Always Room For One More

This is the second of our two Halloween episodes, and this one takes us to a surprising destination... Disneyland. What is the unexpected secret behind The Haunted Mansion? What are some people smuggling into Disneyland on a monthly basis? And most importantly, what is the signature grisly experience that many Disney janitorial staff end up having to go through?

Find out... on WHAT?! EXPLAIN.

*Lightning and thunder*


Audio mixing done by Craig Murdock, who still remains an absolute delight. 

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Transcript

1.       Disneyland is one of the most popular theme parks in the world, opening for business in 1955, giving fans of the Walt Disney movies direct contact with the characters that they knew so well. 

2.       Over one hundred million people enter into Disney parks the world over every year, often traveling across countries or internationally to do so. 

3.       Some of these people are lifelong fans of all things Disney, who make a pilgrimage of a sort to Disneyland annually, or even more often than that, planning their vacations around it. 

4.       While the parks themselves changed over time, one of the mainstays is the Haunted Mansion, which has existed in Disneyland for over 50 years. 

5.       With a movie, many comic adaptations, and a Muppets special based on it, The Haunted Mansion is a cultural icon for many. 

6.       The ride takes you through an old manor that claims to be the home of 999 happy haunts, and, as the story says, there’s always room for one more. 

7.       For most people going through the attraction, it is a delightfully ominous tone-setter for what is definitely one of the scarier rides at a Disney Park. 

8.       However, to some Disney fans, they take that statement a bit more seriously. 

9.       In fact, some of them make arrangements to try and become one of those haunts after they passed on, by having their friends and family try to sneak through and scatter their ashes all over the Haunted Mansion. I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and this is What?! Explain. 

10.   The Haunted Mansion is, to summarize it briefly, supposed to be the scariest ride at Disney for anyone not afraid of roller coasters, jungle cruises, or animatronic pirates. 

11.   It originated all the way back in 1951, when Walt Disney started hiring his “Imagineers”, a combination of architects, engineers, designers, and people who worked on his previous Disney movies to make a theme park out of the 160 acres of Anaheim real estate he had purchased. 

12.   One of the initial concept drawings for the park showed a small crooked street leading off of the main throughfare, past a church and a graveyard, towards a massive run-down manor house. 

13.   Walt Disney liked the concept enough that he put Ken Anderson, who was the art director on many of Disney’s most beloved movies at the time such as Snow White, Peter Pan, and Fantasia, in charge of creating a story to go with that drawing. 

14.   So Anderson went and looked for something to ground the story. When he found out that there were plans to create a New Orleans themed area in Disneyland, a lightbulb went off in his head.

15.    He pitched Disney an idea of an old broken-down plantation house overgrown with weeds, boarded up and swarming with bats. 

16.   However, Disney didn’t want an old, broken-down looking plantation house on his new theme park, and moved the idea more towards the Winchester Mystery House, with staircases that led nowhere, and windows and doors that opened into walls rather than outdoors or into hallways. 

17.   Thus given his marching orders, Anderson started coming up with potential stories for events that could have happened in that Haunted Mansion, 

18.   such as a sea captain that killed his wife, then hung himself, a mansion that would be home to a very unfortunate family, and a wedding attended by as many Disney villains and ghosts as he could shove in. 

19.   As these ideas were being fleshed out, so to speak, construction began on the façade of the Haunted Mansion in 1961, and was completed in 1963. However, the attraction itself wasn’t officially opened to the public until 1969, six years later. 

20.   Additionally, Disney’s death in 1966 caused work on the Haunted Mansion’s interior to change from the original plan. 

21.   Rather than the walk-through attraction with a restaurant at the end that Disney was aiming for, the Imagineers nixed the walking idea in favor of a sort of track-based system of cars, 

22.   in which the “ridegoers” simply sat in a small car, known as a “Doom Buggy”, and then the track would move the buggy, and the participants with it, along the ride. 

23.   This allowed more people to move through it quickly, which the Imagineers favored, rather than the much slower walk-through option. 

24.   They could also put many design features much closer to the participants in the ride, since they were being held in the buggy, rather than putting everything behind glass. 

25.   After Disney’s death, there was also a bit of a schism between the two main ride designers, Mark Davis, and Claude Coats on whether or not the ride should be scary, or fun. 

26.   Coats, who started at Disney as a background designer, thought the ride should be scarier, showing terrifying vistas and visual effects as the ridegoers moved on. 

27.   Davis, the animator and character designer, thought that the ride should have more varied characters and involve more humorous sight gags, as was the traditional sort of Disney way. 

28.   The two designers stayed with their strengths, and no progress may ever have been made had it not been for the intervention of a third Imagineer named Francis X Atencio, who basically took both of their designs, and slammed them together. 

29.   Atencio decided to transition back and forth throughout the ride between character-driven gags and more ominous proceedings, such as the ghost of the bride with a still-beating heart that can be seen floating in a section of the ride. 

30.   The Haunted Mansion opened its doors to the public on August 12th, 1969, and has been an integral part of Disneyland ever since. Two additional Haunted Mansions opened in the Magic Kingdom in Florida in 1970 and Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, to prove the success of the attraction. 

31.   Despite not being based on any previously existing Disney movie, it remains one of the most popular rides in all of the Disney parks to this day.  

32.   However, when an attraction claims to be home to 999 happy haunts in what seems to be eternal revelry, some people want to be a part of that in the afterlife as well. 

33.   A rumor began to brew around some of the Disney fan sites that some park-goers were caught spreading ashes of their deceased loved ones into the Haunted Mansion ride. 

34.   It became something of an urban legend for the Disney community for over a decade until 2018, when the Wall Street Journal ran a story that not only confirmed that this had happened in the past at the Haunted Mansion, but that it happened MONTHLY. 

35.   Some of the people interviewed (anonymously, of course), said that it was not only possible to sneak human remains past the watchful eyes of Disney security, but they had it down to a science. 

36.   Depending on the amount of ash you wanted to smuggle in, you could put the ashes in a small prescription pill canister, or even in one of the pills themselves, if you have one of the pull-apart plastic ones. 

37.   Other people use makeup compacts, which I guess nobody looks at hard enough to wonder why exactly the “makeup” within seems to not match the makeup on the person. 

38.   For those willing to do a lot less preparation, sometimes a ziplock bag in the bottom of a purse will do. 

39.   There can be a more somber case made for why people are smuggling the remains of their deceased loved ones with them into Disneyland.

40.    If having your ashes laid to rest in Disneyland is your last request, you loved the park and odds are, your friends and family either knew, or shared that love as well. 

41.   This would be their way of taking the deceased to the park one last time, and ensuring that some part of them stayed in this place that they enjoyed more than anything. 

42.   While this is a beautiful sentiment, it does leave two sections out of the equation: the Disney employees that have to clean up said ashes, and all the people ALSO on the ride who would probably have to walk off and leave if the ride has to be shut down because someone started throwing mysterious powders around. 

43.   However, Disney tends to not do that as much, preferring to lean more towards subtly moving a custodian over to the site with the key phrase “HEPA (heh-pah)Cleanup”, after the type of vacuum filter needed to properly collect fine particles such as human ash. 

44.   Apparently, this sort of cleanup is a signature part of the Disneyland custodial experience, as ashes are not only spread in the Haunted Mansion, but in the flowerbeds on Main Street, in the water at Pirates of the Caribbean, and sometimes in the bay where the fireworks are shot off. 

45.   That being said, The Haunted Mansion is still  far and away the most popular place for people to attempt to put the remains of their loved ones. 

46.   While there is something to be said for the dedication that people have to Disneyland and the parks therein, , it seems a nice thought that they would want to spend eternity in the park that gave them such joy in life, in practice YOU SHOULD NOT SPREAD HUMAN REMAINS IN PUBLIC PLACES. 

47.   At best, you are dispersing a potential biohazard into a crowded area that you snuck past security. At worst, Disney has stated that they will call the police on people who are spreading ashes around and have them escorted from the park. 

48.   Plus, the whole “people spreading mysterious powders around public places” tends to be regarded dimly by the police. 

49.   In fact, they were called to Disneyland in 2019 regarding a woman who was seen scattering ashes on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, so Disney very much does not mess around in this regard. 

50.   Since it is less than a week before Halloween, and nearer to the time of Samhain, where the boundary between our world and the next tends to be at its thinnest, according to Celtic folklore, this is the time where spirits are on everyone’s mind. 

51.   Whether delightful spookiness, or straight up terrifying appearances, ‘tis the season for them all to appear, and when one can be closest to those they have lost. 

52.   However, if you find yourself about to start smuggling the remains of those loved ones through security to spread them in an area that could maybe shut down a large portion of a theme park, maybe, just maybe, reconsider. 

53.   Happy Halloween, and keep your ashes to yourself. I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and I’ll talk to you in three weeks. 

54.  Audio mixing for this episode was done by Craig Murdock, who informs me that I am this pale not because of any vampiric effects, but because I should probably go outside more. 

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