bighouse

Oftentimes, guests will ask Haunted Mansion cast members if the place is really haunted. After all, the late Paul Frees (voice of our Ghost Host AND Boris Badenov) invites you to join the 999 happy haunts. In real life, the Oriental Land Company presented a "gift" of a mummified severed human head to be the 1,000th ghost at the Big House in celebration of signing the contract for Tokyo Disneyland. The head is now kept at the Archives at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California. That's the logical explanation you'll hear from Disney Company Historian Dave Smith.

For the record, the answer as to whether there is paranormal phenomenon happening in the big house, the answer is yes (ok, so I've been watching "Spooky" Mulder wayyyyyy too much). The thing is that an individual has to be sensitive to the vibes that otherworldly visitors give off. Some people only sense a presence, some hear them and some see them. I remember a rumor around the time the ride opened in 1970 that the ride was so scary, someone died of a heart attack in there. There's actually a kernal of truth in that rumor.

Back in the first summer of the ride's operation, it was a pretty good year for attendance. New Orleans Square could get landlocked with people in the area. Unfortunately, an elderly man had a heart attack in the loading area of the ride (where you get into the Omnimovers). The crew called Central First Aid for help, but because of the congestion in the Square, it took the Security Officer and the Nurse about 20 minutes to get accross from Main Street and by the time they arrived, the poor man had died. I was given this information by the wife of the ride operator who tended to the gentleman. Due to this incident, it was decided to put another First Aid station on the West Side of the park, so one opened in Bear Country the following year. You'll also note that when Mickey's Toontown opened an additional station went into the North Side of the park. That is the ONLY instance of a death in Anaheim's Haunted Mansion.

Before I tell you how I came to believe in ghosts, let me tell you a little bit about being a ride operator. We do what's called "rotation." Enough cast members are scheduled so that there are one or two more people working at the location than there are positions in the ride. As people come on, you get "bumped" to the next spot in the rotation. At the big house it goes like this: start out in Unload (the exit area), when you get bumped you go bump the Foyer person to the Control Tower, then go into one of the Expanding Rooms (ER)...bump that person to the Foyer, then go downstairs and take the Load 1 position . Load 1 goes to Load 2, the Load 2 person goes to one of the ERs, you work them both, get bumped to Foyer/Turnstyle then Control Tower and you finally get bumped to a break. Early in the morning or late at night when there isn't a full crew on, positions get eliminated by shutting down one of the ERs and then by having the Load 2 person do both that and operate the remaining ER, so there can be gaps when you are alone in the Load and Unload area for five to ten minutes or even more when it's really slow. So you stand there alone in the dark with the music and the "ghosts" howling in the background minding your own business, and when you least expect it...

I had been working at the big house for about two weeks and had gotten used to the ride operator custom of trying to scare the people you were working with when it was slow. It was about 11:00 at night and there were huge gaps between guests exiting at unload, so I decided to rest my feet off of the moving ramp. If you look to your left as you exit the cars, you see the Crypt behind a short wall. There's about four or five feet of space between the Crypt bars and the short wall. I was leaning on the wall watching the track to see when cars started coming with people in them. As I leaned over waiting, I felt a hard tug on my hair. It was a good hard yank on the right side, so I turned immediately to see who was trying to wake me up, but there was no one behind me on that side of the Crypt. I looked to the other side---no one there either. No one going out the emergency exit at the end of the Crypt, no one going up the speed ramp (where Little Leota says "hurry back...") and no one going into the door where the cars make the turn to go back to the Load area. I kind of stood there in shock for a second, then noticed that there were cars with people again, so I helped them exit and forgot about it.

After a couple of weeks, I had convinced myself that I had imagined my brushes with the happy haunts. No one who'd been there for years (one RO had worked for Disneyland since the park opened in 1955!) had mentioned anything to me about real ghosts and I considered myself an intelligent woman who was educated...not superstitious.

Early one morning, I was alone in Load waiting for a group of guests to be brought down. I was feeling lazy, so I was sitting on the low marble wall next to the load belt. Shelly, the foreman, was up in the lead office by herself and the ER was upstairs. As my feet dangled back and forth, the hem of my dress was lifted up in the air as if someone was trying to look under my skirt. The funny thing was that there was no breeze in there (a la Marilyn Monroe), my petticoat was still down by my ankles and there was no one in sight. Even stranger, there were indentations in the fabric of the skirt...you could see a dip in the center where the fabric was drooping between two hands, and there were ridges where the fingers would be holding the fabric into the knuckles. It seemed like an eternity, but it was about 30 seconds before the skirt gently went back down to where it belonged. I had been frozen in my seat while it hovered above my knees, but I got my wits back and went running up the ramp to the lead office screaming "SHELLY!!!" at the top of my lungs.