Early Haunted Mansion Sculpts Have Unused Hitchhiking Ghost

Before the Hitchhiking Ghosts ever offered us a ride, Disney Imagineers were already shaping their mischievous faces in the model shop—and a few of those spirits never quite made the final cut.

Walt Disney Imagineering just opened a quiet little window into the Haunted Mansion’s earliest days, and the view is wonderfully ghostly. The new photos highlight Jack Ferges's 1960s maquettes from the WED model shop.

Photo courtesy of Disney.

In a recent Instagram share, Imagineering posted photos of character sculpts created by Imagineer Jack Ferges back in the 1960s while he worked in the WED model shop. These maquettes—small sculpted studies—helped turn rough concepts into something you could walk around and feel. Many of them came out of the unrealized Museum of the Weird, that strange collection of oddities Rolly Crump imagined guests would wander through after leaving the Mansion itself.

Haunted Mansion witch sculpt. Photo courtesy of Disney.

The opening image shows a row of exaggerated busts, all wild smiles and sharp scowls. Then the individual pieces start to speak.

One of the most charming is the unused “sheet ghost,” an early idea for one of the Hitchhiking Ghosts. He’s pale, with dark eye openings, an oversized grin, and thin arms poking out of his drapery. He tips a tiny top hat with one hand and sticks out a thumb with the other—already practicing the pose that would one day become legend. He simply never made the final lineup.

Hitchhiking ghost sculpt photo courtesy of Disney.

Nearby sits a witch from another discarded concept: three witches gathered around a cauldron. This one wears a tall, crooked pointed hat over yellow hair and leans in with a pair of bellows, ready to stoke the brew.

More familiar faces appear too. There’s Pickwick, the round-bellied ghost who still hangs from the chandelier in the Grand Hall, glass raised, one leg lifted in pure mischief. Gus, of course, made the cut—his early sculpt already shows that enormous shaggy beard, the ball and chain, and the outstretched thumb that has been following guests home since 1969. And then there’s a smiling graveyard ghost in a dark hat and green top, meant to enjoy tea around a hearse with his companions in a scene that never fully landed.

These little sculptures carry the soft fingerprints of the people who first dreamed the Mansion into being. Some spirits stayed. Others waited in the model shop, still smiling, still ready. Looking at them now feels like being let in on a secret the happy haunts have been keeping all along.