If you’ve ever visited the Haunted Mansion, you’re very familiar with the mysterious ghosts that haunt its various rooms. The apparitions are clearly not really there, so are they holograms?
Nope! All of Disneyland’s ghosts and other mysterious creatures appear thanks to a visual trick called the Pepper’s Ghost Illusion. This trick is named after scientist John Henry Pepper, who popularized it after a demonstration in 1862. Pepper’s Ghost is different from a hologram because it uses reflections of real figures, rather than an image created by a special lens.
To explain how it works, I’ll use the ballroom scene from the Mansion. When you see the ballroom, you are up on the second floor, looking mostly below to see the ghostly apparitions, though there are a few near the ceiling. This is by design; this trick needs the space above and beneath you to make figures appear in the ballroom.
I made some very basic graphics to show you how this visual trick works. This is what is physically inside the ride:
The teal shape is your buggy, and the blue rectangle is a glass wall between your vehicle and the ballroom. The objects you see before you are really there, like the table, the organ, and the chandelier, but the animatronics are not actually in the ballroom. Instead, there are animatronics in the spaces above and below your buggy, where you can’t see them.
Hidden lights shine directly onto the animatronics, so that they reflect on the glass wall. What you see is an image reflected on the glass placed perfectly in front of the objects in the room. From your buggy, you don’t notice the glass, and instead you see ghostly apparitions interacting with the real furniture and décor. And this is what you see:
The Haunted Mansion is not the only ride in the park that uses the Pepper’s Ghost Illusion; you can also find it in Pinocchio’s Daring Journey, The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh, the Sleeping Beauty Castle Walkthrough, and Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sully to the Rescue. The Mansion does, however, have the distinction of the largest Pepper’s Ghost illusion in the world, at 30×90 feet.
So next time you visit these dark rides, see if you can spot the glass walls used in the illusions; you’ll have a new appreciation for how cleverly Disney disguises its tricks!
Disney World does the ballroom scene better though
Really? To the best of my knowledge the scenes are virtually identical. What differences are you thinking of?
Very cool. I thought the ghosts were just holograms but this explains why they look like they are actually moving around the room. I’ve never noticed the glass before so I will have to look for it!
You have to really pay attention to spot it! The best place to notice it is right before you turn into the attic. There is a “cobweb” from where the glass is cracked, and there’s a seam to the right. Once you notice it, you’ll always catch it!