The haunted house attraction features a ride-through tour in Omnimover vehicles called "Doom Buggies", and a walk-through show is displayed to riders waiting in the queue line.

The Haunted Mansion attraction launched a small franchise including two feature film adaptations, comic strips, television specials and merchandise.

Guests enter the mansion's grounds through the front gate and walk through a garden containing a pet cemetery and a carriage led by an invisible horse.

While the Ghost Host challenges guests to find a way out, the room stretches vertically, and the portrait frames appear to elongate, revealing grim fates depicted in humorous fashion.

Madame Leota, a blue-haired medium whose disembodied head appears within a levitating crystal ball, summons the Mansion's spirits.

After leaving the séance circle, guests move onto a mezzanine overlooking a massive ballroom where many ghosts are enjoying a birthday party.

The ghost of the mourning bride is nearby, who is holding the same candelabra seen earlier as she floats while her heart glows red and beats in time with the music.

Reaching the ground, they turn towards the gate of a private graveyard, where guests see a frightened caretaker holding a lantern and a shovel with his dog cowering at his feet.

In the graveyard are multiple comical sights, such as a skeleton's hand popping out of a hole in a tomb, a duo of ghosts singing opera, a king and queen balancing a seesaw on a gravestone and a duchess sipping a cup of tea.

"[1] The Haunted Mansion was an opening-day attraction at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, where it is part of Liberty Square.

It was decided that the Florida version of the attraction would be slightly longer and more elaborate than its California counterpart with extra scenes such as the library and the music room.

In 2011, the queue's graveyard was reworked and expanded into an interactive experience, consisting of a Composer's Crypt designed after the Ballroom's pipe organ, the water-spouting crypt of Captain Culpepper Clyne (originally created by Ken Anderson for the ride), a library-inspired mausoleum for a poet named Prudence Pock (related to Phineas Pock) that asks for help with rhyming couplets, and a set of busts with a murder mystery attached to them.

The members are Uncle Jacob, Bertie, Aunt Florence Dread (née McGriffin), twins Wellington and Forsythia, and Cousin Maude.

Weeks later, New Orleans Square appeared on the souvenir map and promised a thieves market, a pirate wax museum, and a haunted house walk-through.

He came up with a drawing of an antebellum manor with features from the Baltimore house, overgrown with weeds, dead trees, swarms of bats and boarded doors and windows topped by a screeching cat as a weathervane.

[4] He visited the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, and was captivated by the massive mansion with its stairs to nowhere, doors that opened to walls and holes, and elevators.

Rolly Crump showed Disney some designs for his version, which included bizarre objects like coffin clocks, candle men, talking chairs, man-eating plants, tiki-like busts, living gypsy wagons and a mirror with a face.

[5] Disney accepted these ideas and wanted to make the proclaimed "Museum of the Weird", a restaurant side to the now-named Haunted Mansion, similar to the Blue Bayou at Pirates of the Caribbean.

Coats, originally a background artist, wanted a scary adventure, and produced renditions of moody surroundings like endless hallways, corridors of doors, and bleakly spooky environments.

In the end, both artists got their ways when Atencio combined their approaches and ideas, creating a transition from dark foreboding to "spirited" entertainment.

[4] In around 1977, WDI considered utilizing the unused designs, creatures and effects that Rolly Crump had originally created for the Haunted Mansion and the Museum of the Weird as part of Professor Marvel's Gallery—"a tent show of mysteries and delights, a carousel of magic and wonder," to be built as part of Disneyland's Discovery Bay expansion area.

Recorded by voice-over artist Joe Leahy in English and Fabio Rodriguez in Spanish, in a recreation of the character of original actor Paul Frees' Ghost Host, the bilingual spiel was part of a park-wide campaign to increase safety.

In March 2011, a new "interactive queue" debuted at the Walt Disney World location, with new crypts and tombstones honoring Imagineers; a murder mystery for guests to solve featuring the sinister Dread Family; the Composer Crypt, which features musical instruments that play variations of "Grim Grinning Ghosts" when touched; the Mariner's brine-filled sepulcher, whose ghost sings and sneezes from within, and a crypt for Prudence Pock the poetess, which features haunted moving books and Prudence's ghost writing invisibly in her poem book.

The Hatbox Ghost was originally a part of the attraction when it opened in 1969,[15] but was removed when the illusion involving the specter's head was not convincing enough.

[21] In January 2024, the Disneyland Haunted Mansion began another extensive refurbishment to reform and expand the outdoor queue, modify the nearby Magnolia Park in New Orleans Square, and add a gift shop at the ride's exit.

[28] The Haunted Mansion is closed in mid to late August for a few weeks as they revamp the attraction before opening again in September, replacing many of the props and Audio-Animatronics with characters and themes from the movie.

Unlike the Haunted Mansion, however, it does not include references to departed spirits or the afterlife, due to differences in traditional Chinese culture.

Continuing the Society of Explorers and Adventurers theme of Tokyo DisneySea, the attraction tells the story of Lord Henry Mystic and his monkey Albert.

The attraction's exterior is that of a large Victorian mansion in an elaborate Queen Anne architectural style, and the experience features a trackless "ride" system and a musical score by Danny Elfman.

[30] In July 2010, Guillermo del Toro announced that he was set to write and produce a darker film adaptation also based on the attraction, promising that it would be both scary and fun.