Disneyland's Haunted Mansion Event - Part II
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This is the second part of a two part article covering Disneyland's Haunted Mansion 30th anniversary event. It picks up right where Part I left off. Click here to read Part I.

Turning to the gentlemen seated two seats to his left, O’Day says, “Well, Rolly let’s talk to you a little. As the Haunted Mansion was being developed and designed you were working on another project, The House of Illusion/Museum of the Weird.” Rolly replies, “Well that’s another story.”  Tim requests, “Tell us a little about it." “Well maybe I should tell you this," Rolly responds, “I started working with Yale Gracey in 1959 on all the illusions. Yale was a genius and all I did basically was just sort of build the boxes for him and help him build the illusions. And actually I was there the day he came up with the head in the ball which was incredible! Everything he did, well he just kind of screwed around with the stuff. And he went and got a projector of Hans Conreid’s face in Mirror, Mirror On the Wall from one of the television shows. And he took this projector and played it around the room and he was showing it on everything…Well I left for lunch and when I came back he had lined it up with a bust of Beethoven. So what happened was he projected Hans Conreid’s face on the bust of Beethoven. Of course nothing was in sync. The little face looked like it was alive but the result was incredible. And we showed it to Walt. Of course Walt fell in love with it and basically it became Leota in the ball. We just showed him what was involved. But working with Yale was such a hoot. "

Rolly continues, "He and I were given a huge room for a solid year. All we did was just read ghost stories and go to the movies and see ghost movies. In fact we took Walt along with us one time to see a movie called the seven ghosts or whatever and Walt actually went with us to a matinee. Yale and I just played around and we had a great time and out of that of course came all the illusions of the Haunted Mansion. A story on the humorous side, we grew up in animation and in animation we played gags on each other every day. It was just a crazy, crazy time. Yale and I had this big room and we had it all blocked off. We had a monster that blew up if you shot it with an infrared gun. We had a silk ghost that my wife made...which would come up and kind of shake. We had all kinds of crazy stuff in the room. We got a call from personnel one day and they said please leave the lights on because the janitors don’t want to come in unless the lights are on. Yale said o.k.…We rigged the whole room. We had the lights on, they were very dim and what we did was we hooked it up so there was an infrared beam halfway into the room. When they would break that beam the lights would go down, the black lights would come up, the ghosts would come out…the monster blew up and his head would fly around the room. Well sure enough Yale and I came to the work the next morning, the ghosts had been going all night, the head was hanging in the center of the room and right in the middle of the room was a broom…Personnel called and said they’re never coming back.”