Good news: we finally have an expected reopening date for Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, which has been closed at Disneyland since January for a major exterior redesign. Here's the bad news: that reopening won’t happen until the Halloween season starts up, meaning that when the attraction reopens, it will do so as Haunted Mansion Holiday, meaning the traditional version of the ride won't be seen this year.
Halloween Time at Disneyland Resort officially begins on August 23, and it appears that will be the date of Haunted Mansion’s return. Halloween is a popular time at theme parks, and we’ve seen the holiday creep earlier and earlier at Disneyland, primarily to accommodate more dates for the insanely popular Oogie Boogie Bash after-hours events.
The Traditional Haunted Mansion Won’t Return In 2024
This was the thing that I was most afraid of happening, and now here we are. Every year, the Haunted Mansion closes in late summer for a transformation from the traditional Haunted Mansion attraction into the Nightmare Before Christmas-themed Haunted Mansion Holiday, which runs from the Halloween season through the end of the Christmas holiday season. This year, when the ride closed in January, the normal time for the transformation, it simply stayed closed and construction began on an all-new queue.
No reopening timeline was given, and at the time, I was afraid that if the new queue took too long, we wouldn’t even see the traditional mansion in 2024. Now we know that’s exactly what we’re going to get. Assuming that the mansion returns to a somewhat normal schedule, we likely won’t see the traditional Haunted Mansion again until early February 2025.
A lot of Haunted Mansion fans already hate the fact that Haunted Mansion Holiday already makes the traditional attraction inaccessible for nearly half the year. I don’t even hate the seasonal overlay, but I do prefer the traditional version of the ride, and the fact that it’s going to be so long before I get to ride it again is a bit frustrating.
The New Haunted Mansion Queue Won’t Be Finished Yet
Considering the closure, they could have made the call to give the Nightmare Before Christmas theme a rest for the year. A bit of a break would probably make people more excited for it when it returned.
Of course, that’s if things are normal by then, and that may not be the case. While the Haunted Mansion is set to reopen, that doesn’t mean the newly designed queue will be done. It won’t be. For that reason, the Haunted Mansion will be using a Virtual Queue system, as has been used on new attractions with high demand, to manage the queue and keep it small. There’s still no official completion date for the construction.
The Virtual Queue will also be important because the entire corner of the park the mansion is in is just a lot of construction walls right now. Tiana's Bayou Adventure, which we checked out at Disney World, is still under construction at Disneyland, with the ride expected to open later this year, but with no official date. All of Critter Country has been closed since May. If Haunted Mansion tried to run at capacity it would be a complete madhouse right now.
Still, some Haunted Mansion is better than no Haunted Mansion. We can guess that the Virtual Queue will go pretty quickly as the Haunted Mansion is still one of the most popular attractions at Disneyland.
