I Talked With a Disney Imagineer About Those New Haunted Mansion Illusions

In the 1960s, a legendary Disney Imagineer dreamed of a ghost fish aquarium, where spooky skeletal fish would swim like living sea creatures. In 2024, Disney finally had the technology to bring this vision to life.

Entertainment companies like Disney are constantly looking for ways to make their experiences so immersive that it impacts our spending/vacation decisions. One of these opportunities came onboard Disney’s latest cruise ship, the Disney Treasure, where Imagineers designed the new Haunted Mansion Parlor, a setting that fully envelopes guests in another realm — that of an eerie haunted ship, now part of the lore of beloved Disney attraction the Haunted Mansion. 

Disney didn’t skimp on details even though it’s not a full-blown ride: an eight-chapter saga plays out while you sip on themed cocktails like the shimmering purple Ghoulish Delight and watch specters dance around you. It mimics the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney’s resort parks with scenes like Madame Leota’s tarot reading, the ballroom filled with dancing ghosts and the graveyard performance by the Phantom Five minstrels.

But setting it apart from the traditional Haunted Mansion is that guests will be right up close and personal with the apparitions, able to sit next to them, see some of them from 360-degree angles and even touch them.

My colleague Bridget Carey experienced the Haunted Mansion Parlor onboard the cruise ship while it was docked in New York last month. “You have to pay attention to everything on the walls — the whole room transforms and tells a story,” Carey says of the space. “And you can get up close to study it all, which is so different from being on a ride. The best is trying to figure out the giant fish tank with ghost fish.”

A few weeks afterward, I spoke with Imagineer Daniel Joseph about its inception. While he kept close to the “magician never reveals his secrets” mantra, he did offer insights into the technology, science and engineering goes into creating Disney’s greatest illusions.

“My team will basically figure out and sometimes invent new techniques and new technologies to do illusions for our theme parks throughout the world,” Joseph tells me. “This was like the ultimate call to action, like, ‘you guys get to figure out a way to do something that couldn’t be done in the 1960s at a whole new Haunted Mansion venue.'”

The Haunted Mansion was one of the last rides Walt Disney himself had a hand in designing, debuting in 1969 at Disneyland, after his death in 1966. It can also be found at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and at Tokyo Disneyland, and similar rides are at Disneyland Paris (Phantom Manor) and Hong Kong Disneyland (Mystic Manor). The ride is so popular that it spawned two movies in 2003 and 2023, as well as a Muppets Halloween special in 2021.

The Disney Treasure‘s Haunted Mansion Parlor is “the next chapter of the Haunted Mansion saga,” according to Disney.

Imagineers worked on the Haunted Mansion Parlor for five years, and the ghost fish tank, envisioned by original Imagineer Rolly Crump, has already made a big impression. It houses “ghost” fish swimming back and forth, with the spectral sea creatures standing up to the scrutiny of noses pressed against the glass of the aquarium.

For this, a knowledge of both science and new technology were needed.

“We played with some different materials — it’s real liquid that’s in there — and played with some things that work with the index of refraction and liquids and water, and how light bends and goes through liquids,” Joseph says.

Read More: Every Disneyland and Disney World Ride and Land Planned for 2025 and Beyond

Another notable scene in the parlor is the portrait gallery, featuring paintings in the art style of another original Imagineer, Marc Davis. The portraits look like they’re melting, or dripping away to reveal eerie new images. The first “change portraits” debuted with the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, and were invented by yet another original Disney Imagineer, Yale Gracey, who had a Haunted Mansion character named after him.

I asked Joseph whether the melting “paintings” use technology similar to Samsung’s Frame TV, which has a matte, anti-reflective screen that you can use to display digital copies of paintings and photography. The framed TV looks like you have genuine artwork hanging on your wall when you’re not using it as a regular TV. Joseph laughingly denied that it’s the same concept, but wouldn’t be drawn on what new advances in tech allowed the portraits to come to life, saying that for all intents and purposes, they are real paintings.

“We wanted to do something that, because you can get so close up to it, had the actual feel and texture of an oil painting,” he said. “You can see actual brush strokes in this thing, you can see different material changes, there’s areas that are just canvas, and there’s other areas that still have the matte medium, gesso and the oil paint texture and actual paint on top of it. And as you move left and right, you’ll see them change, just like you would in a museum where there’s overhead lights.”

Tech and science create magic

While technology is probably the last thing you think about when experiencing that Disney magic, it’s front of mind for the Imagineers. Joseph said he attends tech expos like CES to get ideas on what’s being developed and how it might be “misused” by Disney.

“As an inventor and an illusion developer here at Imagineering, I absolutely have my hand on the pulse of consumer technology, as well as pro technology that’s out there in the world, because it changes so fast,” Joseph said. 

But while most companies use CES to demonstrate the latest advances in technology and electronics for their own sake, Joseph said he sees it all “through the lens of ‘how can I misuse this and make it do something that, A, the original inventors of that technology maybe didn’t think of which would give Disney kind of a new edge on this technology, but B, how can I do something with this technology that maybe wouldn’t have been done normally had had other folks looked at it?'” 

But it’s not always about using the latest and greatest tech. Joseph said that for the scenes playing out in the mirror behind the bar in the parlor, Imagineers chose not to have “some super game engine, high-tech thing with characters back there that are CGI that are made to look analog and original animatronic style.” 

Instead, they shot high-resolution, high-ISO footage of the original audio animatronics used in Haunted Mansion rides throughout Disney’s parks. 

“There’s a 1969 aesthetic there that we wanted to really keep rich in the parlor … [so] why not just shoot the actual figures that we have in our mansions? And having them back there, I think, is really cool to see them and have that high quality but also keeps us kind of grounded in that original mansion lore.”

And while Imagineers keep on the pulse of technology, one thing they’re not touching is AI.

“We haven’t used any artificial intelligence at all, really, in any of the stuff that we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t know what the future holds for artificial intelligence, but not as of yet.”