Which is more terrifying: A gravity-defying, mind-bending flight of stairs, inspired by the famous M.C. Escher staircase of 1953? Or a large rubber spider from Spirit Halloween?

If you answered “spider,” congratulations. You’re an Imagineer.

Most visitors to the Magic Kingdom version of the Haunted Mansion think everything in the ride is a 1971 original. But that’s not true. In fact, most visitors to the Magic Kingdom are completely unaware of the park’s opening date and they spend exactly zero minutes thinking about the show scene creation dates of an 8-minute ride. Only nutcases do that.

But even if guests did think everything in the ride dates back to 1971, it still wouldn’t be true. The Haunted Mansion has seen several changes over the years. And even though it seems like the Escher Staircase scene in the first half of the ride has been there since the Dick Nunis years, it was only added in 2007 — 36 years after the the ride opened.

That means the Haunted Mansion had a completely different staircase scene for most of its life! …er, afterlife.

Today, the Escher staircase scene is a colossal tower of upside-down stairways, passages to nowhere, and those supernatural dress-shoes footprints. This isn’t just a nod to a famous Dutch woodcut (we all knew M.C. Escher was Dutch, right?). We’re firmly in haunted house territory, echoes of the Winchester Mystery House.

It’s way cooler than what was there before. It might even be cooler what we see with our own two eyes. There is all kinds of subtle trickery, history, and storytelling at play.

We’ll go into 5 of them. Now back to that spider…

The Banister

Before the Escher stairs, there was a rubber spider. His name was Mr. Spiderpants. He was as big as a cantaloupe — and he glowed like one too, when under blacklight. He was made of rubber, so he kinda jiggled a little bit when fastened to a fake spiderweb and blasted with a fan.

And all of this might have been a teensy bit scary in the dark if there had been something — anything! — for him to menace, instead of the perpetual black-painted corner of the wall that he was mounted in.

Oh, they had ideas. There was the “Man in the Web.” Webster, he was called. He was the corpse of a human being, entwined in unescapable silk tendrils, sucked dry by the titanic arachnid. Just a little lighthearted horror for your young children, just when you had promised them that the Haunted Mansion was “more funny than scary.” I’m sure they would have laughed their heads off.

Rumors persist that the Man in the Web actually did make it to the installation phase. As these rumors always go, he was removed during previews. That won’t stop your cousin’s friend’s mom who was a Cast-Member from swearing that she saw him well after the Grand Opening. I guess that makes the Man in the Web no different than Big Red the Elephant or Michael Eisner’s original Alien Encounter. But somehow even less credible than those rumors.

So yeah, for 36 years, all we had was the jiggly spider. We don’t feel bad about it. In fact, we’re kinda jealous that Tokyo Disneyland still has theirs (his name is Young Master Spiderpants, Esquire). And if we needed a quick rubber spider fix, there was always the Jungle Cruise (Mrs. Spiderpants-DeMornay; she hyphenated after the divorce).

But if we want to get truly nostalgic for this original Haunted Mansion spider tableaux, there’s one part of the scene that is still the same: The banister.

Don’t throw stuff at us! Antique haunted house banisters are a passion of ours! And we don’t mean the railings on the paradoxical stairs themselves. We mean the banister that lines the grand staircase — the one your Doom Buggy is traveling on.

It’s rather nice! The Long Forgotten Haunted Mansion site has a great side-by-side picture (though of course they care more about the spider webs rather than the fascinating railing).

Its maker was a deft hand with the wood tiller. When the Imagineers redid this scene in 2007, they left the banister in place. It actually helps to sell the illusion of the endless stairs. Your vehicle is on but one of many possible pathways through the Haunted Mansion.

And you should maybe be just a tiny bit worried that your own stairs are going to be upside-down soon.

The Half Door

Once you know the door is there, you always want to look for it. You stare knowingly. You maybe even give it a tip of your cap. Because it appears to be just like any other door in the scene.

Which is to say: Fake. All the doors at the tops (bottoms?) of the stairs go nowhere. The don’t even fulfill the one basic tenet of doorhood: opening. These doors are facades. Simply fastened or painted directly on the walls.

But one of them isn’t just a fake door. It’s a fake-fake door. You see, in order to create the illusion of endless flights of stairs, the wall in front of you is actually a giant mirror. It’s a common theme park trick to make a room seem more expansive. Think the AT-AT hanger bay in Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, the Droid Room in Star Tours, or the bathroom mirror after an especially heavy dinner at the San Angel Inn.

By coincidence, the same picture of the banister above also shows the half door. It comes with half a set of stairs against the mirror… and the reflected stairs going back down again.

I guess that explains why the thing doesn’t have hinges. You might say it is… unhinged.

What is the Ghost Doing?

Just getting his steps in, so to speak. Every footprint lingers in ghostly memory on the stairs before fading away like the nostalgic glow of childhood.

But to what end?

Is this guy just a perpetual night owl, roaming the halls of the Haunted Mansion in search of a sandwich? It takes a few rides before you realize the ghost isn’t just running a spectral tour de stade. He actually has a goal in mind.

He just wants to turn off the blasted lights.

There are candelabras all over the scene. Upside-down ones too, which may be even more freaky than the inverted Escher staircase. The flame disobeys the laws of gravity, giving new meaning to the idea of burning the candle at both ends. If you take the time to really watch those footsteps, you’ll see the ghost pausing long enough to blow out the candles so he can finally disappear and get some sleep.

And then the candles puff back on again, like a rival coworker monkeying with the office thermostat.

The Watchful Eyes

As you leave the Escher staircase room and make the turn, you are met by another variation of the old Imagineering trick called “we need something for this empty dark corner.”

Their first thought was probably a large neon balloon animal that jiggled when blasted with a fan. But we got something better: The return of Webster!

Oh, not the Man in the Web. That guy was way too frightening. No, Webster is just our nickname a pair of glowing eyes that are peering out at you from the dark corner. Webster is the third pair from the left. We did not name the other pairs of eyes, because those guys just stared at us blankly. Webster at least gave us a friendly wink.

Hey, wait a minute, you protest. This scene isn’t part of the Escher stairway scene. Eh, we’re cheating. It’s our website. We make the rules. But this was part of the new (now 20-year-old) addition to the Haunted Mansion. So we think it counts.

Also, these glowing eyes happened to be the subject of one of our very first Parkeology posts way back in the day. We felt it was worth a re-run. Have you ever wanted to see what these guys look like for real?

Look at that! They’re just little lightboxes mounted on black pool noodles. We told you they were friendly.

The Staring Wallpaper

One of the truly great gags in the ride is how the glowing eyes of Webster and his ilk gradually transition into the famous wallpaper pattern that the Haunted Mansion is famous for.

The lightbox eyes in the photo above are in pitch blackness, but the wallpaper is under show lighting. Disney sells the effect by having some of the eyes in the actual wallpaper glow and blink before gradually becoming a static decoration. This is also what happens to many of the robots in Hall of Presidents.

It doesn’t take much to figure out this trick. Cut out some eye holes, add a blinking mechanism, and you’ve got it. Except…

How do you do this after the Haunted Mansion is already built?

The solution: add a new wall on top of the original wall.

It’s very difficult to spot in low lighting, but if you study it closely, you can see that the first few yards of wallpapered wall is jutting out a few inches from the rest of the wall. It goes almost all the way to the rafters. We cannot personally verify this, but we have been told that this section of wall is actually on hinges (unlike Parkeology, which is mostly unhinged). The wall can effectively swing open like a gate so that maintenance can get behind it to repair any bad lights.

BONUS TRICK! The Hatbox Ghost Footprints

The Hatbox Ghost comes right after the blinking wallpaper. He is an even newer addition to the Haunted Mansion, having arrived in 2023. But we felt like including him here because of one simple reason: more ghostly footprints!

The Hatbox Ghost wears very similar shoes to those traipsing up and down the Escher staircase. We’re not saying that Hatbox Ghost is the invisible poltergeist, but it is interesting that he also leaves footprints.

But the whole thing is an Escher-like inversion. Everybody can see the footprints on the upside-down stairs. But almost nobody spots the Hatbox’s footprints!

Maybe if you ride late at night, after your pupils have adjusted to low-light, you can see them. The guy has tracked mud all over the rug in front of him. But for some reason, dark mud on dark flooring in a haunted house with most of the lights turned off does not make for great viewing conditions.

We believe it is a subtle tie to the 2023 Haunted Mansion movie, in which Jared Leto plays a freakish ghoul. Now we admit, that is literally every Jared Leto movie. But in this Disney film, Leto is the Hatbox Ghost who first trampled through the Mansion grounds before arriving inside the house.

And because of that iconic scene in one of the defining films of this generation, Disney Imagineers were obligated to include muddy footprints in the ride. We’d be up in arms without them.

Did you enjoy this little deep dive into the obscure corners of the Haunted Mansion Escher staircase scene? If so, we did the same thing with the Haunted Mansion Stretch Room. Check it out here!