Kidnap the Magic: A Haunted Mansion Halloween

I've really been looking forward to this one. Of the several Disneyland themed party ideas I've shared so far, this is the only one I've actually tried for myself, rather than merely speculating upon. So quell those doubts, readers—this stuff's been field-tested in advance by Yours Truly and my then-housemates!

As I've lamented before on this blog, the higher-ups at Disneyland apparently don't think the Haunted Mansion is good enough for Halloween as it is. But we know better, don't we? If the suits in charge won't let us have the regular Haunted Mansion at Halloween...we'll just have to kidnap it!

Location

The best place to hold a Haunted Mansion Halloween party would be an actual mansion, but not many of us have access to one of those. A regular house will suffice. You could even do this in a large apartment—that's what we did, because that was the sort of place we lived in at the time—but the best way to achieve Mansion-y-ness is to have discrete front yard, interior, and backyard spaces to set your scenes.

Decorations

Mwahahaha...

Mwaahahahahahahahah!!

MWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAAAAAAAAH!!!

You might be one of those people who has already permanently decorated their house to look like the Haunted Mansion, completely independent of any party plans, in which event I have nothing to teach you.

But if you haven't, you're in luck. This is one of those rare occasions when Disneyland itself, and even ordinary party supply stores, are on your side! I posted pics of some of the official Mansion merch back in my Mardi Gras post, but that was several months ago, so I'll put them up again:

But wait, there's more! Haunted Mansion swag available at Disneyland now includes a sampling of kitchenware, including plates, placemats, and even drinking glass coasters:

It's somewhat pricey—as Disneyland-specific merchandise usually is—but you can't beat the style of the real thing. If your budget allows for such fripperies, go for it!

Conversely, if your funds are a little tight, never fear. The Haunted Mansion has left its mark on the mainstream impression of what a haunted house should be like, and decorations reminiscent of it are available in any party supply or craft store as Halloween approaches. Want your own gallery of transforming portraits? Google Halloween lenticular portraits and select a few that strike you as Mansion-worthy. Outfitting a graveyard? Artificial gravestones are easier to find than ever, and many of them feature punnish names and/or bits of humorous verse. Gargoyle statues, urns, bouquets of black roses...there's lots of material out there for the Halloween decorator who wants to go for a more genteel or Victorian motif.

Of course, not everything you need will be quite so plug-n-play. I'm going to backtrack a little here and take you through the steps of decorating your house stem-to-stern to echo the best haunted theme park ride in the world!

General

Black lights and lots of them.

Well, obviously there's more than that...

Feel free to shop the Halloween section of your local party supply store for inspiration, but be selective—go for the eerie, the whimsical, and the Gothic over the outright gruesome. Skeletons yes, zombies not so much. The Haunted Mansion includes no vampires, witches, or chainsaw-wielding maniacs (though it does include an axe murderer). Most of the ghosts wear distinct period dress, ranging from the ancient world up through the Victorian era. But hey—if you care enough to be trying this out, you probably have a pretty good intuition for what does and doesn't belong in this theme. And it's your party—make it your own!

For best results, also have several platforms for playing audio in various areas of the house. (See below for music suggestions.)

Front Yard/Porch

This is where you'll want to put your punny and versical gravestones, along with any animal statuary, eerie-looking potted plants, or replica Haunted Mansion plaques you might happen to have. If you still maintain a lawn this late in the year, I recommend mowing it the day of the party, for that Disney-pristine look.

The other thing to consider having on your porch is that Halloween standby, the jack-o-lantern. It's not traditional for the Haunted Mansion, but it is traditional in the larger culture, and you can always choose a Mansion-themed design to keep things consistent.

Entryway/Foyer

If you're fortunate enough to have such a feature in your house, it would be a shame not to use it to its best advantage in this situation. I suggest combining features of the Mansion's own Foyer, Stretching Room, and maybe Portrait Hallway. Spread some fake cobwebs on the light fixtures, hang up some of your creepy lenticular pictures (or prints of the actual stretching portraits)...and if you have a high ceiling and/or a cupola in this area and don't hang a skeleton in 19^th Century menswear from it,* there is something wrong with your priorities.

Another thing to put in this area is a “Dead End!” sign. This sign, which once told Haunted Mansion riders that the ride was nearly over and they should prepare to exit the Doom Buggy, was removed some years ago for an unknown reason.** But it's cute, reasonably iconic, and very easy to recreate in a home-friendly format. First, download this graphic:

Adjust it to the size you want and print it on sticker paper. Attach the sticker to foamboard and cut out along the wedge shape. Hang it up next to your door where your guests will see it as they leave at the end of the evening. Under black light, the white areas will glow almost the exact same shade of blue as the original sign!

Main Party Area

(I don't want to make unfounded assumptions about your plans or home layout by saying “living room” here.)

For starters, unless you already decorate with a Victorian theme, you'll want to disguise most of your furniture. Buy black fabric by the yard and drape it over your bookshelves, entertainment center, tables, etc. This does not have to be costly at all—we went to downtown Los Angeles and found a basic black crepe for only a dollar a yard. It draped beautifully, and it was amazing how much more somber and elegant our place looked with just that minor change.

Likewise, if you have windows with curtains, swap out the curtains for something heavy and dark, perhaps with an old-fashioned damask pattern. (Ours was a black velour with a rose design.) These do not have to be elaborate with ruffles and tassels—if you can sew straight lines, you can make curtains. If even that is a long shot (for example if you don't have a sewing machine), you can cheat by folding the top edge of your fabric over the curtain rod and securing it with duct tape.

So far, so good. But this could be any house in a state of mourning. To make it the Haunted Mansion, you need some more precise details.

The Clock Strikes 13: Transform an inexpensive wall clock into a tribute to the famous grandfather clock from the ride! First...you need an inexpensive wall clock that you can take apart. Most big-box stores like Target or (ugh) Wal-Mart will have simple ones for about eight bucks. A black frame is ideal, but if it's just not available, also visit the craft aisle and get some black acrylic paint and a small paintbrush. When you get home, take the clock apart, paint the frame if necessary (and leave it someplace safe to dry), and measure the diameter of the clock's face. In a cheap clock this will just be a bit of light cardstock with numbers and markings printed on it. You're going to replace it.

Next, download this image:

This is technically Walt Disney World's version of the clock face, with 13 notches whereas Disneyland's has only 12, but we'll have to take what we can get. Adjust the size of the image in a graphics program until it matches the size of your clock's face and print on light cardstock. Cut out the face, punch a hole in the center, where the circled cross is, and check for fit over the main axle of the clock's gearworks. You want the fit to be as exact as you can get it—too tight and the paper can interfere with the operation of the clock, too loose and the face can swivel around while the clock is assembled.

Also cut out those wavy things underneath the clock face in the image. Those are the hands—glue them onto the hands of your purchased clock. This part is technically optional, but makes a nice finishing touch. If you had to paint the frame black, make sure it's completely dry and reassemble the clock, taking care that the clock face stays oriented with the 13 right at the top.

There you go! Your very own Haunted Mansion 13 Clock! Hang it up where your guests are certain to see it. If you have the technical know-how to set something up so it casts a threatening shadow over the face, go ahead, but the clock face itself is iconic enough. And it makes a great prize for a party game or contest...provided you can bear to part with it!

The Medium is In (or Out): Create a Madam Leota scene in miniature! Cover an end table (ideally round, but use what you have) with a swatch of rich, dark red fabric. Get a pack of miniature Tarot cards and lay out a spread. Don't worry about accuracy to any genuine divination practices; just make sure some “spooky” cards like Death or the Ten of Swords are visible.

Now you need Leota herself. This is the best tutorial I've seen for creating a fun-sized Madam Leota character. We were running short of time and materials and had to go much simpler—we set out a simple crystal ball prop and added a handwritten sign: “Out of my head. Be back soon. —Madam Leota” Round out your tableau with an artificial raven (available in craft stores at this time of year) and a few miniature musical instruments (Christmas ornaments are a good source of these) suspended from the ceiling on invisible thread and tuck the whole shebang into a corner where your guests aren't likely to smack it around.

We're Watching You: For a very simplified version of the bust that follows your movements, get a basic mask form. The one in the link is just one variety; you can also find them without eyeholes. Without eyeholes might actually be better, but work with what you can find easily. Paint some facial features on the inside, concave side of the form, accentuating the shape of the nose, lips, and eyebrows. If there are no eyeholes, color in the eyes as well; if there are, draw some eyes on paper or cardstock and tape them to the convex side so they show through the eyeholes from “inside.”

Next, get a shoebox or similar sized box that the mask can sit comfortably inside, including the lid. Center the mask on the inside of the lid and trace around it with pen or pencil. Cut out the outline so that you have a mask-shaped hole in the box lid. Paint both the box and the lid black, inside and out.*** When the paint is dry, set the mask into the hole in the lid in such a way that when you put the lid on the box normally, the convex side faces in. Use black electrical tape to hold it in place and fill in any gaps in the outline. Put the lid on the box. Now you should have a box with a concave face in it, as if someone pressed their own face into a cube of soft clay. Set it up somewhere so that the light hits it from underneath—black light works great for this—and watch your guests double-take!

Hallway

Hallways are not usually major features of house parties, but they are a major feature of the Haunted Mansion, and your guests will probably need to enter them at least to use the bathroom. I don't know that I recommend bringing the bathroom itself into the decorating scheme—a haunted toilet might reach a degree of disturbingness nobody signed up for—but there's plenty you can do with the corridor it faces onto.

For starters, if you don't have a foyer area, this is the very best place to put your transforming lenticular portraits. Hang them up in a nice neat row. Set up some speakers and play a loop of sound effects from the ride's own Corridor of Doors—all those creaks and knocks and beastly growls.

We're Still Watching You: If you really want to go all-out, dress up the hallway with a mock-up of the famous “demon eyes” wallpaper! You'll need a roll of butcher paper in blue-gray or lavender, black and white paint, and some stencils of the demon faces. The first two can be obtained through Michael's or another craft store. For the third...you'll need to improvise. Start by downloading the full-sized version of this image:

Print it out on plain paper or cardstock. Unfortunately, the whole thing comes out pretty small in order to fit on standard 8-1/2” x 11” sheets. You might want to split it into two parts—the large face at the bottom is one, and the rest is another. Just be careful and make sure the two parts remain in the proper scale with each other.

Once you have it printed, cut out the stencil. This is the tricky part. Theoretically, each gray shape should be a cutout, but many of them have fully enclosed white—i.e. background—portions. You'll need to adjust these parts with little connecting bands to keep the centers from falling out. The greatest concern is the largest face, which has all those little mouth and nose lines that are filled in with the background color on the actual wallpaper. The eyes should all be white and thus would have to be painted separately anyway. Make the necessary adjustments and carefully cut everything out using a craft knife.

Once you have functioning stencils, you can make as many repetitions of the faces on your butcher paper as you want! Start with the black paint, lining up your stencils carefully so that the designs fit together neatly. Once it dries, add in eyes with the white paint. The brighter a white you get, the better—even consider using UV-reactive paint so the eyes really pop under your black lights!

When your wallpaper is ready, simply scotch-tape it to your walls. Don't worry too much if it isn't perfect—it's just a temporary party decoration, after all. If you like it well enough to create something more permanent, worry about it then.

Backyard

This is strictly optional—if you wish to mimic the progression of the Haunted Mansion ride as closely as possible, you'll want a “swinging wake” in your backyard. But if you don't have a backyard or just want to keep the party more contained, these ideas will work indoors as well.

Designate your back patio or deck as the “Ballroom.” Set up the snack table(s) there, with tablecloths not from the Halloween section of the party store...but the wedding section. That's where you'll find designs like this one, which says “Haunted Mansion” a lot more convincingly than orange with bats. Set out the most decrepit floral centerpiece you can find and slather it with more dust and cobwebs. For the plates and napkins...follow your heart. You might want ones that match the tablecloths, more traditional Halloween designs, basic black...or maybe something a little closer to the ones actually used on the ride! You probably won't find this exact pattern on paper plates, but you might find a nice blue and white floral that mimics it to a recognizable extent. Don't forget to set up a Hidden Mickey for your guests to spot!

(For the food itself, see below.)

Space permitting, this is also where your dance floor will be. Set up your primary sound system with your chosen party music (again, see below for suggestions) and if you can manage it, display at least one undead dancing couple to get the point across.

For the rest of the backyard...go nuts with the graveyard motif. Set up loads of fake gravestones. Throw a gray tarp over your woodpile and pretend it's a crypt. Line up five foam heads (the kind used as wig stands) to be your Singing Busts and pose skeletons with wineglasses in their hands. Merge your creativity with your love for this classic ride!

Rise as Spooks of Every Size: You too can have a neverending parade of ghosts fly up out of the ground! All you need is a) a spinning ghost projector and b) something to project onto...which could be as simple as the wall of your house. Or you could stretch a string between two trees or poles and drape a sheet over it.

What's a spinning ghost projector? Instructions for building one version can be found here. This is actually a little different from the one we used, which we borrowed from my dad—a bona-fide engineer as well as a Haunted Mansion fan going back to August 1969. Instead of a slide projector and disco ball, his version uses a metal drum with ghost shapes cut out of the sides and an interior light bulb. I'm not mechanically experienced enough to translate my observations about it into step-by-step instructions, but if you're a garage-tinkerer, maybe you can work it out from my description. Let me know how it goes!

In all of this, you may have noticed one iconic scene I've left out: the Attic. This is because the most logical place to set up such a scene in your house would be your actual attic or whatever space you use for storage, and storage spaces aren't usually opened up for parties. Nor should they be—they tend to be cluttered, dusty, and devoid of social purpose.

Also...not to pick a fight with any big fans of Constance or the Hatbox Ghost, but the Attic is actually the weakest scene in the Haunted Mansion. It's disconnected from the loose narrative presented by the rest of the ride, coming as it does between two celebratory scenes without offering any commentary on either. It's a fine collection of interesting props and special effects and the Mansion wouldn't be the same without it, but it is a bit of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, isn't it?

If you want to have your own Bride, Hatbox Ghost, or other Attic material, I recommend putting it in the main area or backyard rather than trying to have an entire Attic scene.

Food

There is a food associated specifically with the Haunted Mansion. Are you ready?

It's birthday cake.

I don't know how you feel on the matter, but I like to have birthday cake at birthday parties, not Halloween parties. So this is one area where you are absolutely justified in looking away from the Haunted Mansion and toward more mainstream Halloween motifs.

For a main course, I love short ribs and/or chicken wings because of the whole “gnawing on bones” thing. (Maybe you could make a “Bury Your Bones” sign using a font like Ravenscroft and hang it on or over the trash can.) Carrot and celery sticks also suggest bones, and you can label the dips with spooky names. Halloween candy and pumpkin-flavored cookies certainly won't be amiss. If you can plan a trip to Disneyland before your party, try to get some of the Mickey-shaped dishes used to serve children's meals and repurpose them as containers for candy, nuts, and dips.

Alternately, you might try a menu inspired by the French Market, as I described in my Mardi Gras post. In Disneyland, that is the restaurant most closely associated with the Haunted Mansion.

Music (and Sound Effects)

You're definitely in luck here. The Haunted Mansion has the most devoted fanbase of any Disney ride ever built, and every sound clip ever recorded for it—even the ones that ultimately went unused—has been catalogued, converted into digital formats, and squirreled away somewhere on the Web for download. Mousebits's Haunted Mansion archive is a good place to start looking. And then there are all the covers and remixes of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” the soundtrack to the 2003 movie version (Eddie Murphy notwithstanding, at least the score was good), and of course complete audio mixes representing the entire ride, from entry gates to exit crypt.

But, as usual, you'll want to mix things up to avoid monotony. By all means, include a variety of versions of “Grim Grinning Ghosts” in your main playlist (the one for the “Ballroom”)...but also include other Halloween-appropriate songs, in accordance with your tastes and those of your guests. I'm going to point again to the plethora of such songs recorded in the jazz and swing eras, and this time I'm going to provide some examples so you can see how awesome this stuff is:

(By the way, that third link? Yes, that is the Thurl Ravenscroft—the voice and facial model for Uncle Theodore the Singing Bust—singing a cover of the Headless Horseman song first recorded by Bing Crosby for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Those are some pretty slick credentials for playing it at your Disneyland Halloween party!)

Whatever musical genres you dip into for your playlist, as with your overall decorations, try to focus on references to ghosts and spirits, haunted houses, and spooky noises in the night. Not that you should feel obligated to omit your particular favorites in order to fit a narrow motif, of course. Consider Kidnap the Magic akin to the Pirates' Code—guidelines more than actual rules. (Ignore Keith Richards in the corner there.)

Activities

Consider any and all of the usual Halloween party activities—a costume contest, round-robin ghost stories, watching a scary movie, etc. Games and contests usually involve prizes, but the main determining factors here will be your budget and your guests' expectations, not what I think makes an appropriate Haunted Mansion-themed prize. (Though I stand by my assertion that the 13 Clock is a good one.)

Halloween may or may not have surpassed Christmas in the decorating department by now, but it's had the edge in parties for some time. Everyone knows what to expect for a Christmas party, but Halloween parties are all about creativity and surprises. The heart and soul of Kidnap the Magic is the potential to engineer excellent surprises for the people in your life by recreating that special Disneyland spark for holidays and other occasions. I'm glad I finally got to this one!

* We didn't have such a feature in our apartment, so this is one idea we were unable to try.

** My guess it that it shorted out or otherwise broke and wasn't considered significant enough to bother fixing/replacing.

*** Or cover them with black sticker paper. A lot of shoeboxes are coated with that glossy paper that doesn't take paint easily.