Favourite Disney Rides - Haunted Mansion

September 20, 2017

Haunted Mansion - Walt Disney World

Continuing on with the theme of favourite rides, and I stress, these are in no particular order (as they are all favourites), I thought this week I would talk about the Haunted Mansion ride. If you have been on the Haunted Mansion ride - a trip down memory lane awaits you below. Feel free to agree/disagree in comments.

Haunted Mansion

Location: Anaheim Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland, Magic Kingdom (Walt Disney World, Orlando)

This was my very first Disneyland ride and did not disappoint. Basically, the queue starts from the cemetery and the general wait time takes about 20 minutes. Once you reach the mansion, about 20 people are herded into a ‘room stretching’ elevator room (which really transports you via an elevator, below ground level to outside the park where the ride actually is. You do not feel any movement however). Unfortunately, 7 year old A.J at the time was petrified and didn’t know what was happening, especially with rooms ‘stretching’, the initial room area being dark and with hidden elevators. This part is probably the only truly scary part of the ride for little kids.

Once well inside the mansion, you finally enter ‘Doom Buggies’, the transport system that takes you all over the haunted mansion as a dark ride. The ride isn’t that scary at all, just the pre-loading section may frighten some kids. The Doom buggies travel to different rooms and the rooms are incredibly detailed throughout so a good ride to try multiple times. The favourite section is usually considered to be the ball room where you see the dancing ghosts. I saw the Eddie Murphy movie ‘Haunted Mansion’ a few years back, just for fun after we first visited Disneyland in 2015. Some of it looked very familiar indeed. I think Disney were trying to create the same kind of following with that movie as the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ franchise. The movie in the end wasn’t that good, but it was fun seeing in the movie similar looking rooms as the Disney ride.

Original plans for Anaheim Disneyland had the Haunted mansion being a derelict, run down house. However, Walt Disney didn’t want a run-down mansion in his clean theme park. The Mansion also stood for a few years initially without a ride inside as the details for this were still being worked out. This increased speculation in the general public as to what the ride would end up being. Walt even considered it for a walk-through ride once, but the imagineers thought the loading time for the ride would be to slow.

Magic Kingdom also has the Haunted Mansion ride. Disneyland Paris has ‘Phantom Manor’ and Hong Kong Disneyland has ‘Mystic Manor’. Mystic Manor is a totally different experience though. Due to differences in the way Chinese people consider the after-life, Mystic Manor is more about magical beings and inanimate objects coming alive. It is a really nice ride with new trackless technology. To be reviewed next week…

These ladies greet you at the entrance to Haunted Mansion, Tokyo Disneyland

Haunted Mansion, Tokyo

Below are some photos from Walt Disney Worlds Haunted Mansion (the cemetery). It is filled with names such as Mr Toad (from Mr Toads wild ride) and Imagineers who have worked at Walt Disney World. There are rhymes and sayings written on the tombstones.