Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion could lose one of its 999 happy haunts if Walt Disney Imagineering ultimately decides to eliminate the Ghost Host hanging corpse from the pre-show scene of the classic dark ride to avoid triggering sensitive guests.
Walt Disney Imagineering may remove the hanging corpse scene from the Haunted Mansion stretching room elevators at Disneyland, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“We’re still looking at that,” Imagineering creative director Kim Irvine told the Times. “That one is complicated, structurally. One thing at a time.”
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The image of the hanging corpse in the Haunted Mansion stretching room could be triggering for some guests, Irvine told the Times.
“In this day and age we have to be really careful about the sensitivities of people,” Irvine told the Times.
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Disneyland fans were anxiously waiting to see if the hanging corpse scene would survive another round of updates to Haunted Mansion that were unveiled over the weekend.
Imagineering introduced a new ghostly bride in the Haunted Mansion’s attic scene and updated Hitchhiking Ghosts in the finale when the classic dark ride returned after shedding its annual holiday overlay.
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The hanging corpse scene appears in the stretching room elevator in the Haunted Mansion’s pre-show as the Ghost Host narrator offers visitors a “chilling challenge” to find a way out of the chamber with no windows or doors.
Suddenly the lights go out and a sinister laugh fills the chamber as the Ghost Host shows passengers his way out: A swinging corpse hanging from the rafters.
Removing the hanging corpse isn’t complicated. Disneyland does it every year for the Nightmare Before Christmas ride overlay.
Structurally, the challenge is the limited amount of room in the “rafters” above the stretching room. Imagineering would have to make a rethemed scene fit in the same amount of space.
The Nightmare Before Christmas ride overlay employs a video projection of an animated Jack Skellington. The hanging corpse scene resides in a three-dimensional set at the top of the stretching room filled with support beams, heating and air conditioning ducting and elevator cables.