Serpents and spiders, tail of a rat, call in the spirits, wherever they’re at!
Rap on a table — it’s time to respond. Send us a message from somewhere beyond…
Goblins and ghoulies from last Halloween, awaken the spirits with your tambourine!
Creepies and crawlies, toads in a pond, let there be music from regions beyond!
Wizards and witches, wherever you dwell, give us a hint, by ringing a bell!–Madame Leota
Madame Leota has arrived once more in the Valley’s Premium Shop, as of September 16, 2026–or, at least, some fantastic Madame Leota themed fashions. The new Madame Leota Ensemble features new hair for our characters, a lovely 19th century-inspired purple gown, and some fabulous matching ankle-boots (I may wear them with everything!). This is the third Madame Leota-themed bundle or item to ever arrive in the Premium Shop: the first was the Madame Leota Table furniture item, which debuted during the Dapper Delights Update back in August of 2024; this was followed by Madame Leota’s Tombstone, which was included in the Haunted Mansion Decoration Set bundle, which debuted during the Return to Beast’s Castle Update in October of 2025. But who is Madame Leota?
Madame Leota is one of the four most popular characters from Disney Parks’ Haunted Mansion attractions. (The other three are a trio of characters almost always appearing as a group, known as the Hitchhiking Ghosts.) Within these attractions, Madame Leota is depicted as a ghostly medium (psychic who communicates with the dead) who appears as a floating head trapped within a crystal ball. It is she who summons the spirits for park guests, allowing riders of the attraction to participate in the Mansion’s “swinging wake”. That’s the simple “TLDR” answer to the question “who is Madame Leota”, but there is so much more to her real-world history and her fictional backstory so, please, stay for a spell and read on….
The real life history of Madame Leota begins even earlier than the 1961 groundbreaking for New Orleans Square, or even 1963, when the facade for Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion was completed. If you want the full story, I highly recommend this (roughly 30 minute) video by Walt Disney Imagineering, but since our focus is Madame Leota, we are going to begin our story in the mid-1960s, when Imagineers Yale Gracey and Blaine Gibson approached fellow Imagineer Leota Toombs about becoming the face for a “psychic in a crystal ball” idea they had. Leota Toombs had worked at Disney since 1940 (when she was still Leota Thomas), when she joined their ink and paint department, working on Pinocchio and Fantasia. In preparation of the 1945 re-release of Pinocchio, she was transferred to the animation department to be an assistant animator, which is where she met soon-to-be husband, Harvey Toombs. They married in 1947 and had two children (one of whom we’ll meet by the end of this story), at which time Leota left Disney to raise the kids. But in 1962, Leota was asked to return to Disney to work at WED Enterprises, the first incarnation of Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI): Leota Toombs was one of the first female Imagineers. After working on many of Disney’s projects for the iconic 1964 World’s Fair (including It’s A Small World), she returned to California, where she was initially asked simply to be the test model for Gracey and Gibson’s “psychic in a crystal ball” idea. That initial test model was so perfect for Gracey and Gibson’s concept that they not only decided to keep it for the final in the attraction, but they finally decided on a name for their crystal ball entrapped psychic: Madame Leota. Leota Toombs’ voice wasn’t quite the timbre that Gracey and Gibson craved for the character, though, so they brought in Eleanor Audley, who also voiced Maleficent and Lady Tremaine (the Evil Stepmother in Cinderella), to record the final incantation so that in the seance room, we see Leota Toombs, but hear Eleanor Audley. You can hear Leota Toombs elsewhere in the Haunted Mansion, though: she is both the face and voice of “Little Leota” at the end of the attraction, who utters the infamous lines “Hurry back; don’t forget to bring your death certificate!”
Leota Toombs became a Disney Legend in 2009 (she passed away in 1991) and her daughter, Kim Irvine, has carried on her mother’s legacy as an Imagineer, a Disney Legend (class of 2026), and even as Madame Leota. In 2001, Imagineers decided to do a Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas holiday overlay of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. Since Kim Irvine had already offered a jovial nod to her mother’s role as Madame Leota in the Muppets Haunted Mansion special, her fellow Imagineers asked if she would be willing to actually reprise her mother’s role as Madame Leota for the Holiday Haunted Mansion. She said yes. This year marks the 25 Year Anniversary of the Holiday Haunted Mansion overlay at Disneyland. (Maybe that explains the upcoming Oogie Boogie Update…..*grin*)
The character backstory of Madame Leota is way less straight forward. Madame Leota holds the distinction of being one of the few characters to appear in multiple Disney attractions who also has multiple backstories. In the original Disneyland Haunted Mansion, which opened on August 9, 1969 (which explains why we have consistently gotten Madame Leota-themed items in the Premium Shop at DDLV in or around August!), Madame Leota’s story is that she is a woman of Romani (formerly “gypsy”) descent, gifted with the power of communicating with the dead, as well as skilled in divination (“fortunetelling”) who came to work for the Gracey Family (the owners of the Haunted Mansion). This background for her has been maintained through both Haunted Mansion films, in which Leota was portrayed first by Jennifer Tilly (2003) and later by Jamie Lee Curtis (2023). This version of the tale has her living in New Orleans sometime in the mid-19th century. However, at the Haunted Mansion in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom park (which opened on October 1, 1971), Madame Leota is said to have been living in Salem, Massachusetts during the witch trials of 1692-1693 and to have narrowly escaped after possibly also contributing to kicking off that nasty little morsel of American history. WDW’s Haunted Mansion is situated in the Liberty Square area of the park which is, as the name probably suggests, themed to Colonial America. The Haunted Mansion there has a backstory of being located in the Hudson River Valley in New York (around the same region from whence Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman hail), so Madame Leota’s backstory in this park reflects this theme’s change not only in locale (from New Orleans and the American South to Colonial America’s more northern states), but also in time (from the mid-19th century to the mid-18th century). In WDW’s Haunted Mansion it is made clear that she not only somehow came into the employ of the Gracey Family, but indeed was adopted by them, as she is buried on the grounds (the tombstone from the Premium Shop is a reproduction of the one that actually exists in the park) and also apparently maintained a boudoir (bedroom) within the mansion, living with the family. In Paris Disneyland’s Phantom Manor, neither her ethnicity nor her true origins are revealed; we learn simply that she was considered a “local figure” in Thunder Mesa, the fictional location of the entirety of Paris Disneyland’s Frontierland (arguably the best Frontierland of any Disney Park). This would place Madame Leota living in the American West in 1860 in the fictional boomtown of Thunder Mesa, Arizona, where she became recognized as a supernatural talent, thereby coming into the employ of the Ravenswood Family. (This is only brushing the surface; the Madame Leota fandom rabbit hole is deep, y’all!)
My opinion: The best Madame Leota backstory ever would be that all of these are true! Multiple sources maintain that Madame Leota is of Romani descent, that she is a fortuneteller, mystic, medium, and possibly (probably) a witch. The history of the Romani people goes all the way back to India in 250 BC, with migrations to the Americas as early as 1498, when they (unfortunately) arrived as slaves with Christopher Columbus. The first Romani to arrive in the United States came in the 1500s to Virginia, Georgia, New Jersey, and Louisiana, so the Madame Leota of Salem fame from Liberty Square at Walt Disney World could still have been Romani. This is Disney, y’all: whose to say the same woman could not have been in all of these places in all of these time periods spanning hundreds of years of history? I mean, there’s a period of 84 years between the Salem Witch Trials and 1776, the actual time in which Liberty Square is set, and Madame Leota apparently didn’t look 104ish when she died! She is magical, after all! And she could, in the afterlife, simply be haunting multiple locations….
Although she is a character originally created solely for the parks, Madame Leota has become a fan favorite, and she is certainly one of my favorite Disney characters of all time.
In fact, Madame Leota and the other denizens of the Haunted Mansion are so popular among Disney fans that, when a replacement parade was required for Oogie Boogie Bash this year (2026) due to the ongoing construction of the upcoming Coco attraction at Disney’s California Adventure (DCA), those characters became the inspiration for the new “street dance party”, Madame Leota’s Swinging Wake. Check it out below, and don’t forget to bring your death certificate….
(All third party links, images, or videos are included purely for educational and entertainment purposes; no copyright or trademark infringement is intended nor implied.)
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