This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Henry Ryeder. Find him on Instagram at @henryryeder. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
Summer. The culmination of a life cycle of drudgery and heartache that passes between all living things on earth’s temperate zones. After a long, cold, lonely winter, we can all but hope for a vernal resolution. The poet Robert Burns, writing in the 1780’s, spoke of the wintry Scottish dearth in “Winter: A Dirge,” exclaiming, “’The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast, the joyless winter day, let others fear, to me more dear, than all the pride of May.”
Much of Burns’s poem (and poetry in general) draws on indigenous Scottish attitudes toward the environment. There’s an order to things. Rather than disregard Nature’s will, Burns embraces it. To laugh in the face of this order is to disavow the Power Supreme.
I distinctly remember one particular Six Flags television commercial from my childhood. It opens on several shots of decaying, autumnal leaves rustling in the wind. Then our hero, Mr. Six, pops into frame. Maybe he blows a whistle, I can’t remember, but a crowd of reenergized youths arrive on buses, heralding the dawn of a new season.
Amusement parks are distinctively, and morbidly, indicative of industrial excesses. While they’ve evolved to mirror the gargantuan steel-framed, gas-guzzling infrastructures of Western society, they’re also vulnerable to the elements. They must close for the seasons. If there’s a storm, they often close for the day. Then there’s the more acute ways in which amusement parks abide by the rules of nature.
The physical limitations of the profit-hungry ride designer’s visions must be adhered to, otherwise a disaster can take place. And while these spaces are often manicured to resemble a dream-like facsimile of the natural world, the real environment is never too far away. Crocodiles live in Orlando. There’s just no getting around that.
There are plenty of grizzly incidents that have occurred at amusement parks over the years. Yet some have been particularly revealing about these thrill-factories’ constraints in manipulating nature, as well as how capable they seem to be at manipulating our justice system. Is Disneyland a ghoulish graveyard? Is Six Flags haunted? Absolutely, though the looming specter over these establishments might take the form of fine print on a contract, or the legal jargon in a court filing.
A Brief History
As long as humans have formed large social structures, they’ve sought places to simulate leaving those social structures, if even just for a little while. Gardens and amusements in Ancient Greece and Rome encapsulated the highest forms of intellectual thinking (Aristotle’s Lyceum) to the most base desires of a barbaric state (the gladiator games of the Coliseum.)
The Middle Ages saw a series of natural and human-made disasters that delayed the evolution of this pleasure-seeking proclivity, much like most aspects of European civilization. During the Renaissance, large-scale, developed amusement centers resurfaced, informed by the sociocultural influences of the time.
Coinciding with the Dutch Golden Age, Bakken surged in popularity as a source of public enjoyment. The park opened in 1583 and was centered around a natural spring north of Copenhagen. The location was renowned for its clean drinking water and alleged healing properties. The natural beauty of Bakken was supplemented by a bustling community of entertainers, innkeepers, and salespeople.
Bakken’s amusement park-preeminence was soon challenged by the garden craze of Western Europe. The mid 18th Century saw the advent of London’s Vauxhall and Paris’s Tivoli Gardens. These “pleasure gardens” established some of the most recognizable tenets of future amusement parks: ubiquitous music (musicians would often hide in trees and bushes to create an invisible ambiance), food (4 quid for a whole chicken at Vauxhall!), and a meticulously groomed natural environment in the forms of the gardens themselves.
Yet just as the automobile transformed towns and the internet transformed cities, the railroad brought new understandings of “getaways.” Ease of public transit in the form of trains and trolleys allowed pleasure-goers to seek urban respite in the forms of faraway beaches and resorts. This progression led to some of the first proper “amusement parks” as we know them, as well as the first American roller-coasters.
The roller coaster itself has a peculiarly cross-cultural history. Catherine the Great of Russia, noticing the trend of Russians in St. Petersburg to construct massive mountains of ice for sledding, allegedly built a similar structure in her palace. Much like Queen Margherita edification of the pizza, Catherine’s hill put a cultural touchstone into bourgeois relief. Decades later, Russian troops occupying France (may or may not have) introduced Parisians to the tradition. France having a little less ice than Russia, the first “Montagnes Russes” (Russian Mountains) were constructed with carriages on tracks. Similar to these European contraptions, Americans began repurposing mining railroads toward amusements for patrons.
In this period, from the last two decades of the 19th Century to the first two decades of the 20th, America reigned supreme in amusement. A newfound sense of post-Civil War imperialist pride reared its jingoistic head in John Philip Sousa as much as it did in the invasions of Cuba and the Philippines. Funny enough, one of those wars led directly to one of the amusement park industry’s most infamous early disasters.
Rough Ride for the Rough Riders
For a brief ten-year period in the early 20th Century, Coney Island ruled the American imagination like no other amusement park before or since. Not besotted by a limited creative brand, but rather a full-throated faith in nationalist exceptionalism, millions of New Yorkers came to Coney Island’s Luna and Dreamland Parks to experience the excesses of an American century. It was during this time, from the 1902 to 1911 (when a fire destroyed Dreamland) that Coney Island saw the rise and fall of Rough Riders.
Not the Rough Riders, as in the macho cavalry headed by Theodore Roosevelt that overpowered Spanish forces at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Those forces, whose successes allowed the United States to push the Spanish to cede several Cuban territories to the United States (including Guantanamo City, future home to a certain detention facility), rapidly became mythologized in the American consciousness. Roosevelt’s presidency and New York lineage furthered the allure of the Rough Riders, leading Coney Island’s William F. Mangels to create a Rough Riders-themed roller coaster.
Sadly, shoddy design and safety precautions led to disaster. This was still about fifteen years before the the invention of the under-friction roller coaster, so the cars had to be manually operated by park personnel. The cars were often pushed to their limits, leading to one incident in 1910 in which 16 people were flung from their seats, killing 4. Another incident in 1915 followed suit, leading to 3 people falling thirty feet to the concrete below, perishing.
Fanfare and Funfair
As you might guess, the nationalist pride-to-deregulation-to-fatal disaster pipeline isn’t partial to the United States. Following World War II, British councils sought to increase exports by way of festivals and exhibitions. Their conclusion was the Festival of Britain, a 1951 celebration of British imperial ingenuity akin to the World’s Fair in the United States.
The Festival of Britain saw the creation of Battersea Park on the South Bank of the Thames. The wooden Big Dipper Roller Coaster operated smoothly in this park for nearly two decades until May 30th, 1972. During a routine ride in the afternoon, the rollback brake on one of the trains malfunctioned, causing it to slide backward. The caboose carriages jumped the rails, smashing into other cars, killing five children.
A criminal trial found uncovered that a 1970 fire led the ride’s engineer and manager to purchase fifty-year-old wood stock as replacement parts. The structure itself was rotted and unsafe. Both men were acquitted of all charges.
Action Park
No recitation of creepy waterpark trivia would be complete without mentioning Action Park. The storied New Jersey hell-scape has come to epitomize late 20th Century, latch-key kid American parenting as much as Danny Torrance’s unsupervised Overlook wanderings in The Shining.
Action Park, located in Vernon, New Jersey, opened in 1978 under the holding company “Great American Recreation.” Beckoning patrons with corporate malfeasance by name alone, GAR owner Eugene Mulvihill sought to create a park where “You’re the center of the action.” It was a park without very many rules, regulations, or safeguards. Hedonism hung over the the place like a cloud. The park itself greeted visitors with an unused waterslide that sent would-be passengers through a fully vertical loop, seeming to tell all those entering, “Abandon all cartilage, ye who enter.”
Tragedy struck multiple times throughout the park’s 18-year-long run. The wave pool, later referred to as “the grave pool” by park lifeguards, took the lives of two people between 1982 and 1986. Park guards would have to rescue as many as thirty people from the pool during busy summer weekends.
Investigations by a local paper found that GAR had struck a special relationship with local politicians, systematically keeping the true number of accidents under wraps for years. The park was closed in 1996 following increased notoriety and public pressure.
Here Comes the Story of Star Jet
Hurricane Sandy was one of those Obama-era disasters that I personally look back on with a sordid kind of nostalgia. Yes, it was a terrible event that took the lives and livelihoods of many people, but compare it to the minute-by-minute catastrophes that are both occurring and injected into our consciousnesses today, and Sandy feels quaint in retrospect.
I remember hearing about it on the news before half-assing a Halloween costume (it was my last year trick-or-treating, I was trying so hard not to try hard.) Yet between the wall-to-wall coverage of Chris Christie pretending to comfort the afflicted residents of New Jersey, the nascent meme culture produced a saliently eery image of the hurricane’s toll. A picture of a roller coaster submerged in water seemed to encapsulate the hurricane’s environmental destruction, as well as a portent for Climate disasters to come.
In fact, that particular roller coaster, the Star Jet, had actually floated off Seaside Heights’s Casino Pier during the hurricane. Fuller photos of the pier show a massive gash in the wooden pier, as the largely intact Star Jet coaster lies dozens of yards into the water. The symbol of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation was violated (a 38-year-old man was arrested after climbing the wreckage to mount an American flag at its peak) then removed when the Pier was rebuilt. Star Jet’s replacement, the Hydrus, was opened in 2017…on the actual beach this time.
The Disney Exception
The most harrowing, frustrating, and creepiest story on this list is, by no surprise, the most recent. Jeff Henry, a German waterpark impresario and owner of the Schlitterbahn in Kansas City, was at the peak of his lunacy in 2014. The self-proclaimed “The Wizard of Wet,” a title I can almost certainly attest is limited to his professional life, was being featured in an episode of Travel Channel’s “Xtreme Waterparks” when he promised the world’s fastest waterslide on the spot. Henry was also filmed pitching the idea to several designers in the episode, all of whom turned it down.
Why would they turn it down? It turns out that Henry, despite his wet wizardry, had no formal engineering background. Designer John Schooley admitted to Gizmodo in 2014 that “[He and Henry] were crazy enough to try anything.” Emails revealed in a subsequent criminal trial showed that Henry sought to maximize the optics of the waterslide for profit, not durability, “This is a designed product for TV, absolutely cannot be anything else.”
The ride itself involved a 168 ft high drop and a five story climb. A thin plastic and metal contraption, the slide was buttressed with an overhang of ribbed, metal netting to ensure riders didn’t fly off (this was done after tests with sandbags kept resulting in failure.)
What could go wrong with a 168 ft vertical drop leading to sharp incline enclosed by sharp metal fixtures? Many riders who made the epic plunge between 2014 and 2016 reported bumping their heads on the metal netting during the five story incline, while others reported seeing clear marks of human impact on the netting itself.
Inevitable tragedy struck in 2016, when Caleb Schwab, son of Kansas state representative Scott Schwab, was decapitated after hitting the metal netting on the five story incline. A prompt closure of the ride was followed by the arrests of Henry and Schooley, as well as a lengthy trial. One might assume, given the tragedy’s political implications, that this would be one instance in which gross corporate negligence was brought to justice.
Nope! In 2019, a Wyandotte County judge reversed a grand jury indictment, claiming that evidence of intent to harm shown in the 2014 Travel Channel episode was in fact “highly dramatized.” Never mind the court evidence showing Henry explicitly mentioning that he was building a ride strictly for the purpose of television, this judge decided that the line between entertainment and reality should be drawn after the manslaughter of a ten-year-old.
Amusement Parks and Us
Yet amusement parks, for all their wonder, lie at the uneasy intersection between entertainment and reality. Since Bakken and the pleasure gardens, amusement parks have stood as hubristic exemplars of Western civilization’s ability to manipulate the natural world for enjoyment, even when the natural world begs understanding. Whether it comes in the form of hurricanes, fires, or the simple laws of physics, nature is always ready to tear at the façade of adventure promised by theme parks.
It’s because of this carefree, thrill-seeking veneer that theme park tragedies become so embedded in our national subconscious. Why did the children die? They simply wanted to play. Striking this into the hearts of suburban parents might be difficult in reference to a drone bombing a thousand miles away, but God forbid little Jimmy Turner gets hurt in American Fun Town, it becomes an American-Jungian archetype.
Stephen King uses the dangers of childhood entertainment to underscore the lurking evils of American conformity in It; Jordan Peele artfully takes this a step further to present a theme park built on the suppression of racial identity in Us. In both instances, these artists play on the schadenfreude of American amusement parks and carnivals to illustrate societal empathy gaps.
Yet even in our much storied fascination with theme park disasters, we too often fail Nature’s will, and in doing so fail ourselves. We too often relish the rustling away of dead autumn leaves without appreciating their presence; that our very crafty contraptions are nothing without the cycles we try to (and frightfully successfully) manipulate.
We could make amusement parks safer, but I have a feeling we won’t. I think that in the course of several decades or so, amusement parks will either be an eery relic of an excessive past, or more hopefully, the notorious predecessors to better eco-integrated (and safer) natural parks.
One of my favorite childhood memories is going with my father every Halloween to the Haunted Graveyard in Lake Compounce. I remember exiting the halls of the artfully designed ghoulish mansions to an open field on a hill. Walking up the hill, I found my legs tiring as actors with chainsaws (or leaf blowers) swarmed around us. This was the scariest part. It was also the most natural. We’ll always need thrills. We’ll always need to survive. We’ll always need to respect the rules of nature. Hopefully one day, theme parks will reflect this truth as a whole.
What’s your creepiest waterpark story? Is Six Flags haunted? Leave a comment below!
Leave a Reply