When Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion reopens Saturday in its classic, non-holiday form it will essentially mark the completion of a nearly yearlong refurbishment project, one that added significant backstory and lore to one of the resort’s most famed and mysterious attractions.

A fixture at the park since its 1969 opening, the Haunted Mansion has been the subject of regular tinkering, its illusions evolving and changing as technology and culture advances.

This update will be no different. One of the Mansion’s signature scenes has been remade, and now has a much more somber story to tell.

Walt Disney Imagineering, the secretive arm of the company devoted to theme park experiences, has once again revisited the ride’s trademark attic scene, long home to a tortured bride. There’s still a bride, but she’s never quite looked or acted like this.

It’s not the only major change to an attraction developed during the Walt Disney era. An expanded queue has added narrative-focused gardens and a greenhouse to where guests will wait in line, while a new gift shop adjacent to the ride’s exit expands on the storyline of Madame Leota, seen in the attraction as a disembodied floating head in a séance scene. Imagery at ride’s end, in which a “ghost will follow you home,” has also been updated.

As for the would-be honeymooner in the attic, she’s now utilizing the latest in projection technology, appearing to float before guests as she holds a three-pronged physical candelabra, giving corporeal depth to her ethereal glow, which hovers away from a shattered window of a wall. Her blindingly red heart, in a nod to the park’s original vision of the bride, still beats in time to an elongated, gloomy rendition of Richard Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus.”

Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion has for about 55 years stood as a love letter to humanity’s most hedonistic tendencies. Gluttony, greed, sloth, lust and even murder have been on display in its cryptic halls. We’re all going to bite it in the end, the Mansion seems to tell us, so let’s live it up. There are no gilded gates here, but there is one heck of a party, complete with serenading busts, ballroom dancers, excitable opera singers, drunken buffoonery and portraits locked in an endless duel.

And now there’s heartbreak.

In an exclusive preview of the revamped scene on Tuesday morning at Disneyland, where operations have not been interrupted by the L.A. area fires, I stood across from the new bride for a number of minutes. I marveled at how the hidden-in-the-floor projections allow the ghost to levitate, but I also increasingly felt a sense of mourning. Like many locals, my emotions are heightened at the moment, but I also was struck at how much more clearly defined the bride’s face is now, appearing grief-stricken and lovesick.

I told Kim Irvine, the longtime creative director with Imagineering at Disneyland, that unlike the previous bridal scene, here I’m feeling a sense of sorrow.

That’s intentional, Irvine said, noting the team wanted to heighten the “sadness in her face.”

“We thought, what if we change the story back a little bit to the original story that the Imagineers had about a lost bride in the attic mourning the loss of her husbands,” she said. “It was a sad thing. It was a story about lost love.”

The last time the attic received a major overhaul was in the mid-2000s, and that figure, known as the “black widow bride,” had a more aggressive, sinister story to tell. Holding an ax, she was portrayed as a murderous, wealth-seeking seductress who had beheaded her husbands, evident by their heads disappearing from the wedding portraits scattered around the attic. Those pictures are still present, only now the full bodies of the men vanish leaving their departure up to the imagination.

Irvine said the attic scene was redone, in part, because the projection technology on the prior figure had become so outdated as to necessitate regular maintenance. But rather than update what was there, Irvine saw an opportunity to add a greater contrast with the more festive waltz in the prior room as well as to embellish the Mansion’s tale.