Exploring a Haunted Mansion Mystery: The Man in the Web

“He was a cloaked figure with an evil grinning face. A hat box hung from his hand. With each beat of the bride’s heart, his head disappeared from his body and appeared in the hat box.”

If you’re a Disneyland fan, you know this scrap of prose. You very possibly read this with the distinctive, halting cadence of Thurl Ravenscroft’s narration as delivered on the “The Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion”. You also know the story behind it – how a vivid description and illustration in a children’s record led to decades of speculation about a ghost who did not appear on the ride; how Imagineering joined in the hunt to find the Hatbox Ghost through the pages of The E Ticket Magazine; the arrival of photographs unearthed by Imagineer Chris Merritt; the resuscitation of interest and discussion; the subsequent merchandise and triumphant return of “Hattie” to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion in 2015. 

 

But did you know that Walt Disney World has a similar character? It’s… well, okay, if Walt Disney World has a similar character it’s The Orange Bird – a character resuscitated through fan interest and now honored and feted with a statue and Golden Book during the resort’s 50th anniversary. Look, I can’t argue with that.

But bear with me here… because Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion specifically did have a character analogous to the Hatbox Ghost, an effect that helped make better sense of the scene he was in which was hardly seen by the general public before vanishing into the vaulted realm of myth and legend. He’s a lot less cool than the Hatbox Ghost, and a good deal more gruesome, but he was real, and not widely known about. This is the story of WDW’s Man in the Web, a “web site” denizen long before the internet was even a thing. And he lasted a whole day, maybe!

Work on the Florida Haunted Mansion actually began before the California Haunted Mansion was even complete. For several months, the only two individuals in WED Enterprises doing anything about Walt’s Florida Project were Herb Ryman and Ted Rich, who were working on designs for Cinderella Castle. Rich then created a drawing of a rambling old Colonial-style Mansion and Ryman painted it, meaning that for a time the only things that existed about Walt Disney World were the castle and the Mansion – for some of us this description is still accurate. This also means that while WED was hammering out what the heck this Haunted Mansion was supposed to be in 1967 and 1968, the drawings for the Florida version went into a drawer and stayed there.

What WED ended up doing was taking the footprint of the final attraction and rotating it to fit snugly alongside the Rivers of America. This necessitated the design and fabrication of a few new scenes to bring the Doombuggies to the point in the Disneyland Mansion where the loading point is; afterward, the track and scenery of the two versions would be nearly identical. These scenes were designed and built at the same time as the version in California, allowing the East Coast Mansion to be ready in time for the opening of Walt Disney World.

About that loading point! One of the more interesting ideas attempted in the Mansion is the loading area, what the Ghost Host describes as a “boundless realm of the supernatural”. This was visualized as twin staircases and chandeliers floating in an endless black void with distant rolling fog. Guests walked through a thicket of huge cobwebs before seeing the ride cars appear on a staircase high above them and descend through the center of a huge spider web, complete with an orange glowing spider. 

The head of the Mansion project was Claude Coats, who had just come off the ambitious Adventure Thru Inner Space in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. That ride used light projections and limited sets to create a late 60s psychedelic freak-out with very limited means. Coats’ concept of a haunted house that simply dissolves into nothingness is interesting, but…

Well, if you’re reading this, you’ve been to the final ride and you can see how it turned out. And yes, for the first thirty years of the ride’s existence, the loading point was darker than it is today, and this brightening has also coincided with the removal of theming. The large spider web and spider went away around the time of the first Haunted Mansion Holiday. That overlay, and new safety standards, ushered in a battalion of candles to illuminate the perpetual gloom. Most of the large cobwebs went away a few years later, to make way for a new wheelchair access point. All of these subtractions were finally alleviated somewhat by theming additions this very year, although Disney seems to have given up on the “perpetual gloom” idea.

But really Claude Coats knew the problem was deeper than just lighting. Despite designing a totally new loading area for the Florida version of the Mansion, he tried the idea again – this time deeper into the ride experience, where no pesky pedestrians would require extra light sources to haul themselves into ride vehicles. The new scene was called “Grand Staircase”.

In the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion, if you visited before 2007, you would board your car, briefly glimpse some floating candles on a balcony above, slide through a portrait gallery and decaying library, then past a piano at a bay window which played itself. The cars would press onward into darkness as they slipped up a creaking old staircase, the only sounds being the steps creaking below your “feet” as you ascended. The walls of the Mansion seemed to slip away into darkness, truly dark all around.

“We have 999 happy haunts here, but there’s room for 1000. Any volunteers, hrm?” Paul Frees would whisper in your ear as you ascended this staircase, floating in nothingness. Upon reaching the landing, the cars would be confronted by a large glowing spiderweb with its own large glowing spider. “If you should decide to join us, final arrangements will be made at the end of the tour!” The cars would pivot and spot another large web and spider, before turning and picking up at the start of the Disneyland ride, at the Endless Hallway.

As you can imagine this was a relatively unpopular leg of the ride. There was little to look at, and what you could look at was a pair of fairly unimpressive spiders that wiggled a teeny tiny bit in their webs. Unlike their cousin at Disneyland, which was just a prop, the two spiders were technically animated, even if their animation consisted of a mild jiggle. It was enough to make you wonder if there was originally intended to be more to the scene.

Which there was, although information on this is still extremely spotty and speculative. When I knew the Mansion best in the late 90s and early 00s, there were three webs in this area: an empty triangular web to the left, a large one along a wall with a spider to the right, and another one off to the left behind a wall in a “reveal space”. These webs were probably re-strung in 1979 as part of a general refurbishment, so their original shape may have been different. It has long been a rumor that the first web to the left, which was always empty, was originally home to a human skeleton!

This bit of lore was kept alive thanks to legendary attractions Cast Member Ginger Honetor, who logged 30 years walking the belts at the Mansion, from 1982 until 2012. Walking tours of the Mansion are seemingly always in demand inside Disney, and she would invariably stop by the empty web and bark in her distinctive Western drawl: “There used to be a skeleton here but it was too scary so they removed it!” She very probably learned this from somebody who opened the ride in 1971.

This became such an ingrained piece of lore about the attraction that when Mike Lee and Dave Ensign began interviewing an earlier generation of Walt Disney World personnel in the 1990s, model shop Imagineer Lee Nesler told them that he had mocked up the scene prior to the atrraction’s opening “complete with bloodcurdling screams”, but that nobody seemed to like it. Mansionologoist Brandon Champlain turned up a maintenance diagram with the figure indicated right on it – “MAN IN THE WEB” – proving that it was at least intended to go into the ride. Finally, the second edition of Jason Surrell’s The Haunted Mansion From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies printed concept art by X Atencio of a skeleton in a tattered suit caught in a web, adding to the mounting pile of evidence that this was at least for a brief moment a real thing.

There’s a lot to unpack here already.

Let’s begin with two related claims: that the figure was “too scary” and that it originally featured “bloodcurdling screams”. If you go online you’ll see that these claims have been embroidered and expanded to the point that some will have you believing that the skeleton was screaming for help trying to escape its web and that toddlers were reduced to tears. This is very much the same rumor which once swirled around the Hatbox Ghost, that he was removed for being “too scary” rather than, you know, not working properly. The screams can be easily debunked by checking the Mansion’s speaker wiring diagram, which indicates no wires headed to the area where the skeleton was intended to go. It really does seem as if it was just basically a prop.

We can extend this argument a bit. If we jump across the park to another Claude Coats attraction, Snow White’s Adventures, we can find almost the exact same gag. The 1971 iteration of Snow White was scary indeed, probably scarier than the Haunted Mansion ever was, featuring six jolting appearances by the Witch, and a climax where she drops a huge diamond on your head and appears to hit you. It was so scary that Disney actually printed the words (SCARY) directly after its name in their attraction ticket books. Like its 1955 predecessor, it featured a trip through the Queen’s dungeon en route to her potion workshop, where one skeleton flapped its jaw and warned you to “go back!”.

Around the corner was another skeleton chained to a wall, with yet another giant glowing spider having spun its web above his head. This spider actually moved back and forth on a little track, and the skeleton actually did make sounds… though silly “Brr! Brr!” sounds as though he was scared.

Now it’s possible that these two spider-and-skeleton scenes built in the same park at the same time got conflated in memories. But the mere existence of the Snow White skeleton tends to disprove the “too scary” story. If it was okay in Snow White’s Adventure – a ride which looked like a pleasant children’s ride from its exterior – why would it to too much for the Haunted Mansion?

Regardless, the skeleton was gone by opening day. Imagineer Tom Morris visited Walt Disney World on October 1, 1971, and he has confirmed to me that there was no skeleton in place in the Mansion spiderweb. Since that seems like something you would pretty vividly remember, I’m inclined to believe him. Disney was running the Mansion for test groups all through August and September, so it’s possible somebody saw it then, but those would have been employees and construction crew, not the general public.

But hold up here.

If we remember the whole reason this story kept circulating is because it helped explain why the spider scene ended up being so lackluster – they removed a scary skeleton and this is what we’re left with. There’s no point in repeating the story if everyone liked the spiders as they were, right? But I’m not sure that’s the whole thing. Because simply having a skeleton in that first web off to the left doesn’t fix the scene.

The problem with the Grand Staircase scene as I knew it as a child was that it had no dramatic thrust, no real reason to exist. This is because there were two spiders, not just one. The spider off to the right in the larger web was plainly visible for the entire trip up the staircase, meaning you spent the entire trip up the stairs watching him unimpressively jiggle in his web. Having reached the top of the stairs, you turned to the left and saw another, almost identical spider over there too. There was no build and release, no sense that the scene was going anywhere.

Having a skeleton in one of the webs doesn’t fix that problem, but getting rid of the first spider definitely does. And I think that’s what happened: when they removed the skeleton they added a spider to give you something to look at in that area.

If I’m correct – and this is only just a guess – but if I’m correct then the original Grand Staircase scene would have played out something like this:

Past the Music Room, the cars would press onward into darkness as they slipped up a creaking old staircase, the only sounds being the steps creaking below your “feet” as you ascended. The walls of the Mansion seemed to slip away into darkness, truly dark all around. At the top of the stairs, a dimly lit spider web could be seen glowing. The cars seem to be heading directly towards it.

“We have 999 happy haunts here, but there’s room for 1000. Any volunteers, hrm?” Paul Frees would whisper in your ear as you ascended this staircase, floating in nothingness. Having reached the landing, suddenly you would become aware of a human skeleton tangled in a web off to the left, which you couldn’t see from the bottom of the steps. “If you should decide to join us, final arrangements will be made at the end of the tour!”

The cars pivot, avoiding both webs as suddenly the huge, glowing spider which spun all of these webs is briefly glimpsed off to your left as you head towards the relative safety of the Endless Hallway.

This theory not only immediately upgrades the basically static spider by hiding it from view until its appearance can be dramatically effective, but it also makes better sense of why they used an alternate take for the Ghost Host’s dialogue – the “if you should decide to join us” is a dark comedy beat in the context of a skeleton trapped in a web.

It also makes sense that “Act 1” of the attraction climaxes with another direct threat on riders’ lives, the first since we were trapped in a room with no escape. “Act 2”, which I place at the end of the Corridor of Doors (although that is very debatable), has a shadowy hand descending from the ceiling towards the cars. And of course, at the end of the ride, a ghost climbs into our cars and sits on our laps. Seen in this context, I think it makes sense that Claude Coats would revisit a concept that didn’t quite pan out in the original show and try to goose it up with a more direct threat to riders.

The problem was never fully resolved. When WED built Tokyo Disneyland they copied the Florida Haunted Mansion and added a third spider where the “Man in the Web” was intended to go. Claude Coats was working on this park and actually added more giant glowing spiders to the Cinderella Castle Mystery Tour, his last project for WED and the true successor to the Haunted Mansion. Presumably, nobody thought to ask Claude what he would have done.

The problem was fixed for good in 2007 when Florida tore out the spiders and installed a new, lavish “mirror illusion” room with upside-down staircases running every which way. This adds a nice beat to the ride similar to the “endless void” concept but in a visually impressive way. Still, what was once thought impossible has come to pass and many of us who grew up with the Eastern ‘Haunted Mansion Mark 1.0’ have come to be nostalgic for those stupid rubber spiders. I wouldn’t ever trade backward but it’s nice to know I can still visit my rubber arachnids in Tokyo.

The past few decades have actually been a bad time to be a rubber spider in an American Disney theme park. These were all basically the same static figure, sculpted probably by Adolfo Procopio for the Jungle Cruise in 1963, where it guarded an ancient shrine at the start of the ride. That original spider went missing in the 1990s. The Disneyland Haunted Mansion spider went away in 2001 or so, then both of his cousins out in Florida vanished in 2007. There remained two glowing spiders lurking in the Cambodian Ruins of the Jungle Cruise until 2021, when their webs were cut down as part of changes made to the ride.

I personally think it would be nice to have some kind of giant spider in the Mansion today, perhaps in the Doombuggy turnaround where those of us who care to can look and enjoy it. A screaming skeleton tangled in a huge web? Well, perhaps sometimes it’s better to leave some things to the suburban front yard Halloween display. Happy Halloween, eerie-body!

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