Disneyland guest dies after riding Haunted Mansion attraction

A Disneyland guest has died after riding the park’s classic Haunted Mansion attraction, Entertainment Weekly has learned.

After unconfirmed reports circulated online that a woman died on the seasonal holiday overlay themed to The Nightmare Before Christmas, EW confirmed with a source that a guest was transported from the Anaheim, Calif., park to a local hospital on Monday.

Matt Sutter of the Anaheim Police Department later told EW via email that “Anaheim Fire & Rescue responded to the Disneyland Resort for an unresponsive woman in her 60s who had just finished riding the Haunted Mansion attraction,” and that “Disneyland security personnel provided CPR until paramedics arrived.”

Later, the woman “was transported to a local hospital, where she was later pronounced deceased.”

Sutter said the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner “will determine the cause of death” at a later time.

EW has reached out to representatives for Disneyland for comment.

The guest’s death comes just under one month after a man died while riding the Stardust Racers roller coaster at Universal Epic Universe, Universal’s new theme park that opened in May.

The Haunted Mansion, one of the Disney parks’ most beloved rides, first opened in 1969 in the New Orleans Square section of the park, and began operating its temporarily, seasonal Haunted Mansion Holiday seasonal overlay in 2001.

One of the final attractions made with creative input from Walt Disney, who died in 1966 prior to the ride’s opening, the original Haunted Mansion at Disneyland takes riders on a journey through a spirit-infested manor, where they encounter the floating head of medium Madame Leota, a dining room filled with dancing specters, and hitchhiking ghosts.

The ride is also one of the only Disney parks attractions that features explicit images of human death, including the ride’s opening sequence that sees visitors locked inside a room that, with help from special visual effects, stretches upward with guests inside. At the end of the sequence, the “Ghost Host” narrator challenges them to “find a way out,” with lighting effects revealing that a dead body hangs above visitors from the ceiling.

Kim Irvine, a former creative director with Imagineering at Disneyland, indicated that her team initially discussed removing the hanging corpse scene during a refurbishment of the attraction in 2021 because, as the Los Angeles Times wrote, “such an image could be triggering for some guests.”

In a recent interview with the outlet, Irvine added, “We’re still looking at that,” and called it “complicated, structurally” to address.

The ride’s narrative was, however, adapted into two family oriented feature films, including 2003’s Eddie Murphy-staring Haunted Mansion and another adaptation in 2023 starring LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Jared Leto, and Jamie Lee Curtis, among others.

In addition to the films and the original Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, further iterations have opened at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom park in Florida, at Tokyo Disneyland, and at Disneyland Paris, though the French iteration, called Phantom Manor, features similar scenes peppered throughout a different narrative set in the American west.

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Hong Kong Disneyland also later opened Mystic Manor, an attraction inspired by the Haunted Mansion, though its tone is far lighter as it follows a mischievous monkey named Albert who meddles in his explorer owner’s collection of magical antiques.