Fun Facts About the Haunted Mansion Grand Hall

August 2, 2013 in All Posts, attraction tips, disneyland, fun facts, Randy, Tips & Tricks for Families by Babes in Disneyland

Photo courtesy of the Disneyland Resort

If you’ve ever ridden through the ballroom scene in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and said to yourself, “I’d like to know how they do that!” then today’s Fun Fact Friday post is for you. Walt Disney loved to pull back the curtain and show people what they were working on and how it worked, and today we carry on that tradition in the hopes that knowing some of the how may inspire you to do things that seem impossible.

If you’d rather not know the “secret” of the haunts in this room, stop reading now. Come back later today–and every day–for great Babes in Disneyland content, but skip this post.

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The Grand Hall, with ghosts dancing, playing the organ, having a duel, and blowing out candles is one of the most captivating illusions in all of the Haunted Mansion. It’s also one of the oldest and simplest.

This effect is called the “Pepper’s Ghost” effect, and is named for the scientist who created in way back in 1862, but a description of the effect appears in a book called Natural Magic that was written in 1584 (first translated into English in 1658). Yes, the concept for this seemingly cutting-edge illusion dated back more than three centuries before Disneyland opened!

For being such a simple illusion, it can be somewhat difficult to describe, but as your resident Disney trivia expert, I’ll do my best.

The ballroom you see is real. All the furnishings, decorations, etc. in there are really there. Between you and the scene below is a large (90 feet long by 30 feet high) piece of glass, and behind you–above and below–is a nearly-exact duplicate of the room you’re looking at, with three exceptions: (1) all the furnishings and the walls are duplicate shapes (without the detail) in flat black, (2) some furnishings are missing, to create the proper illusion, and (3) there are animatronic ghost figures in it.

The Pepper’s Ghost effect–no matter where it’s used: Disneyland, performances of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, magic shows, or wherever–works like this. When you look at a room through a pane of glass at an angle (either you or the glass is angled), the light bounces off the glass at that same angle forming a “V” shape. By putting something at the other side of that “V” and lighting it, the reflection off the glass forms a “ghostly” image that seems to be in the room. These images can be made to appear and disappear simply by turning the light on and off.

The duplicate ballroom behind and both above & below you has the animatronics in it, as I said before. As they are lit, the reflections appear in the ballroom you can see, and so the ghosts materialize.

This makes a lot more sense with a picture, and I’m no artist, so here’s a visual representation from the Haunted Dimensions website.

That’s really all there is to it. An incredibly simple and believable effect that’s ages old, yet continues to delight guests to this day!

For you to discover: Another Disneyland attraction uses this same effect multiple times. Which attraction is it?

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2 Comments

Comments

JMama says

August 5, 2013 at 4:09 pm

Is the other ride Snow White? The evil queen appears in a similar way.

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Randy Crane says

August 13, 2013 at 5:04 am

Very good guess, but I don’t think so. I’ll do some research though to find out exactly what effect is used there–I could be wrong!

You’re very close, though…in a manner of speaking.

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