Why the Haunted Mansion?
By Richard Kaufman I’ve been asked twice why I collect memorabilia from The Haunted Mansions at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, and Disneyland Paris. The first was when my girlfriend nearly had a heart attack at how much I’d spent after the Mansion’s 30th anniversary event in 1999. “Why are you collecting this stuff,” she inquired loudly. The happy ending to that short story is that we got married and I still have my stuff (and then some). I could not answer the question at that time why was I spending thousands of dollars on memorabilia and souvenirs related to a theme park attraction? The second time someone posed the question is now, when Jeff Baham (the friendly Chef Mayhem) asked me to write about the same thing. Why. I still can’t tell you, but here are some things that have been encoded into my brain in the past 49 years that may account for it. Growing up, all I wanted to do was watch horror films on TV. In Queens, New York, that meant Creature Features on WNEW
