Imagineer interview: How Disney turned the Haunted Mansion into a bar
Discover the making of The Haunted Mansion Parlor onboard the Disney Treasure cruise ship from the Imagineers who created it.
The Haunted Mansion Parlor is a unique bar onboard the Disney Treasure cruise ship, which debuted last December. (The lounge will also be on the upcoming Disney Destiny, which sets sail in late 2025.) In adapting the story world of the classic Disney theme park attraction into a bar venue, the artists at Walt Disney Imagineering had their work cut out for them.
In the weeks and months leading up to the launch of the Disney Treasure, Attractions Magazine staff conducted and attended interviews with these artists and leaders. Below is their tale of making The Haunted Mansion Parlor, presented in the style of an oral history.
Darren McBurney, cruise director of the Disney Treasure:
On the Disney Treasure, for the very first time — we’ve never done it on a ship before — we’re going to take the idea of some of those [theme park] attractions that you like and turn them into special locations. Of course, the coolest one is … The Haunted Mansion Parlor.
Nicholas Snyder, senior concept designer at Walt Disney Imagineering:
It started with the idea of, “Hey, we finally get to get out of our Doom Buggies. We get to open one of the corridor doors. What’s inside?” … Of course, we’re all huge Haunted Mansion fans: all of Imagineering, all of the fanbase. We looked at all of the Haunted Mansions around the world: Phantom Manor [at Disneyland Paris] and the Haunted Mansion in our three locations [at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland]. We wanted to take all of those iconic pieces that you always see when you’re in the attraction and try to figure out, “How can we bring that to Disney Cruise Line and bring that nautical twist?”
Danny Handke, senior creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering:
It’s a story of a jolly sea captain. He’s our version of the aging man that you see in the Haunted Mansion attraction at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. The sea captain found a bride washed ashore and saved her life. They were soon to be wed, and all the mysterious happenings started happening around her. She has this creepy music box that’s key to this story of the whole space. You can discover that story as you sit through here, but let’s say their engagement was short-lived. You might even hear the souls of her victims coming from that very music box.
Nicholas Snyder, senior concept designer at Walt Disney Imagineering:
We, of course, partnered with a lot of our different partners across Imagineering, including Kim Irvine [director of concept design at Walt Disney Imagineering]. … Little twists and bends … makes it very specific to Disney Cruise Line, but still harnesses that very classic, nostalgic Haunted Mansion onboard of what we’re calling an original, first-class parlor that you would’ve seen on original cruise liners back in the early 1900s.
Danny Handke, senior creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering:
When you come inside the lounge, it’s going to go through that classic structure of the attraction, where you attend the funeral for our captain character, the captain ghost. We’re attending his funeral. You hear that funeral music. You hear the Ghost Host. Then the funeral goes into limbo. All the ghosts are trying to materialize, but we can’t see them yet, so we have to go through the seance led by Madame Leota. After the seance, then we go to the swinging wake. The whole space comes alive with special effects, ghosts, illusions, and it becomes a real swinging party while you drink your spirits as part of the experience.
Daniel Joseph, executive of illusions and effects development at Walt Disney Imagineering:
With the Doom Buggy, as you go through the Mansion, just like a movie camera, you’re aimed to see things just from a specific perspective, which as an illusion inventor and as an illusion designer is what we want because if you see something off-axis just a little bit, you might see something that we don’t want you to see.
One of the challenges and calls to action when we were brainstorming this Parlor about five years ago was doing things that you can see from different angles and doing some things that you can see in the round, which is really, really, really hard. In those brainstorms, I remember we came up with a bunch of different, fun gags and looked at some things that hadn’t made it into original Haunted Mansions and put them through that lens.
They have to be funny. They’re creepy and funny because we have happy haunts. The Haunted Mansion is a spooky place, but a happy place. What of those things can we do in here that would play to that and work as the close-up magic? Everything in the Haunted Mansion [ride] you go by relatively quickly and you see at a distance and you see at the perspective that we want you to see it in.
Danny Handke, senior creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering:
Brother Roland [a bust on display in The Haunted Mansion Parlor] is based on Rolly Crump, our legendary Walt Disney Imagineer. In the 1960s, he developed a Museum of the Weird, which was one of the ideas for the Haunted Mansion. The Museum of the Weird never saw the light of day. When we started doing our research to design The Haunted Mansion Parlor, we took a lot of inspiration from Rolly’s original designs, especially the ghost fish aquarium. You might see some of Rolly’s designs in our carpet, as well. A lot of inspiration taken from him to create this whole atmosphere.
Daniel Joseph, executive of illusions and effects development at Walt Disney Imagineering:
The ghost fish aquarium was something that Rolly Crump devised with his Museum of the Weird concept, which was first debuted in the 1965 Disneyland Tencennial special, where Julie Reihm [Disneyland’s first ambassador] takes Walt around the WED Model Shop. They look at a bunch of really cool things and they meet Rolly, and Rolly has all these weird things that he’s come up with: these little maquettes and models and things. One of the things was the ghost fish aquarium.
Photo courtesy of Disney
I think for a bunch of us, we’re Mansion fans for sure, but we’re also Imagineering history fans who got to work on this project. [The ghost aquarium] had to happen because we’re doing a nautical bent on the Haunted Mansion story. What better to celebrate that than a ghost fish aquarium? And also to celebrate one of our favorite Imagineers of the past, Rolly, and give him a moment to finally have that come to life — or come to the afterlife, if you will.
The really cool thing is the way we did the illusion is when you sit on one side of the room, you can look through it and see other guests on the other side of the room, just like a regular aquarium — because for all intents and purposes, it is a regular aquarium — but there’s the magic part of these skeleton ghost fish that appear and do funny, happy-haunt things in there all day long. That, to me, is a prime example of leaning into the difficulty of being able to see something in the round because you can see that from every angle.
Danny Handke, senior creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering:
We’ve created a brand-new music loop with our composer, Shruti Kumar. She created a 40-minute experience weaving in all those classic themes that bring this whole experience to life with new arrangements that give this big, emotional arc to the whole experience. You’ll hear all those classic sound effects, classic voices, and some new things, as well.
Daniel Joseph, executive of illusions and effects development at Walt Disney Imagineering:
The notion of the haunted, real-looking portrait that does things magically was first debuted at the 1969 version of Haunted Mansion at Disneyland with the portrait corridor as you walk down in the queue to get to your Doom Buggy.
We wanted to do a new-generation version of that and something that would hold up to very close scrutiny, something you could literally put your eye right up near and look at and not figure out how it works.
This is a very, very fun, new kind of illusion technique with all the realism of a real painting and the texture and the magic of going to a museum and seeing a real textured painting and seeing brushstrokes, but then seeing these do things that paintings don’t normally do. That nautical bent is what we leaned into with the paintings, as well. They’re all based on the original Marc Davis concepts for our attraction, our land-based attraction, but just like the other things, take on that nautical bent and also expand the story a little bit.
Danny Handke, senior creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering:
There are a couple of really good “spirits.” One is non-alcoholic called the Sympathetic Libations. Then we also have a mocktail called the Ghoulish Delight that will be perfect for families. We also have some really exciting margaritas: a black margarita that has a message in invisible ink, so if you shine a light on it, you’ll see a hidden message.
Daniel Joseph, executive of illusions and effects development at Walt Disney Imagineering:
With the original Imagineers, there was a treasure trove of stuff that hit the cutting-room floor that they worked on for 10 years. The Mansion started development in the very early ‘60s and finally opened a decade later. We were not on the same timeline, but the same idea — lot of different things that hopefully will just go on the shelf and we can use maybe elsewhere.
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