One of the most famous of the 999 happy haunts that inhabits the Haunted Mansion is the mysterious Madame Leota. Found in a seance room, she is one of the most prominent characters in all versions of the ride, being granted an entire scene in each version of the ride. As with most characters in this iconic Disney attraction she has an elaborate backstory.
But her backstory is not the same in each version of the ride. Both the Disneyland and Walt Disney World versions of Madame Leota, as well as the Phantom Manor version of the character, have entirely different backstories from one another based on the ride's location that showcase the life of Madame Leota before she came to reside in the Haunted Mansion.
Here you will find an exploration of what is known about each the backstories of one of the Haunted Mansions most famous ghouls, Madame Leota.
Disneyland
The exploration begins with the original version of the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland. Here the mansion was found in New Orleans Square, meaning Madame Leota lived her life in this American city in roughly the 19th century.
In this version of the ride, Madame Leota has been suggested to be Romani through numerous references to her life throughout New Orleans Square, although this has not been officially confirmed. During her life she worked as a magician, primarily focusing on fortune telling and acting as a medium. She performed and even had her own cart along the streets of New Orleans Square. In life she contacted the dead, and eventually in death she would contact the living.
Walt Disney World
Madame Leota has an entirely different backstory in the context of the Walt Disney World version of the Haunted Mansion. As the Magic Kingdom attraction is located in Liberty Square, said to be in colonial America, this leads to an entirely different backstory.
Here she lived around a century earlier than her Disneyland counterpart. Here her race is not as explicitly implied in this park at the moment, with her main backstory being as a survivor of the Salem Witch Trials, that she may have helped cause, which led her to flee Massachusetts and end up in Liberty Square
She would live the remainder of her life in Liberty Square and become a significant staple of the community, even opening her own storefront, Memento Mori Curios and Curiosities. Here she found a way to profit off of her abilities, and she would eventually be buried in the burial grounds of a neighboring mansion which she would inhabit in her afterlife.
Phantom Manor
Madame Leota is one of the few Haunted Mansion characters to appear largely unchanged in the Disneyland Phantom Manor, apart from a different actress portraying her. While her speech in the ride is different to fit the different storyline of the attraction and the story of Melanie Ravenswood, her characterization and scene in the ride are not dissimilar to her appearance in the Haunted Mansion.
While Frontierland in Disneyland Paris has an incredibly elaborate backstory, Madame Leota is largely absent from it. It is known she lived in the town of Thunder Mesa and worked as a fortune teller, but major details of her life have not been revealed.
Many characters in the Haunted Mansion are given elaborate backstories, but few are different between versions of the attraction. Madame Leota may appear largely the same across versions of the ride, but if you look deeper this spirit is not the same person in each version of the Haunted Mansion.
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