A 1974 souvenir film of the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World has surfaced on 8mm, and the man who digitized it has put the whole thing on YouTube. The faded footage shows the Mansion only a few years after Magic Kingdom opened, including what fans say are bats in the attic that have since disappeared.
Bryan Young, who hosts the Star Wars podcast Full of Sith, has been buying lots of old 8mm films on eBay and digitizing the Disney parks footage he finds for a project. He shared this reel on Reddit and YouTube this week.
The color has washed out to a deep red, which Young said is common with mass-produced 8mm film stock from some companies. Even so, the reel shows the outside of the house, the coffin in the conservatory, the ballroom and the attic.
A Souvenir For The Home Projector
Before home video, Disney sold short films of its attractions that families could take home and run on their own projectors. Disney started its own 8mm division in 1968, moved to Super 8 in the mid-1970s and stopped selling the films by the 1980s, according to the late Disney historian Jim Korkis. His partial list of the park titles includes two Haunted Mansion reels, one for Disneyland (No. 715) and one for Walt Disney World (No. 722), each a 50-foot color reel.
Fifty feet of 8mm film runs only a few minutes, so these were quick souvenirs rather than full ride-throughs. Many of the early reels were silent, and one commenter on Young’s post guessed the reel may have been sold with a separate audio track that has since been lost.
What Fans Are Spotting
Haunted Mansion fans went through the footage frame by frame. Several pointed out the bats hanging in the attic, which one called “charming bats in the attic that just had to go.” Another asked whether the candlesticks on the coffin were always that wobbly.
Some viewers think the film mixes two parks. One commenter said most of the interior footage looks like Disneyland’s Mansion while the outside of the house is Walt Disney World’s, and another suggested a Disneyland reel already existed and was reused to have something ready for Magic Kingdom. A third said parts of the ballroom appear to be filmed on a scale model, since the curtains stay frozen in place with no ghosts coming through them. None of that has been confirmed, and Korkis wrote that documentation about these films is slight to non-existent.
The Magic Kingdom Mansion opened with the park on October 1, 1971, two years after the original at Disneyland. It has changed in small ways since, including the addition of the Hatbox Ghost, and one commenter joked that the film shows the ride from “before they installed the Hatbox Ghost in the wrong spot.”
If you want more Mansion while you wait for the next visit, Disneyland’s version is in the middle of its holiday overlay right now, and fans have been spotting small changes to it this season.
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