There are few things I love more than Disney and Horror, which is one of the many reasons Haunted Mansion is my all time favorite ride at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
Exactly 50 years ago today Haunted Mansion opened up its tomb for the first time to guests and I can’t think of a more perfect day to post about my Haunted Mansion inspired wedding that happened on October 14, 2016. All photos were taken by my wonderfully talented wedding photographers The Ramsdens.
When Peter and I first began discussing our wedding we knew we wanted it to be Disney related, especially since we decided that being surrounded by all of our family and friends was more important to us than having a destination wedding at a Disney Resort. We both love Halloween and all things creepy so it was a no brainer that Haunted Mansion would end up heavily inspiring our wedding.
I like using the word inspire instead theme when it comes to talking about our wedding because it wasn’t really a “hit you over the head” themed wedding but more greatly influenced by Haunted Mansion.
We got married at the Merry-Go-Round Pavilion at Bear Mountain State Park which completely captured the whimsical feel that I was going for. If I wasn’t going to get married at Disney I was going to at least have a working merry-go-round that we could ride all night.
My dress was custom made for me from Wedding Dress Fantasy and I wanted it to evoke the feeling of one of the ballroom ghosts. As much as I love Constance, the bride in Haunted Mansion, I did not want my dress to be like hers…you know with the whole killing her husbands story line. Peter, of course, wore the official Haunted Mansion wallpaper tie which was perfect because our wedding colors were black and purple.
There were two things that were really important to me and the first was the flowers. I wanted our bouquets and boutonnieres to look like they could have come straight from the graveyard scene. All florals were done by Dark + Diamond.
The other most important part of the wedding was the cake. I am a huge dessert person and I’m always in awe of insane cakes. Thankfully the cake decorator at Homestyle Bakery was also a big Disney fan so she got really into the whole idea.
There were two amazing secrets about our cake. Our cake topper was made entirely of sugar (besides the tulle skirt) that was sculpted by our cake decorator. The other secret was that only one tier of this cake was real cake. Since the cake is completely covered in fondant they made a sheet cake that was used to serve everyone. I highly recommend doing this because fondant is not that pleasant for everyone to eat and since one tier was real we still got to do the cake cutting ceremony.
Since the pavilion we had our wedding at was so gorgeous one of the ways we saved money was that I did all the rest of the decor and the centerpieces myself. Most of it consists of stuff picked up from Michael’s and a lot of spray paint.
A few other Haunted Mansion highlights from our wedding that couldn’t be captured by photography that really helped tie everything together was that for the ceremony the bridal party and I walked down the aisle to the orchestral music from the ride and when we were announced during the reception we came out to “999 Happy Haunts”.
Our wedding was a truly a ghoulish delight and we absolutely felt like two of the happiest haunts that night.
Thanks for taking this walk down memory lane with me! If you want to read more about it you can check out my features in:
Grim Grinning Life 
What a gorgeous wedding! I love how you chose to use “inspired” like you said! That was what we did as well for our wedding! Love all your details and your dress was perfect!
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Thank you so much!
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