Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion Anniversary event
Last weekend we attended the special event at Disneyland celebrating the 50 year anniversary of The Haunted Mansion.
The Mansion has been my favorite attraction since childhood and as soon as tickets went on sale, I knew I had to jump on it…when I started seeing sponsored posts on Facebook up to the day before, I was starting to worry if the $300 price tag was too much for what was being offered. Here’s my recap so you can judge for yourself.
Check-In and Merchandise
The event started weeks ago when registrants were sent an email regarding which Haunted Mansion merchandise would be available at the event, what the price of the merch was and what was the edition run of the limited products.
Once you’ve spent time with the list and had an idea of what products you wanted, you would fill out a form to pre-purchase the items that were open edition and put into a lottery for the limited edition product.
Once everything was locked in, you were charged for the total of the order and everything would be waiting for you when you checked in on the day of the event.
Check-in was a pretty seamless process: you would present your ID, get your gift, your badge and the ticket to the event, then moved to pick up all of the merchandise you had pre-ordered. All of the event product was on display and if you wanted to purchase more product, you’d need to wait in a line as you would at any retail store on the resort.
Personally, I love art, so many of my purchases were shirts, prints and other product from artists like SHAG, McBiff, Dave Quiggle and Joel Payne.
One of the highlights of the event for me was the 2 time slots where the artists were signing their merch and taking photos with attendees.
After that, there was a few photo ops in front of some Haunted Mansion backdrops then I went back to my room to spend time with the family and walk around the Parks for a bit.
The Event
As 11:30pm rolled around, I said goodnight to my family and left the Park in order to re-queue by the main entrance for the event. At this point, there were hundreds of Mansion fans lined up, many in some pretty creative costumes, getting read for the swinging wake.
We were let in at about 12:30am and moved to another queue near Rivers of America where the Dapper Dans…I mean, Cadaver Dans, were singing songs from their Halloween playlist, including one of my favs, Dead Man’s Party by Danny Elfman’s old band, Oingo Boingo).
As 1:00am rolled around, we were moved into the official event where people gathered by the waterfront for a kickoff show on Tom Sawyer’s Island. The production of the little intro was quite entertaining as the dead were called upon to celebrate the anniversary.
As part of the $300 event ticket, our badges included tabs that were redeemable for snacks and drinks in Haunted Mansion theme from various vendors.
Other benefits of the event were short lines at most of the attractions in Adventureland and Frontierland, as well, of course, as The Haunted Mansion.
My first order of business, while the line for The Haunted Mansion stacked up pretty quick, was to take advantage of some of the photo ops. The character offerings for the event were The Hitchhiking Ghosts, Constance Hatchaway (The Bride) and Sally Slater (the tightrope walker from the stretching portraits).
I jumped in line for my Sally Slater op and soon after I queued, the line was temporarily closed. For an event that was only 3 hours long, I was a bit disappointed to realize that I probably wouldn’t be able to do everything I wanted during the 3 hour event.
By time I reached Sally, the event was almost half over and I decided not to wait for the other photo ops. I swung by the character locations to get a glimpse and headed over to the Mansion which was all dolled up for it’s special day.
The Mansion was lit up in the Disney Halloween purple and green lighting and had bright white back lights emanating from the top. I wasn’t expecting any changes from the ride itself but I was surprised to see the integration of live actors through the normal ride.
The changes I caught were a suit of armor in the green house that jumped out at riders, a live actress sitting at the table in the ballroom and the replacement of Gus with a live actor just before you exit the ride. As a fan of the attraction that could recreate the ride in my mind if asked, I though these were great payoffs for the fans who spent the middle of a weeknight celebrating the Haunted Mansion’s history.
With the event coming to a close, I decided that instead of waiting in any new lines, I would just do a couple of laps on Indiana Jones Adventure and head back to my room.
With my feet on fire and The Disneyland Hotel feeling like it was miles away, I stumbled down an empty Main Street, snapped a few pics and called it a night.
The Verdict
This was my first after hours Disneyland event so I really didn’t know what to expect. All I knew is that a hardcore fan of The Haunted Mansion fan like myself couldn’t miss it.
All in all, I’m not sure I found the value in spending $300 for the event.
What broke down to about $100 an hour, Guests of the event should have been able to take part in all of the festivities. Though I appreciated the fact that Sally Slater took the time to interact with everyone, part of me wishes the line was a bit more efficient so that people wouldn’t have to spend an hour at each op.
In the end, I feel like the $300 was basically a way to buy more product (I spent about $500 and most of the product was available in the Parks the following day) and take advantage of short lines in the part of Disneyland that was open to the event.
The lines were way too long to do everything so looking back all I had accomplished was the themed atmosphere, one photo op, some cool additions to The Haunted Mansion, short lines on rides and all of my drink and food coupons since I didn’t have time to redeem them.
The event itself wasn’t bad but I certainly wouldn’t do it again for the price of admission.