Three architectural sites are associated directly with Walt Disney: Disneyland, built under Disney's guidance and opened in 1955; EPCOT, or the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a utopian city designed by Disney; and the house he purchased for his parents following the success, in 1938, of Snow White. Each of these sites can be said to stand in for a particular aspect of the American Dream: the promise of a continually innocent happiness and pleasure; the utopian social dreaming that is present in the political performatives of America from John Winthrop's ‘city on a hill’ sermon through to Obama's campaign for ‘hope and change’; and the mundane happiness of the normative family, white picket fence and all. And yet, like these American fantasies, all three Disney sites are haunted, undermined by the realization of their hollowness, of violence, and of death. Months after moving into their new home, Disney's mother died of asphyxiation caused by a problem with the furnace (Mannheim 2002: 185). EPCOT's technological utopia ‘was supposed to be a model for world cooperation’ but ‘instead became a giant ad for corporate futurism’ (Waldrep 2013: n.p.); it was to be ‘a precisely controlled city with carefully selected residents’ – terrifying in itself – but became ‘a teaching machine for corporate capitalism’ (Fernandez 1995: 237). As our use of ‘haunted’ indicates, the disparity between the superficial perfection and happiness of these Disney sites and the partially hidden realities lying behind them are perhaps best represented through the cultural forms of the gothic.

As for Disneyland? Could it be that Disneyland is the most gothic site in the whole of the America? This enigmatic question requires much by way of explanation, from defining the gothic, to defining what is ‘American’ about the gothic, even to defining what, exactly, constitutes ‘America’ and where its borders may lie. To cite Jean Baudrillard's famous example of the uncanny force of simulation and simulacra, what he terms the ‘hyperreal’, ‘Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real’ and provides the ‘religious pleasure of the real America’ (Baudrillard 1994: 12), precisely by helping us to forget the fantasies by which we live in the real world.