only in one spot at a time.

In the Philippines people have been freaking out over a child's dirty footprint that keeps appearing in shopping malls:

Why a small child, you ask?  Because even the ghosts are trying to reduce their carbon footprint on the planet. Ba-da-bing.

Plenty of photos out there. Decide for yourself what to make of the whole business.
The point is, ghost footprints are still very much a part of paranormal phenomena.

I don't pretend to know what's going on, but clearly something strange is afoot.

The tread of the dead?  Toes of those in repose?  Tootsies of the kaputsies?

Freshly made by an unshod shade?

What's creepy is that these appeared when there wasn't a sole around.

Okay, I'll stop.

I really like this next one. Reminds me of the Anderson sketches below.

Although these are all contemporary accounts, I think it's safe enough to assume that similar stories were around in the days of the Haunted Mansion's development. Ghostly footprints can be found in old films and literature as well. A particularly good example can be seen in the schlocky 1960 horror film, Tormented, featuring the vengeful ghost of a murdered woman. (Those are such a pain in the ass.)

I'll cite one literary example, early enough to have been known to the Mansion Imagineers and especially relevant because of where the prints appear (as you'll see presently). Back in the 30's and 40's a magician and author named Clayton Rawson published a series of mystery novels featuring a magician-cum-detective named The Great Merlini. (Same basic premise as this short-lived TV series.) A couple of the books were even made into movies. Anyway, one of them is a locked room, haunted house mystery called The Footprints on the Ceiling:

Of course the footprints are hoaxed, as you would expect in a detective story. But this still demonstrates indirectly the presence of the "ghostly footprints" motif in pop culture. After all, if a literary or cinematic criminal hoaxes something like this in order to scare off investigators, it must be the case that such footprints are a recognized element of ghost lore, no?  The inference is obvious enough for a Scooby Doo cartoon.

©Hanna-Barbara

Blueprints for Yellow, White, and Green Prints

Let us now turn our steps back toward the Haunted Mansion. As we have seen before, the theme of ghostly footprints begins with Ken Anderson, as with so many other ideas. Ken was rather fond of phantom feet, and we see them in several of his concept sketches (as painted by Alt). Unlike all the Imagineers who followed in his footsteps, Ken favored bare feet, which is actually closer to reports of the genuine phenomenon.

Claude Coats included ghostly footprints in his 1966 concept art for the Grand Ballroom, but we know he was mostly just copying Ken:

UPDATE (6-20-20): An overlooked detail in Anderson's "Bloodmere Manor" script, dated Sept 17, 1957, is highly relevant here. At the climax of the show, the wedding scene in the "Great Hall," the ghost groom lifts off his bride's head to kiss it, she slaps him, and all hell breaks loose. One detail in the turbulent cacophony that follows is rarely reported: Footprints run all around the floor and even up the walls. This anticipates the 1961 document discussed below.

When Anderson was taken off the project in 1958, it was handed over to Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey,
and the footprint idea was retained. When Yale drew up a list of 89 ideas for the Mansion,
"Footsteps" was #15, and he came up with two different ways to achieve the effect:

Until recently, the next steps in this historical review would have taken
us to Coats '66 and from there to the WDW Grand Staircase in '07.

A Fleeting Haunted House Meeting

As mentioned earlier, some newly discovered evidence sheds unexpected light on this topic. This is the real reason for doing this post!

The document is a set of notes from a "Haunted House Meeting" on November 22, 1961, and it contains an outline of the attraction as it was conceived at that very early date. As we saw in the Marc Davis post, the first two rooms of the attraction were already established in 1964: The Elongating Room and the Portrait Hall. You might think that those rooms were determined because, after all, the elevators and breezeway under the railroad tracks had already been constructed by 1964, but thanks to this new evidence we now know that even in 1961, before the existing façade building had been built, that was the case. After those two rooms, however, the show was up for grabs. As we have seen, the third room in Davis's 1964 outline was the séance room. Interestingly, the '61 "Meeting" notes do not include a séance room per se, but on the other hand, the third room is called the "Ectoplasm Room" and is expected to possibly have a "drawing room decor," so it may not be a coincidence that the actual séance room does indeed feature a parlor-like decor and an ectoplasm effect (at least until recently; the effect vanished between 2017 and 18).

The 1969 "effects" blueprints explicitly refer to the wandering blob as "ectoplasm."

An old WDW shot:

The "Meeting" notes are actually very brief at this point and describe only one effect in the "Ectoplasm Room." You guessed it, ghostly footprints. Lots of them. On the walls. On the ceiling. Leaving "fanny marks" when the footprints show that the ghosts have apparently bumped into each other and have fallen down (or fallen up, I guess, since it's "on the ceiling"). I imagine the "fanny marks" were a pair of ovals?

As we now know, this effect was largely anticipated in a 1957 Ken Anderson

script, which mentions footprints on the floor and walls but not the ceiling.

Curiously, the Ghost Host chooses this moment to give us the number of ghosts hereabouts. Not 13, as in the movie that probably inspired such enumerations, and not 1001, as in some early publicity. Not 999, either. It's 485! The significance of the number, if there is any, escapes me.


1961, Meet 2007

I don't know if the Imagineering crew for WDW's "Rehaunting" in 2007 was aware of this 1961 document. Obviously there are differences, like the stairs themselves of course, but nothing I've seen in any other HM historical material sounds closer to a description of what they did: a room full of glowing footprints walking about, defying gravity, moving sideways and even upside down.

There have been a number of conjectures as to how they did the footsteps. Fibre optics and embedded LED lighting are often mentioned. The truth is that the footprints are simply projections, not terribly different in principle from what Yale Gracey came up with many decades ago.

We've often been told that WDI never throws an idea away, meaning that something in the dead files may yet come to life years later. This newly uncovered document provides us with another good example of an old idea stepping out of the shadows at a much later date and becoming a visible reality. Ken Anderson conceived it, Yale Gracey figured out how to do it, the 1961 team figured out how to use it, and the 2007 team finally did it.

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