The Haunted Mansion (location)

The antebellum house known as the Haunted Mansion

An antebellum mansion, known as "The Haunted Mansion," is the eponymous location of the original Haunted Mansion.

Description

Description

Located in New Orleans Square on Esplanade Street, this mansion is built in the antebellum Neoclassical style of architecture. Through the gateway of the mansion there is a small family cemetery located on a berm above a series of crypts. Closer to the front of the mansion there is a pet cemetery, sundial, and a white hearse with no driver or horse. Located at the back of the estate is a large cemetery, which can only be accessed via the house itself or by a flooded mausoleum located outside the mansion's grounds. The mansion also has a garden area filled with statues, which serves as an alternative entrance to the grounds.

Features:

1st floor

• The Foyer: A foyer is a small entrance hall which resembles a funeral parlour.
• The Portrait Gallery: An octagonal room decorated with four portraits of some of the mansion's residents as they appeared in their "corruptible, mortal states."
• The Portrait Corridor: This is a corridor with several windows on one side and on the other, five portraits. At the end of the hall are two marble busts.
• The Great Hall: The Great Hall is a grand ballroom with a fireplace, crystal chandelier, dining room table, dance floor, and pipe organ. It has gateways to the outside in addition to stairs and balconies leading to different stories of the manor.

2nd floor

• The Endless Hallway: The Endless Hallway is a dark supernatural corridor lined with doors; it seems to go on infinitely.
• The Conservatory: The conservatory is a glass-lined room which holds a great number of wild, dead, and decaying plants.
• The Corridor of Doors: The corridor of doors is a series of hallways lined with doors, photographs of the dead, disturbed wallpaper and other macabre décor.
• The Séance Chamber: This is the chamber where the undead clairvoyant Madame Leota performs her rituals.
• Alcove: A curtained-off alcove is found on the balcony level of the ballroom. It is visible only during Haunted Mansion Holiday, when it is revealed to be a small library.

3rd floor and 4th floor

• The Attic: The Mansion's Attic is the home of the ghost of the Victorian gold-digging serial killer, Constance Hatchaway (aka the Black Widow Bride), who married and subsequently murdered five wealthy men for their inheritances. The attic is filled with souvenirs and mementos from her life of crime, including a piano being played by a Shadow Pianist.
• The Attic Balcony: An old derelict balcony with a broken railing is where the Hatbox Ghost is found, standing alongside a collection of five Hatboxes.
• The Cupola: The Cupola is where the Ghost Host hung himself to death and still holds his rotting skeleton.

Background

A painting featured in Club 33 of the Mansion before it became haunted.

The Haunted Mansion was a white-washed Antebellum Mansion of late 18th/early 19th century architecture built on Esplanade Street within the French Quarters of New Orleans, Louisiana, overlooking the Mississippi River. Since the mansion is located in the French Quarter, this indicated that the mansion was build in 1789. While unconfirmed and now typically seen as non-canonical, Disney sources and cast-members sometimes say that the mansion was built by a ruthless and ill-fated sea-captain. It is known that the mansion was once owned by a family, who seemingly suffered great tragedies and all wound up dying from sudden and unnatural causes, being buried within the estate's berm plot.

At some unspecified point in time (likely within either the 19th Century or early 20th century), a man (possibly the manor's owner or some head-of-staff) committed suicide by hanging himself within the Mansion's cupola; this personage went on to become the estate's "Ghost Host." At another unknown point there a clairvoyant Romani woman known as Madame Leota worked out of a Caravan where she sold her supernatural services; Leota had some connection with the Mansion and upon death became its undead medium.

By 1879, the mansion was owned by a wealthy man named George Hightower. George was engaged to a beautiful and charming woman named Constance Hatchaway; however, George was unaware that she was secretly a gold-digging serial-killer, intent on murdering him after their marriage to inherit his wealth (a scheme she had already enacted on four previous occasions). Constance succeeded in the scheme and used the manor's attic to hide the evidence and twisted "souvenirs" of her criminal career, going on to live a long and happy life which only ended in her old age.

Constance appears to have had an affiliation during the Victorian era with a mysterious figure who was a man held sway over some of the hatboxes which may be inferred to contain the heads of her grooms. While the nature of their relationship is unknown, he died by means of decapitation, with his own head also having been stashed into a hatbox; he may be presumed also to have been killed by Constance, since this death fits her general modus operandi. This ghost would become the most mysterious phantom in the mansion, coming to be known as The Hatbox Ghost. It can be inferred by comparing Constance's age in her 1879 bridal photos to that of her portrait in the stretching room that she likely died at some point between 1910 and 1930.

Since Constance's absence from the estate, at least three families have attempted to move into the Haunted Mansion, with the price of the mansion continuously decreasing. The third family, who are known as the Johnson family, who were subsequently chased out of the mansion by a variety of spirits. Becoming known as "The Haunted Mansion", the estate served as a kind of retirement home for ghosts and spirits from creepy old crypts all over the world, who acquired "Post Lifetime Leases" from the mansion's Ghost Relations Department. The Mansion was seemingly run by the Ghost Host and the Ghostess, so by the anachronistic time in which the attraction takes place, the manor has 999 happy haunts occupying it. Nonetheless, there is always room for a thousand, if any mortal guests care to volunteer.

Haunted Mansion Holiday

During the Christmas season, Jack Skellington and the inhabitants of the fantastical Halloween Town come to the mansion to assist in a macabre celebration of the holidays. Apparently this practice had been taking place since the 1930s, when the Johnsons reported Jack and Zero's presence in the mansion.

Appearances

Camp Discovery

A newspaper clipping here shows a photo of the Antebellum Mansion, mentioning the Johnson family's abandoning it in the 1930s.

Club 33

In this exclusive New Orleans Square dining-service is a booth featuring a portrait of the mansion.

The Haunted Mansion

Haunted Mansion Holiday

In this overlay, the Antebellum Mansion hosts residents of Halloween Town. Within the portrait corridor, there is a painting of the mansion as it appears with its holiday decorations. Variations of the mansion's likeness are often used to depict the gingerbread house. In 2019, the gingerbread house was made to resemble the mansion for the attraction's 50th anniversary.

Main Street Cinema

There is a posting from the Disneyland Casting Agency for spirits to apply to the mansion's Ghost Relations Department to partake in a musical revue at the manor.

The Mark Twain Riverboat

The mansion is brought up in the narration of this attraction, when the captain mentions the urban myths and ghost stories surrounding the estate.

Alternate Versions

Ghost Gallery

The Antebellum Mansion is alluded to within this cast-member-created backstory for the Haunted Mansion, despite its revolving around the Florida incarnation of the attraction. In the Ghost Gallery, we learn of a man named Jamie Padgett, who owns the mansion in the form of a grand plantation in New Orleans.

Padgett comes to be seduced by Little Leota who is fixated on inheriting his plantation for her own goals. She goes about this with her New Orleans lover, Nicholas Crown, who manages to convince Jamie that he is a vampire so that they can stuff him in a coffin and suffocate/starve him to death.

Haunted Mansion (Slave Labour Graphics Comics)

See:  Gracey Manor (comics version)

This version of the Antebellum Mansion is listed as having the 1313 address on its street. It was most notably owned by the pirate captain William Gracey AKA Captain Blood.

The Haunted Mansion (film)

See: Gracey Manor (2003 film version)

Haunted Mansion (2023 film)

See: Gracey Manor (2023 film version)

The Haunted Mansion (Disney Kingdoms comics)

A version of the Antebellum Mansion serves as the main location of this series. Here, apparently there are only four ghosts who actually died on the manor's ground (even though the series clearly shows us the corpses of ghosts who unequivocally died on the estate) with all the other spirits coming there from across the world. These four ghosts are the Hatbox Ghost, Constance Hatchaway, Madame Leota, and the Captain.

The spirit of the Captain is apparently obsessed with hunting down a supposed treasure which is stored in the halls of the manor. The manor is also home to the Endless Staircase and Ghostly Materials Gallery, which connect it to haunted locations all across the world (such as the comic variant of the Museum of the Weird, Ravenswood Manor, Gracey Manor, and others). Due to the captain's obsession, the manor became engulfed in a cloud of mist which prevented all 999 of the ghosts from leaving.

Tales from the Haunted Mansion

The Mansion seen in the book series is described as being close to New Orleans Square and resembling the Antebellum Mansion, but its enigmatic enchanted nature results in its also appearing in the form of Gracey Manor and Phantom Manor, depending on whoever is visiting it, with mortal access being by invitation only. Located along Route 13, the Mansion is placed on a tall hill, preventing GPS systems from locating it and also from its existing on conventional maps, with the only known physical map being tattooed on the leg of parapsychologist Rand Brisbane and removed from his corpse after he died in the Shepperton Sanitarium. The house's history is also shrouded in mystery, with the Gracey Family and Sea Captain legends being mentioned as possible origins alongside the idea of the house being concocted by a mad genius as an elaborate and deadly amusement park, though none of these are a definitive answer, and narrator Amicus Arcane specifically calls "Gracey Manor" an erroneous name for the house and celebrates that the Mansion is a rare lingering mystery in a world obsessed with origin stories.

Trivia

• The mansion was modeled after the (now-demolished) Shipley-Lydecker House in Baltimore, Maryland.
• Outside of the mansion is a sundial which reads "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be," a quotation from the poem "Rabbi Ben Ezra" (1864) by English poet Robert Browning; it is also decorated with the design of a winged hourglass.
• One of the porches has empty glasses and a lemonade pitcher set on a wicker table set.
• There used to be a spyglass and a barometer found on one of the second floor balconies, but they were removed in 2001. These set-pieces alluded to a deleted design draft in which the Haunted Mansion, to be known as Gore Manor, was originally built and owned by a pirate called "Captain Gore."
• There also used to be an empty birdcage hanging on the exterior of the house hanging from the southern porch. This referenced the Raven found within the ride which would go on to get its own birdhouse.
• The mansions in both the comics and in the 2003 film are visually inspired by the Antebellum Mansion and are set in New Orleans. The mansion in the 2023 reboot is based on the Antebellum mansion and is also set in New Orleans, while the Mansion in Walt Disney World is used for the basis for Crump Manor in that same movie.