For deep-lore Disney fans, there’s a Mount Rushmore of attractions that Disneyland almost made, but didn’t. The park could have had an entire Indiana Jones land, for example, if not for overambitious budget projections. There also would have been a San Francisco-themed Discovery Bay, had the 1974 film “The Island at the Top of the World” not been a spectacular flop. A seasonally changing Holidayland would have celebrated throughout the year, too, if Walt Disney and Herb Ryman’s original vision for the park had come to life.

And if Walt Disney had lived longer, there would have been a very funky, very bizarre Museum of the Weird.

Arguably the most beloved of all of Disneyland’s lost attractions, the Museum of the Weird still has an especially fervent fan following among the park’s near misses. For the first time, a piece of that never-built attraction is now on display to the public, at San Francisco’s Walt Disney Family Museum.

When Walt Disney told his Imagineers in the mid-1950s that he wanted a haunted house in Disneyland, he trusted that they would come up with the concept on their own. “We weren’t really given too much direction on the project,” legendary Disney Imagineer Rolly Crump, one of the original Haunted Mansion Imagineers, wrote in his memoir “It’s Kind of a Cute Story.”

“At the time, they still didn’t really know what they wanted it to be,” he added, “so they just kind of set us loose. Walt just wanted us to be left alone, and he gave us the freedom to do whatever we wanted. We had our own little studio that we just filled with all sorts of crazy stuff.”

The team was divided on whether the attraction should be funny, in keeping with the spirit of Disneyland, or scary, as haunted houses traditionally were. Crump and Yale Gracey, the Imagineer behind the ride’s special effects like the Hatbox Ghost, after whom the ride’s Master Gracey character is named, were firmly in the “It should be scary” camp. (The model that Gracey built to explain the Pepper’s ghost illusion from the ride’s ballroom scene to Walt Disney still works, and is on display inside the members-only Magic Castle.)

In Crump’s view, he was following Disney’s orders when he created a cast of terrifying characters, like the Candle Man, a macabre figure covered in dripping wax that eventually made its way into the Haunted Mansion in 2023.

“It was Walt’s idea,” Crump told SFGATE in 2021; he died in 2023. “He loved all that. He loved to scare people. He said, ‘People love being scared,’ and that one of the things we should be doing is to scare people.”

In the end, what Crump came up with was, on the whole, deemed too scary for a ride meant to be enjoyed by the whole family. Ever the innovator, Disney had a solution.

“The next day, what happened was Walt came in and said, ‘OK, we’re going to do a Museum of the Weird, that’s where we’re going to use all that funny stuff you showed me yesterday,’” Crump told SFGATE. “All he had to do was go home and spend some time with himself, and he’d come up with everything. He was a delight to work with.”

“You never felt like you worked for Walt,” Crump added. “You felt like you worked with Walt because that’s the way he made you feel. He encouraged your creativity. He was part of the magic. He was part of everything we did.”

The Museum of the Weird would be attached to the Haunted Mansion, as a walk-through attraction that would have effectively been the world’s first themed ride queue, but after the ride.

Walt Disney teased the Museum of the Weird during a 1965 episode of “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color,” where Crump was featured with models of his creations, like the Candle Man.

“These are going to be collected from all over the world, supposedly,” Crump said on the show. “And we’re going to have man-eating plants, and we’re going to have a coffin clock here that we’re working on right now.”

But Disney died the following year, and the museum was one of the projects that fell apart. The majority of the Haunted Mansion team weren’t in favor of the super-scary attraction, and without the company’s chief idea man championing the concept, it got overruled and eventually killed ahead of the ride’s 1969 opening.

“You have to understand something: People were not happy with it to begin with,” Crump told SFGATE. “Nobody wanted to do it. It was Walt’s idea to begin with.”

A few of the concepts made their way into the ride, but most of them were totally scrapped. One of the centerpieces of the museum was going to be a fortune teller’s cart that “would come to life every so often, and put on a sort of show,” Crump described it, according to the Walt Disney Family Museum. “Flames would shoot out, doors would fly open, bells would ring and all sorts of magical, weird little stuff would happen.”

The model for that wagon, with its palmistry engravings and its undeniably weird demon iconography, is now one of the centerpieces of the Walt Disney Family Museum’s current exhibition, “Happiest Place on Earth: The Disneyland Story.” It’s on display to the public, marking the first time the artifact has been seen by any kind of audience since that 1965 television special. Even Chris Crump, Rolly’s son who became an Imagineer himself, only saw it in person at the museum.

“The museum has had a cult following,” Rolly Crump told SFGATE. “We knew that it was popular. If Walt had lived, we would have done it.”

It was a long journey to get the wagon ready to display. “When Pam Burns-Clair, daughter of Imagineer Harriet Burns, donated the miniature wagon model to The Walt Disney Family Museum in 2009, it arrived in thirteen pieces,” Kaitlin Buickel-Manosca, exhibitions manager, and Katherine Langdon, museum conservator, said in the Walt Disney Family Museum member newsletter this year. A painstaking restoration process, including rebuilding some wheels, started in 2010.

In addition to the fortune teller’s cart, there are Museum of the Weird sketches on display at the museum currently.

“Everything has a bit of humor, in spite of being a little surprising,” Marie Tocci Crump, Crump’s widow, told the Walt Disney Family Museum. “I don’t want to describe those things as scary, because in truth they were like Rolly, they were just lovable.”

The Museum of the Weird artifacts is scheduled to be on display at the museum until Sept. 13.