The Big Easy comes to Disneyland—just not as soon as Walt would have liked.

New Orleans Square in Disneyland was the first new “land” added to the theme park since it opened in 1955, but Walt had always wanted there to be a New Orleans-themed section in Disneyland from the start.

At the opening day ceremonies, co-hosts Ronald Reagan and Bob Cummings both referred to the New Orleans flavor at the edge of Frontierland, and the famous jazz band the Firehouse Five Plus Two played Dixieland jazz to inaugurate the area. A Disneyland postcard of the area from 1956 stated: “Down on New Orleans Street over in Frontierland…finest barbeque this side of the Mississippi…”

Walt planned that the Magnolia Park just around the corner from Adventureland’s Jungle Cruise would eventually develop into a New Orleans area. Wrought-iron balconies, like those iconic of New Orleans architecture, decorated the exterior of Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House.

The Plantation House restaurant (often referred to as the Chicken Plantation Restaurant because it featured full chicken dinners for $1.65) was designed so that the side of the building that faced the Rivers of America had a New Orleans-style façade. It was reminiscent of pre-Civil War New Orleans. The side of the building that faced the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad was designed to look like a Spanish hacienda, in keeping with the Frontierland theme.

In the late 1950s, the Imagineers conceived of this area as having a creepy haunted house, a pirate wax museum that guests would walk through to see tableaux of pirate history, and a Thieves Market for shopping.

By 1961, in order to put in as much as possible into the area, the haunted house was moved to the north, taking over the land where the Plantation House restaurant originally stood.

The New Orleans area was proposed to be the Blue Bayou Mart, an enclosed section where it was always a breezy summer night with stars in the sky. There would still be a Thieves Market with the pirate museum underneath the street in a “basement”. However, there would now be an elegant restaurant overlooking the Blue Bayou.

Imagineer Sam McKim created a concept map. Because of the demands of the projects for the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, Walt pulled all the Imagineers off the New Orleans project to concentrate on the pavilions for the fair. When the fair ended, everyone had a new perspective, including changing the walk-through pirate wax museum into a boat ride like “it’s a small world” and changing the static figures into Audio-Animatronics.

Why was it called New Orleans Square, since it doesn’t seem to be a square at all, but a series of curved, winding streets? The Vieux Carré is the historic name for the actual New Orleans French Quarter, and translates from the original French into “Old Square”.

The area at Disneyland was officially dedicated on July 24, 1966, by Walt and Victor Schiro, who served as mayor of New Orleans from 1961–1969.

A reporter for a New Orleans newspaper wrote that “it’s the next best thing to being there” and repeated the information from the Disney publicity material that it was built for almost the exact amount paid for the entire Louisiana Purchase in 1803, roughly $15 million (just $2 million shy of the cost to build the entire Disneyland park in 1955).

When Schiro repeated to the gathered reporters that the Disney version was “just like the real thing”, a playful Walt off to the side and in a soft voice said “only cleaner”. Walt was in an exuberant mood and kept interrupting the mayor, pointing out that they both had mustaches, and how the dollar had risen over the years since the original Louisiana Purchase. He also joked that since the mayor had just made him an honorary citizen of New Orleans (“You know I am already a Louisiana Colonel,” remarked Walt) that maybe he should make the mayor an “honorary dictator of the Magic Kingdom”.

When New Orleans Square opened, you could hear the chants and ringing bells of a voodoo queen living off a balcony on the backside of the square near the bathrooms and the train station. It was speculated that it was the sound of the infamous Marie Laveau who practiced voodoo in New Orleans in the 1700s and 1800s. After all, her portrait could be found in both the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion when those attractions first opened.

Those chants and bells wouldn’t have bothered Walt, whose massive personal apartment was being built over the Pirates of the Caribbean ride where his wife Lilly would have been able to easily visit the nearby One-of-A-Kind Shop down below, filled with unique antiques.

At the dedication, Walt said:

Disneyland has always had a Big River and a Mississippi sternwheeler. It made sense to build a new attraction at the bend of the river, and so New Orleans Square came into being—a New Orleans of a century ago when she was the “Gay Paree” of the American frontier.

To read the rest of the story, pick up your copy of The Vault of Walt: Volume 4.

If Imagineer Ken Anderson had gotten his way, Disneyland's Haunted Mansion would have been haunted by some very different haunts!

It had always been part of Walt’s vision for Disneyland to include a haunted house, but he had originally planned to locate it on a side street off of Main Street. Imagineer Harper Goff had sketched a dilapidated old house on the top of a small hill overlooking a church and a graveyard. Guests would have looked through its large windows to see the ghostly activity inside.

By 1957, when Walt gave an interview to the BBC about his plans for a retirement home for ghosts, he envisioned it in an area of Frontierland with a New Orleans theme. Ken Anderson had just moved over to WED Imagineering from the studio, and Walt turned to his “jack of all trades” to research some possibilities. As Paul Anderson told me:

We always hear about “the group of Imagineers” that went out to research the Haunted Mansion. Actually, “the group” was just Ken.

Anderson’s 1958 sketch of a decaying mansion was apparently based on the Evergreen House in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s the sketch that Sam McKim transformed into the famous concept painting.

It is also apparent that Ken’s approach to a Disney “walkthrough” haunted house was greatly influenced by his experiences taking a tour at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.

Sometimes called the “ghost mansion”, this popular tourist attraction has doors and staircases that lead nowhere and a maze of rooms constantly being redone by the widow of the maker of the Winchester rifle. She believed that the ghostly victims of the Winchester rifle had cursed her family and were haunting her to keep building more and more rooms for their earthbound spirits. It was even rumored that through “automatic writing” she received building directions which she passed along to the carpenters.

Ken Anderson had two pages of notes on the Winchester House, from the size of the tour group (maximum of 20), the mix of adults and children (roughly four times the number of adults to children), the maximum/minimum entrance and exit time in each area (25–60 seconds), the maximum/minimum time the guide spoke in each area (32 seconds to three-and-a-half minutes), as well as a variety of notes like “average group well behaved” and “rooms are all empty—nothing to touch”.

Anderson strongly believed that a cohesive story was necessary to guide Disney guests through the Haunted Mansion. Not only was storytelling an important element of the Disney Brand and had positioned Disney’s “dark rides” as different from carnival amusement park dark rides, but storytelling would be necessary to move guests through the experience rather than have them dawdle in one area and clog the flow of traffic.

In 1957, Anderson developed four story concepts, all of which feature elements reflected in the final version of the attraction that was eventually opened at Disneyland on August 9, 1969.

Perhaps the best-known version was Anderson’s first attempt, which featured the Legend of Captain Gore and was written in February 1957. The mansion was the seaside manor of an old sea captain who had married a young woman named Priscilla. She discovers he is actually a notorious pirate.

Gore killed his bride (and in one version tossed her bloody body into an outside well that still bubbles red) and she haunted him until he took his own life by hanging himself. This story would have been shared with guests by a butler or maid who worked in the mansion.

Another version was Bloodmere Manor, which was the lakeside estate of “the unfortunate Blood family”. It was built around 1800 in the swampy bayous near New Orleans and was moved to Disneyland intact because it was an example of early architecture from that region.

The mansion had not been occupied for some time and was badly in need of repair, so the Disney Company started the work of restoration as soon as it arrived at Disneyland, but:

[S]trangely enough…the work of each day was destroyed during the night…and the night watchman reported that when he had passed the house he’d heard eerie screams and seen weird lights… In fact, we are sorry to report that the latest tragedy of all occurred here in Disneyland…when one of our carpenters engaged in restoration work on the house disappeared completely from sight…and he has not been seen or heard from since. The house is now too dangerous to live in, but we have succeeded in making it safe enough for a visit…when accompanied by our trained and competent guide, a former butler of the household.

A third version had Walt himself as the narrator on tape as the guests wandered through the house to go to a ghostly wedding celebration.

Another version focused on the Headless Horseman from the Disney animated film The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949) about Ichabod Crane on Halloween night. This version also featured a wedding, this time between Monsieur Bogeyman and Mlle. Vampire. The bride jilts the groom at the altar, sparking chaos and the need to quickly exit the mansion.

To read the rest of the story, pick up your copy of The Vault of Walt: Volume 4.