Disney 'looking at' removing hanging corpse from Haunted Mansion stretching room: 'That one is complicated'

As the Ghost Host famously tells guests inside Disney's Haunted Mansion attractions, there's always room for one more happy haunt to join the 999 souls inhabiting the classic ride — but Disney might actually remove a grim-grinning ghost from the iconic stretching room at the start of the experience.

One day ahead of Disneyland's planned reopening of the original 1969 iteration of the beloved dark ride (to add new theming elements and remove the temporary, annual Nightmare Before Christmas-themed seasonal overlay), Kim Irvine, creative director with Imagineering at Disneyland revealed that the company is weighing options to potentially revamp a scene at the start of the attraction, which sees a visual gag reveal a hanging corpse dangling from the rafters in the stretching room.

“We’re still looking at that,” Irvine — whose mother, Imagineer Leota Toombs, provided the face and voice for the ride's crystal ball-bound Madame Leota character — recently told the Los Angeles Times. “That one is complicated, structurally ... One thing at a time."

Related: See first-look photos of Disney's Haunted Mansion bar that expands ride's story and revives Donald Duck chair

The outlet noted that Irvine and her team initially spoke of removing the hanging corpse during a prior refurbishment in 2021, after, as the publication wrote, "such an image could be triggering for some guests."

After an introduction from the Ghost Host narrator, the stretching room scene welcomes riders into the world of the spooky experience, and ends with the voiceover challenging all in attendance to "find a way out" of the room that seemingly has "no windows and no doors" — a sequence that ends with a clap of thunder, dimmed lights, and a special effect that reveals a dead body hanging from a wooden beam at the top of the room. The narrator also teases that this manner of death is his preferred method of escaping the seemingly inescapable room.

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Disney representatives for comment.

In recent years, Disney has worked to remove other theming elements from its attractions, including revamping both Splash Mountain flume rides into Princess and the Frog experiences at its American parks following criticism of the rides' storyline drawing inspiration from the 1946 movie Song of the South, a film long accused of perpetuating racist stereotypes. In 2021, Disney also reopened its classic Jungle Cruise boat ride at Disneyland after removing "negative depictions" of Native peoples throughout the attraction.

The new Times piece also highlighted a new addition to the Disneyland attraction, as the attraction will reopen with a new scene depicting the storied bride who inhabits the ride's attic sequence. Other additions include a new gift shop inspired by Madame Leota, as well as a refreshed outdoor queue space.

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Though Irvine's quotes referred to the Disneyland version of the ride in Anaheim, Calif., the Haunted Mansion also operates classic versions of the attraction at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., and at Tokyo Disneyland in Japan. Other iterations inspired by the original (but with a different storyline) operate under the names Phantom Manor and Mystic Manor at Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland, respectively.

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Disney has also adapted the Haunted Mansion into two different films: 2003's Eddie Murphy-starring The Haunted Mansion, and 2023's Haunted Mansion, featuring LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Jared Leto, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

"We got down to the point where we were obsessing over the angle you first see the mansion when you walk onto the ride in Disneyland — when we see it through the gates and we see the pillars, that angle has to hit. That's how specific we were," director Justin Simien previously told EW of designing the film's version of the titular abode. "When you first glide through the dining hall and you see the waltzing dancers, that angle had to be right, because that's the one where you gasp on the ride."

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