Harry Packer Mansion visited by Disney Imagineers in the 1970s 

Where can you get two slices of history wrapped into a gorgeous Victorian mansion for $1.5 million? If you guessed the Harry Packer Mansion in Jim Thorpe, you are correct. 

Bob and Pat Handwerk have the 15,000 square foot, 20-room mansion, with 12 guest rooms perched on two acres, on the market. Its in a prime location, above the Lehigh River and the Mauch Chunk Historic District and bounded by the former Switchback Depot and the home where Harry Packer grew up, the Asa Packer Mansion. 

The Handwerks purchased the mansion in 1983 for $85,000, at a time when the town was recovering from a loss of jobs due to the bankruptcy of the railroads, and from over a century of industrial ecologic damage to its air, water and land. While local residents had left the area for jobs in the cities, visitors from the cities were discovering a town that had recently created a National Historic District. 

Bob and Pat Handwerk converted the Harry Packer Mansion into a Bed & Breakfast. They advertise their B&B as “The mansion's impressive facade could have been taken from a gothic novel, this is only fitting for the Mansion used as the model for Disney World's Haunted Mansion! The interior however is anything but spooky. Fifteen foot ceilings, marble fireplaces and gilded mirrors of the parlors reflect the elegance of the Victorian Age.” 

Taking advantage of their link to the Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion, they began offering Murder Mystery weekends, with scenarios based upon the iconic Packer fortune. “Test your mettle and match wits in an exclusive mystery of the Victorian era, an age when the sleuth was king,” they write. 

Harry Packer was the son of Asa Packer. When Asa Packer died in 1879, his fortune passed first to elder son, Robert, who had it for one year before his death. Then, it passed to the younger son, Harry, who had possession for one year before he passed away. The only surviving child, Mary, was precluded from inheriting the family fortune by Victorian laws that forbade single women from inheriting. 

To get around this, she married Charles Cummings. It was a marriage of convenience. He signed a pre-nuptial agreement ceding him $100,000 worth of Lehigh Valley Railroad stock in the event of a divorce. Within the year, Mary Packer Cummings received her inheritance and they separated. 

That is one piece of the Harry Packer Mansion’s history, but what about it relation to the WDW Haunted Mansion? Jeff Baham operates a web site dedicated to Disney’s Haunted Mansions at www.doombuggies.com. 

“There is no written record, to my knowledge, of what the WED Imagineers actually did on their "field trips" to scope out various architectural locations in terms of research for the Mansions,” said Baham – who is the publisher of this fan-based web site and not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company. “A couple of trips are pretty well accepted as true history by both the Haunted Mansion fan community and Disney, and those are trips to the Sarah Winchester "Mystery" House in San Jose, CA, and to the Packer Mansion. There were undoubtedly other trips and a research performed as well.” 

Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune began construction of a rambling Victorian mansion in 1884. When she died 38 years later, the $5.5 million home had 160 rooms, some with quirky and bizarre features such as staircases leading nowhere. She was fascinated with the number 13: bathroom number 13 has 13 windows—one looking into the bedroom next door, the kitchen sink has 13 drain holes, and a 12-light gas chandelier was modified to hold 13 lights. 

According to Baham, the Walt Disney Corporate created Haunted Mansions in its various theme parks, but not al of them were inspired by the Harry Packer Mansion. Disney’s original Disneyland in Anaheim’s Haunted Mansion was based on a Louisiana Plantation. 

“Since the trips the Imagineers took were only used for exterior architectural information, then the Packer's inspiration only extends to the Orlando (and Tokyo, which is identical) Mansions. Disneyland's and Disneyland Paris' Mansions are both very different, architecturally,” said Baham. The WDW design changed to reflect its location in a New England-based "Liberty Square" locale. 

The WDW Haunted Mansion seems to be inspired by but not based on the Harry Packer Mansion, The WDW Imagineers freely blended from several architectural sources to create a mish-mash of gothic, pseudo-Victorian details,” said Baham. 

The Haunted Mansion's history stretches back into the mid 1950s, when Walt Disney asked conceptual artist and Imagineer Ken Anderson to start working on a walk-through "ghost house," as it was called in the early years of development, for his Disneyland theme park. “While there were many influences on the Mansions’ final architectural designs and the decorative details, it seems Anderson was most influenced by a catalog of Victorian decorative art and architecture that was part of the Disney library,” Baham said. 

The Packer Mansion was mentioned "officially" as a source of inspiration for the WDW Mansion's architecture in the Disney book "The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies" by Imagineer/author Jason Surrell. “However, I think that Surrell based much of his information about the architectural inspiration on the same sources that I've been discussing, which is primarily 35 years of hearsay, and apparent evidence,” said Baham.