Introduction

“Where hinges creak in doorless chambers…
Where strange and frightening sounds echo through the halls…
Where candlelight flickers though the air is deathly still…
This is Phantom Manor!”

Artwork by Dan Goozee. © Disney.

A dramatic story of love and death, an emphasis on atmosphere, a lush orchestral soundtrack... Phantom Manor was designed as a bold departure from the long Disney haunted house tradition – a tradition spanning back to the original Haunted Mansion which opened in Disneyland California way back in 1969.

In some ways, however, the Imagineers went right back to the roots. And so the story of Phantom Manor actually begins a good forty years before its construction, in the early 1950s...