It's Autumn Lives Here's Third!

Vol. 155: Hand over the presents, creeps

It’s true. Three years ago, I was loopy enough to start a horror/Autumn Substack in the middle of June. I blame it on a desperate need to see a flickering light at the end of the ring in Hell that is Summer in Arizona. And I wanted to talk about the scary books I read and Autumn food. Anyway, June marks my third anniversary. So many crimes, so much body glitter…Stuff a chunk of cake in yer hole and let’s look at a couple things I’ve been uncomfortably interested in over the last 12 months.

From Vol. 120, here’s the backstory on one of the happiest places on Earth…

Come Out To Socialize!: How the Haunted Mansion Got So Spooky

I grew up just a few minutes from Disneyland, and that leaves an impression on a kid. I didn’t get to go as often as you’d think, but obviously I got to go more than a kid who lived five states away. The Haunted Mansion was this creepy kid’s nightmare come true.

I loved the staff’s solemn faces, the Doombuggies, the changing portraits, and the dark, specter-filled rooms. For me, the sounds of The Haunted Mansion were just as delicious as the appearance. That deep voice that tells you to enter your Doombuggy and keep your arms and legs inside, that the ghosts will control everything... if eight year-olds could have heart attacks, I wouldn’t be here.

From 1969 to 2001, The “Ghost Host” was performed by voice actor extraordinaire Paul Frees. He was one of the most in-demand talents of the 60s, voicing Boris in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and he dubbed Humphrey Bogart’s lines in Bogart’s last film after his voice was ravaged from esophageal cancer. In 2001, Frees’ spiel was replaced due to a longer safety blurb, but both the English language and Spanish voice-over actors (Joe Leahy and Fabio Rodriguez) are imitating Frees, whose voice is still heard in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride telling you that “dead men tell no tales”. Frees died in 1986, but it’s likely that you’ll hear him in many American cartoons released in the 60s and 70s, including The Flintstones and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

Here’s a few minutes of audio from Frees’ Haunted Mansion recording session. You’ll hear him testing out the host’s lines as both Dracula and Peter Lorre.

The music you hear throughout the attraction is all one song, “Grim Grinning Ghosts (The Screaming Song)”. The tune was written by Buddy Baker, who also wrote the music for the “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” attraction. The lyrics to “Grim Grinning Ghosts” were written by Xavier ‘X’ Atencio, one of the multi-talented artists who worked directly with Walt Disney.

Atencio’s imprint on the world of Disney is huge. He began as an animator on Fantasia in 1940, and later worked on Mary Poppins, among many Disney films. He did double duty as a park Imagineer, writing the script for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. When he suggested that Pirates needed some music, Walt Disney listened as Atencio hummed something vaguely piratey... then told him he was now in charge of that too. (Disney was famous for listening to employee ideas and then saying, “Great! Go do that thing that you’ve never done before.”) Atencio wrote“Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)”, his first foray into songwriting.

Disney was clear about his vision of The Haunted Mansion. He died in 1966, never seeing the attraction finished. Atencio oversaw Disney’s idea of the Mansion being a retirement home where the spirits of the former residents still reside.

“Grim Grinning Ghosts” is played slowly, like a funeral dirge, as guests enter the building. It’s played by the crumple-hatted organist named Herr Victor Geist during the ride, and it’s the same song the handsome couples spin to in the ballroom. Guests hear it played at a very slow tempo while exiting their Doombuggy, but the most lively version is played in the graveyard. The busts with the other-worldy glow singing the complete song were The Mellomen, a group that consisted of Jay Meyer, Verne Rowe, Bob Ebright, Chuck Schroeder and the incredibly named Thurl Ravenscroft.

Ravenscroft looked an awful lot like Walt Disney, which started the long-standing myth that it was Disney appearing among the dearly departed. The group was hired just to record the audio for The Haunted Mansion, but during the recording session it was noted how animated they were, so they were hired to be the faces too. The special effect is simple: the actors were made up in garish make-up and filmed separately, then it’s just an endless loop of the faces projected onto sculpted foam busts. It’s a kind of immortality. The Mellomen are long gone, but their images and voices are still working their graveyard gig.

Madame Leota. Now this is the part of the ride that gave *some* kids nightmares. Smart, tough kids who knew it was impossible for a severed head to be alive and ordering spirits to attach themselves to the kid. Spirits that would hide under the kid’s bed and haunt her every night. I hear this girl went on to be a horror writer or became a fake psychic...something sketchy.

Madame Leota is the combination of two remarkably talented women. The image is that of Disney animator Leota Toombs, and yes, that was her real name. Toombs began her Disney career in “Art and Paint” of the Animation department in 1940, coloring in the black line drawings. She was soon moved to Animation, and there met fellow animator Harvey Toombs, whom she married in 1947. She was a looker, resembling pop singer Connie Francis. When she began working on The Haunted House attraction, her fellow Imagineers asked her to perform Madame Leota’s dialogue in the testing. A mask of her face was judged to be perfect for the role, so she was then filmed reciting the incantation. The problem was that her light, feminine voice wasn’t frightening enough, so voice actor Eleanor Audley was hired. Audley’s commanding voice is also heard as the Evil Stepmother in Cinderella and as Maleficent in Sleepy Beauty. But that’s Toombs’ real, unaltered voice as the tiny bride when you exit the ride, entreating, “Come baaack, come baaack...remember to bring your death certificate.”

Toombs also worked on It’s A Small World and Pirates of the Caribbean, retiring from Disney in the 1980s before passing away in 1991. Her daughter, Kim, also became an Imagineer. She looked so much like her mother than a blending of their faces was created when the park did a seasonal change for a Nightmare Before Christmas theme.

Now here’s something really scary-

RadiThor: The Killer Energy Drink

People have always looked for quick solutions for lethargy. A cure for, uh, loss of stamina. Products that promise energy with health benefits aren’t the modern trend we like to think they are. RadiThor was the hot young thing in the mid-1920s. Each little bottle of about two ounces sold for $1, the equivalent of $17.33 today. What did you get for that steep price? Certified radioactive water. As the label boasted, “Contains Radium and Mesothorium in Triple Distilled Water”. Because water that hadn’t been triple distilled would be dangerous.

RadiThor was the creation of a man named William J. Bailey. Born in Boston in 1884, Bailey was one of nine children to a widowed mother. He was intelligent, ambitious and ethically fluid, a dynamite combination in the days before background checks. Bailey was accepted to Harvard and attended for less than a year, dropping out when he ran out of money, but that didn’t stop him from telling people that he graduated. He also made up a medical degree, and by 1918 he forayed into medical quackery with a product he called ‘Las-I-Go for Superb Manhood’. It was a consumable cure for impotence for which Bailey was fined for fraud, but that didn’t stop him. In 1927, he was convicted for practicing medicine without a license. It was too late for him to care, as he had already launched his most lucrative scheme.

Bailey had learned of the powers of radium. By mixing less than one microcurie (the standardized way radium is weighed) of Ra-226 and Ra-228 into water, Bailey produced RadiThor as an energy drink marketed mostly towards men for increasing sexual stamina. Each little bottle featured a 400% profit margin for him, and with the success of RadiThor, Bailey had hit on his golden goose. Over the course of its production, RadiThor sold over 400,000 bottles. He made so much money that one of his advertisements was a challenge: $1000 to anyone who could prove that RadiThor contained any less than a full microcurie of the radium as labeled. No one took him up on it, of course, as only a few scientists in the world had the means to test it, but there would be horrifying proof later that RadiThor did indeed contain radium.

One of the most vocal proponents of RadiThor was Eben Byers. The son of an iron industrialist, Byers was a devout golfer who won the 1906 U.S. Amateur title. He was a playboy in his youth, but by the time his doctor suggested trying RadiThor he was in his mid-forties and had fallen out of the upper berth of a train car, landing on his arm. The injury was causing him acute pain, so Byers took his doctor’s advice and started drinking RadiThor. It was later discovered that Bailey was giving kickbacks to doctors for pushing his product to their patients.

Byers not only gained relief for his arm by drinking RadiThor, he gained a new lease on life. His energy escalated and his youthful sex drive returned. Byers became a one-man campaign for the product, drinking up to three bottles a day, which would be the equivalent of about $200 a week today. He told all his country club friends about it. He sent packages of the stuff to his business associates and his multiple girlfriends. He had RadiThor given to his racehorses. He felt amazing. And then his teeth began falling out.

That was his first sign that something was wrong. In less than three years, Byers bones were destroyed. He stopped drinking RadiThor in 1930, but by then he had ingested about 1500 doses of radium. He had lost a drastic amount of weight, and in quick succession, surgeons removed his entire lower jaw and most of his upper jaw in an effort to save his life. This malformation of the jaw, or complete removal of it, became a sign of an extensive ingestion of radium. The medical community nicknamed it “RadiThor jaw”. It was also found among the “radium girls” who licked their paintbrushes while creating watch faces, a profession that costs many their jaws, teeth and life.

Byers prominent position and the effect RadiThor had on him finally caught the government’s attention and kicked off an investigation into RadiThor and Bailey, who claimed to have drunk just as much RadiThor as Byers and suffered no ill effects. This couldn’t have been true as Bailey was healthy. He likely didn’t drink the product, or if he did, it hadn’t been on a regular basis.

The Federal Trade Commission sent a lawyer named Robert Winn to Byers’ Long Island beachfront mansion to take his testimony. Byers was too ill to travel. Winn included a description of Byers’ physical appearance in his report, writing, “All the remaining bone tissue of his body was disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull.” Tasked with getting the facts from a suffering man who was missing half of his face, Winn also stated, “A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine.”

Byers after jaw removal, with tape covering holes

The FTC shut down the production of RadiThor, but Bailey doesn’t seem to have served any jail time and he continued with his medical quackery. He began producing compressed seaweed pills, billing them as having the power to cure a multitude of diseases. The Food & Drug Administration shut it down. After that, he either stopped his shady businesses or just became better at hiding his involvement. He died of bladder cancer in 1949 at sixty-four years old, an age that testifies to the fact that he wasn’t ingesting RadiThor.

Eben Byers died on March 31, 1932, two weeks short of his 52^nd birthday. His death certificate stated “radiation poisoning” as the cause of death, though today a distinction is made between “radiation syndrome” and the acute cancers that are caused by the radiation. Not that it would matter to him. He was buried in a lead-lined coffin, but more than 30 years after his death his body was exhumed and tested. His remains still contained dangerous levels of radium.

Now let’s look at an installment of my advice column. I love telling people what to do.

Dear Autumn Lives Here

It must be so aggravating for you. Here you are, texting, calling, blinking S.O.S. at me from across the Halloween aisle at WinnCo., and I let it all drift past without a care. You must think I was ignoring you. I was, but now I’m doling out the wisdom you’ve desperately been after. All I can say is, wow. You people are a mess.

Dear ALH, what’s your favorite thing about Fall?

Dear Reader,

I love it when the trees in the back orchard are covered in beautiful red apples. The Giant lifts me onto his shoulders and I pretend to gather fruit while really watching the neighbors, dressed as squirrels, chasing each other around the house and trying to hide their nuts. That says Fall to me.

Dear ALH, how do you celebrate Halloween?

My favorite holiday! I hand out those king-size candy bars to all the darling children in exchange for the five years or so of life force that I drain from each one of them in the short time they’re on my porch. I like to be generous.

Dear ALH, who would win in a fight between a vampire and a witch?

Dear Reader,

I don’t need to speculate because I’ve seen a fight between a vampire and a witch. The witch easily won. The vampire turned into a bat, the witch snatched him out of the air and threw him into her bubbling cauldron. Witches are the goats of the supernatural world, they’ll eat anything.

Dear ALH, I hate to be rude, but what’s that smell?

Dear Reader,

Are you referring to me? Well, let’s go down the list of possibilities:

Do I smell sweet?- I’ve just eaten two pounds of candy corn.

Do I smell like vomit?- I’ve just thrown up two pounds of candy corn.

Do I smell spicy?- I’ve given myself a once-over with Pumpkin Spice Glade.

Do I smell like a chicken coop in August? Who told you to stand behind me? That’s on you.

Enjoyed my little celebration? Ha! While you were reading I finished off the cake.

Thanks for visiting this little Substack that keeps dragging itself along like that half-chick from The Walking Dead. You know, the one Rick put out of her misery? Where was she going? Anyway, drop in on Autumn Lives Here often, and maybe pony up a few bucks if I’ve entertained you this year. I’m just one weird girl dreaming of lasik. Help spread the word that this is the creepiest place on Substack, and maybe you’ll look up one day and I’ll be there saying, “Let’s have a drink.”