Disneyland's Haunted Mansion Event - Part I
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An all too familiar voice is heard, "When hinges creak in doorless chambers and strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls, whenever candlelights flicker when the air is deathly still, that is the time when ghosts are present practicing their terror with ghoulish delight. Welcome foolish mortals to the haunted mansion." A lone scream echoes through the theater.

Tim O’Day appears, "I am your host." The audience immedietely replies, "Your ghost host."

O’ Day continues, "Welcome everybody to this great celebration of hot and cold running chills, 30 years of the Haunted Mansion." In his first question of the panel he asks, "Did you guys have any idea when the Haunted Mansion opened in 1959 that it would be a Disney classic?"

Sam McKim, pictured on the far right, immediately responds with an enthusiastic "YES!" The crowd explodes in applause and cheers. O’Day then turns to Marc Davis, "Well Marc you were back there in the very beginning? Wasn’t the Haunted Mansion considered a walkthrough attraction?"

 

Mr. Davis replies, "… it [The Mansion] sat empty for something like five years or so. Walt walked in one day and said ‘Hey, let’s look into this thing and see what we can do.’" He talks about how the people who were working on it were trying to tell a story. "Walt Disney did not want to tell a story….We looked at this thing a number of different ways. Here was this building…and out front we put a bunch of gravestones. And there was a gravestone for each one of us. That was not very nice!" Davis adds with a bit of a chuckle. "Finally they decided that was not a good idea so they gave each one of us a gravestone. I had my gravestone in my office and here was this thing with my name on it. And I looked at it, after three days I was so depressed I told the fellow to come and get it. This was part of my beginning of the Haunted Mansion. I contributed the beautiful room, the dining room and created what happened in there. There were other people who worked on the other sections there and I worked on the graveyard. I was delighted I wasn’t in it…One scene I liked. I don’t know if anybody ever got it besides me." Mr. Davis recalls with great fondness, "There was this sarcophagus and in it was an Egyptian mummy sitting up and then there was a woman who dressed in the middle, oh, early 1900’s, I guess and there was another figure that was older than that. And this was really, really something! It scared the hell out of me! Because I had a dog sniffing the sarcophagus... So anyway we went on from that and on into where the ghosts joins us in our car and that was my remaining contribution, I think, to the Haunted Mansion…We’ve all contributed to this attraction."