Meet Phineas (the traveler), Ezra (the skeleton), and Gus (the prisoner), affectionately known as the Hitchhiking Ghosts and some of the most famous residents of the Haunted Mansion.
They originally got their names from Cast Members who created backstories for the attraction, and they used to jump into your Doom Buggy at the end of the ride via a Pepper’s Ghost special effect—the same creative use of reflection that fills the ballroom with dancing apparitions. In 2011, the same year that Disney replaced this with a CGI effect at the end of the attraction, Imagineers leaned into the story themselves, sharing that the CGI Phineas character was inspired by John Candy and Chris Farley, the Ezra character by John Cleese, Jim Carrey, and Michael Keaton, and the Gus character by Christopher Lloyd's character, the Reverend Jim Ignatowski, on the old sitcom Taxi, which is a very specific little detail that always makes me laugh.
I remember always being a little spooked when I was little at the idea of the ghost following me home. My kids had a phase, too, where they were just scared enough of the Haunted Mansion to want to skip it nearly every time. I’m glad we’re all over our superstitions now and willing to ride it, because it never gets old.
This scene is dark and camera settings here were insane—50mm, 1/50 second (as slow as I dare to go in a moving vehicle), f/1.2, and ISO still a whopping 40000. I dealt with the aftermath of that ISO in edits (high ISO makes for a very grainy picture), stripped out the blue overcast, and made the whole thing a little dreamier, among other things. The result is the chance to see more here than I think I've ever been able to take in of the scene before.