From Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion to the clanking metal doors of the midway ghost ride, haunted houses are the best part of any theme park. Tomáš Kašpařík reminds us why, with this incredible 25,000+ piece tribute to spooky amusements. The model debuted at Skærbæk Fan Weekend last month, where we had a chance to explore the display in person.
To make it easier to transport,  the model is divided into two sections – the spooky ride queue, with winding lines and a few interior set pieces – and the ride itself, a two-story motorized build. While the physical build is new, the design itself started six years ago as a collab with Jason Pyett of Playwell Bricks. We asked Tomáš about how this project came together and he was gracious enough to share his story:

It all started in March 2019 when I decided I want to build a LEGO Haunted house just like the real thing in theme parks, with carts where people (in this case minifigures) can sit in and enjoy the ride. As you can see from my other builds I am a big theme park fan :-)

I was browsing Flickr for inspiration and found Jason’s profile with design of parts of the Harry Potter Hogsmeade village. I liked the style so much, that I immediately wrote to Jason about my idea, asking him if he would be interested in doing a collab, create the design that I could then build. Fortunately he loved the idea, we sent back and forth some pictures for inspiration, talked about some of the details and Jason started doing his magic.

The main inspiration was the Haunted Mansion’ Ghost Train Winter wonderland, Hyde Park, London.

During Jason designing the inside section with the carts, we chatted a lot about the cart size and style, what to use for rails and space needed for the motorizing parts.

It worked out perfectly, there was just enough space to fit in the motors and all the technic pieces to make it all work. It is all powered by one 4548 Transformer and Speed Regulator and each floor chain link pulling the carts and all the moving wall pieces are run by one 9V Power Functions L motor, so there are only 2 in the whole build.

In less then three months Jason had the entire design finished. He sent me the Studio file which for me still to this day using LDD was like science fiction!

Jason also extracted the parts list so I could start collecting the pieces, it was almost 24000 pieces in little over 800 unique part categories and I knew getting all the pieces will take a while :-)

Fortunately I had about third of the parts at home which I had to tediously search for in my supplies. Also Legoland Germany is only 8 hours drive away where I bought some smaller pieces like thousands of roof ingots for a very good price. I managed to collect better half of the pieces during summer and while working on other projects I planned to collect the rest during winter.

That was the time, when Covid hit the world hard and everything slowed down and priorities shifted. In the next 4 years I was super busy, found the woman of my life, traveled a lot, did LEGO Masters Czechia and Slovakia 2022, got married, had 2 kids and finally in 2024 managed to buy all the remaining pieces for the build and set myself the goal that it will be the first thing I build in 2025.

So January 1st 2025 I started, but the “small” hiccup was, that Jason did not make instructions for the Haunted house. Given the size of the build, it would take too long to make, and Jason, thanks to his great skills, also became super busy.

That was when I realized I finally had to learn to work in Studio. What I had to do was to dissect the design section by section, removing piece by piece to see how everything was connected, quite literally reverse-engineering by removing the pieces.

It was challenging, but not impossible and at the end of February the build was 95% finished and the fine details I worked on slowly while preparing new projects.

Since I plan to take the build to many events across Europe, like PKH Trondheim, the northernmost European event and one of my favorites located 2500 km drive from my home, I had to make sure it can survive the trip in one piece. So I created strong bases for both sections and slightly reinforced Jason’s wall design with more brackets and SNOT bricks.

This and the added decoration around the front section brought the total number of pieces well above 25,000 and the entire build weighs around 25 kilograms.

Besides the motorization, base and the added decoration all over, I also added green LED strips to each floor interior section including the roof, so this could look very nice in the dark.

I am excited to have brought it to Skaerbaek where many Afols from all over the world are able to see it live. And  and middle of October I was lucky to be chosen to participate and in October it will be at Legoworld Utrecht, the last LEGO-organized event of the year in Europe, with around 100,000 visitors every year.

Thank you Tomáš for sharing your story! You can see the Haunted Mansion in motion and experience the minifig POV rider view here: