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Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And I don't know where you live, but where we are in LA, the weather's getting nicer. It's hitting that sweet spot where I remember why people really like living here. The sun's out, the rain is over, the temperatures are moderate. It's all around just really lovely. So of course it got me thinking about dying on a roller coaster. Let me explain. This is the time of year that amusement parks start coming back to life. The power gets turned back on after a long winter, the rides rattle and shake along their tracks for the first time in months. And it's only a matter of time before the laughter of kids and families fill the air. When all goes according to plan, millions of people will have the time of their lives at these parks. But when things go wrong, some people's lives will run out of time. Parts break, restraints come loose, supports buckle and all that happy screaming turns quickly into screams of fear. The speeding, grinding, clanking metal and high powered hydraulics of amusement park rides can do a real number on the human body if given the chance. Not to mention how often your fate is in the hands of a 15 year old ride operator. So please remove your hats and glasses, push down on the lap restraint and do remember to keep your arms and legs inside the podcast at all times. We'd hate for you to lose anything. Scared. Scared All The Time. So some of you might know this, I think I've said this on the podcast before, but I grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, home of Hershey Park. So especially as a young kid, it was a pretty cool place to grow up. You could see the chocolate factory and the amusement park from the elementary school, and we'd get free tickets and our report cards at the end of the year.

Oh wow.

Yeah, it was one of the only, there weren't really many perks to living in Hershey. You'd think that there'd be more like free candy and stuff. And it was really, there was not much, but they did treat the kids. We got to go tour the chocolate factory once when it was still standing, the original factory. And we got to do a day of learning in fifth grade at the one room school house where Milton Hershey had gone to school. So that was about it.

Did they ever like sponsor Halloween or anything?

No, I mean, I don't think officially, like they had a Halloween parade and they would occasionally have like little, I think they called it like Hershey Park in the Dark or something. They did like kind of trick or treating a little bit at the park loosely, but nothing big and cool.

Even better question, Mars is pretty close by, right? Like Mars candies is also in Pennsylvania?

It is Mars candy is, I think it's like an hour and a half from Hershey or something.

I mean, did they ever do like an army Navy game style thing? Was there any kind of like palpable in the air? Like you get out of here, you M&M piece of shits.

No, the version of that we had was actually the Hershey High School versus the Milton Hershey School. The schools were right next to each other, but because Milton Hershey School is a private school, the worlds never really combined or collided very much, except for the one time of year that we would have the, they had some term for it. I forget the chocolate bowl, maybe they called it, but we always got our asses kicked. Our high school football team wasn't very good.

Well, it's because other teams have, you know, Gatorade on the sidelines and stuff. Hershey Public High School just had like-

Chocolate sauce.

Chocolate, they just had a chocolate fountain. They had to put their little Dixie cups into a chocolate fountain and pretty quickly, the kids were getting all fucked up. Shouldn't be in the sun.

Yeah, yeah. So there's all kinds of Hershey stories I could tell. The air in the summertime, Ed, you know, it smelled like chocolate.

Yes, I do know that.

Because of the humidity would take the scent from the roasting cocoa beans. But I spent a lot of time at the park, both as a guest and an employee. It was very much a rite of passage for kids from Hershey High to get a summer job at the park, working on rides or selling candy or being a costume character. I didn't have any of those jobs. I was in a band in high school. And in the summer, we wanted our free days so that we could practice in our basis garage. So the whole band got jobs on Hose Crew, which was where you would get up at like 4 a.m. And then you'd get to the park and you'd use fire hoses to spray down all the different concrete paths in the park and get all the trash and leaves into the gutters. So we'd be done by noon and then go home and play music all day and then come back the next morning. It was probably one of the best summers I've ever had, actually. The job was awful, but it was very fun.

I know we're coming off of a pretty disgusting episode, but you have a pretty, I think, infamously disgusting story on Hose Crew, don't you?

I do, yeah. So one of the jobs we had in the height of summer was we would have to hose out the dumpsters that had all the trash in them, like the giant big park dumpsters, because they would get filled with shit that just never made it out of the dumpster. So we'd have to hose those out. And one day we were fucking around and the kids, a lot of times people would try to spray each other with hoses. I mean, you can imagine what a bunch of 15 and 16 year olds running around with fire hoses with no supervision. There was a lot of horse play.

Sure.

So we were horse playing and my friend, the bassist in our band, whose house we practiced at, he was pretending to eat. He was like, oh, look, I'm gonna eat the trash, like blah, blah, blah. And he had his mouth open near the trash and somebody sprayed it and sprayed a giant blast of hot summer trash water into his mouth. And he immediately started like retching. And then I think he got very sick that summer afterwards. Like, I don't know if it wasn't like botulism or something, but like he had to go to the doctor because he got very sick from, I mean, there were baby diapers in there and rotting meat. And I mean, there's all kinds of horrific shit.

Was the person spraying the hose to actively get him sprayed with garbage water? Or was it like, get out of the way, I'm doing my job.

No, I don't, I actually don't think so. I think it was just somebody, like we were all gathered around, I think it was actually maybe right after lunch, which was at like 10 a.m. or whatever. And we were all just standing around fucking around and somebody was like trying to work.

Okay, so yeah, it wasn't malicious.

No.

But man, different time today, I feel like someone would own Hershey Park from that event. That'd be like sued that like, oh, there's no one was here supervising these hose boys and they sprayed my son's mouth with botulism. And now, you know, now he's getting fucking buried behind the park.

Yeah, the hose boys ran wild again.

And now I have to order a Hershey casket.

Yeah. Yeah. Would you like that made out of chocolate almond or rice crispy?

I don't, I'm not a Hershey, but I'm not a sweets guy really, but you wouldn't guess it from looking at me. This is a body that's savory foods made. But that said, if I have to eat a Hershey bar, I do like the almond one.

Yeah.

They had like the gold writing.

Yeah.

It's just something a little nicer about it. I don't know.

Chocolate with almonds, a little fancy, feels a little-

It's a little fancy.

It's a step below a Faro Rocher, which is not a Hershey product.

No, of course it isn't, because a Faro Rocher, honestly, until just a few years ago, I thought was peak fancy chocolate. That only came out at Christmas in my family's home.

Yeah.

At Christmas time, Faro Rocher showed up, and they were in the faux crystal housing.

Yeah.

And I love them. To this day, I fucking love them. I genuinely do.

I feel like they killed the mystique of the Faro Rocher. They sell them at gas stations now.

Now that I'm an adult, or for many years an adult with my own money, I'm like, okay, I have $6. I'll buy a bunch of Faro Rocher. I thought they were like a Fabergé egg. You had to trade to get one, you know? No, they're just like six bones.

Yeah, I thought you had to get them out of a treasure chest somewhere and you can just go anywhere and just have one. Hey, cheers to growing up, I guess. So growing up in the Hershey Park environment, I heard so many urban legends, speaking of people who you think would own the park, I heard so many urban legends about accidents that happened at the park. I don't think any of them were true, but the rumor was always, you know, I forget exactly how emergency services were set up at the park, but they do kind of have their own emergency services.

Is it just a huge trap door they can pull a lever and the people slide to a neighboring town? Like, nothing happened here, like that's, oh, that's Shelbyville's problem.

Well, the one story I heard was that there's a ride there called Tidal Force. It's just a big water plunge ride where like, you know, the big boat goes up, it goes around a curve and then comes down and splashes into a giant pool and makes a big wave.

It's like a splash mountain, you're saying?

Yeah, basically.

Well, to say that it's not a freestanding boat, like it's on a track of some kind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's on a track.

Okay.

But the story I heard was that one morning, just as the park was opening, or in some versions, I think maybe they were testing it, but that the boat was like unbalanced. And when it came screaming down the hill and slammed into the water at the bottom, the whole boat flipped, and everybody got trapped under the boat. And in some versions, there were deaths and like hush money payouts to families, and in other versions, the hush money went to the workers who like witnessed the tests that went bad.

At least they're laying out some money for somebody. That's not-

Yeah, I should say, I have zero faith that that story is true.

A big corporation shelling out any money voluntarily? Yes, it's probably not true.

I mean, the accident.

Yeah, allegedly. These are all alleged incidents.

It's very alleged. We do have this platform now. So if anyone, I know we have at least one listener in Hershey who got in touch during the first season when I was recording an episode in Hershey when we were doing the Satanic Panic episode. But if anybody else has ever heard stories about Hershey Park, please email and let us know. We will keep it anonymous.

After this episode, you're not welcome back there, probably.

So I wrote a movie sort of based on Hershey lore that if it ever happens, I definitely will not be allowed back. But my only brush with death at an amusement park didn't actually happen at Hershey. I was with my mom at some sort of, I think it was a summer fair in Massachusetts, and they had a ride. I don't know what they're called, but it was a car and it was just a big loop. It was the loop in a roller coaster, but it was just the loop part.

Ugh, gross. I fucking hate that.

And the car would go through the loop over and over. And for whatever reason, our car like stopped halfway through the loop. And so we weren't like at the height of the hanging completely upside down, but we were high and angled enough that I was freaking out and trying to hold on. I remember my mom had her arm across me and in my memory, we were up there like forever. And I'm sure it was probably just a few minutes. I don't know what went wrong. I just remember being like, oh, this is the scariest thing that's ever happened to me and I'm gonna die now.

But now what year was this? This would have been your kid? Yeah, I mean, early nineties.

In the late nineties, probably mid to late nineties.

The late nineties. Geez, God, how old are you?

Well, I-

So you're in your teens.

No, I was, I, no, yeah, it would have been, I mean, I went to high school in 2000. So yeah, this would have been like early middle school or late elementary school, maybe.

Yeah, so only saying is that this was a time period we all carried a lot more physical currency.

Yes.

So I do like the idea that everyone's upside down and just coins are raining down.

That's another fun Hose Crew story. So there was a coaster with a big loop that went over this sort of walkway in the park and they hung a big net so that if anything fell off the coaster, it wouldn't hit people walking on the pathway. And when we would show up in the mornings for Hose Crew, a lot of times there was change and like hats or money every once in a while, there'd be like a fanny pack or something up there and we'd spray it down and then go through like a bunch of orphaned children on the streets or something and like take the change and then go buy snacks with it.

Street urchins who bring the money right back to the company they work for. Immediately put it into the vending machines.

Exactly.

And then the same thing with just handfuls of money out of the wishing wells to go buy Hershey products out of the Hershey vending machine in Hershey Park.

Yeah, it's a really great system if you think about it.

Just like that ride your family got stuck on, it's a closed loop.

Yeah, they're geniuses. But what about you, Ed? Did you ever have any near death experiences on an amusement park? Are you afraid of rides?

I am afraid of rides. We've established in our previous episodes that I'm a pretty motion sick person. So the motion sickness alone keeps me off of a lot of them, including at like a dirty circus, not like a fun, good amusement park, but like a crap comes to your town across from the fire station, carnival. I do remember throwing up on a lot of people in one of those, you know, it's like back to back seats. So you're always seeing people in front of you and you have people behind you. I remember I just came to the end of that and I just threw up all over the people directly in front of me. It was the most embarrassing thing and I ran away. So anyway, I went home. Like I walked as far as I could into like a pay phone and like called someone I needed to be picked up because of embarrassment. Now that said, we've spoken on the show about my family's one vacation to Disney World. I got like pretty injured there in the park.

Oh really?

Yeah, I'm on a ride called the Typhoon Lagoon.

Okay.

Which was basically a giant wave pool that generates, I mean fucking big. Like it's like you'd be like on a beach basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then like a wall of water, a replicated typhoon, if you will.

Yes.

Would come and crash. You know, you can go out there and ride it, you know, or kind of come crashing down on the beach but I was little, I'm six or something. And I'm like wading out into the water, like walking out, like just where my legs are. And the ground was, it's so weird, because it's like the ground was, you know that like sidewalk cement where it's, it's not smooth. It's all like, you could skin your knee on that shit. It's all like crackly. Crummy. It's a fresh sidewalk, but it's still like crackly and crummy. It's basically that material until you're maybe a foot into the water and then it becomes this smooth mat, if I remember correctly, like smooth mat ground. Well, I'm only like three feet tall. So for me to get a foot in the water, I'm already like half in the water and I have no bearings. The wave comes, I immediately am swept away. And instead of hitting the smooth mat, that's like in the three, four feet of water, I just get dragged across the like crumbly crummy sidewalk concrete. And it was just blood in the water. My legs were all ruined. And I remember my mom or dad, somebody was like, oh, you got to go to first aid and told my brother to take me to first aid. And then he left me there. One of my brothers left me or whoever took me to first aid, left me there. And then I was really scared because I left and I was lost. And then I saw another brother in a lazy river and I was like, ah. And I didn't know how to get him out. Anyway, I got all fucked up. And then they had to do an announcement over the speaker that I was a lost kid. It was a pretty nightmarish day, but that's my closest I've come to. When you're six, it feels like I might die that day. I lost my family and I'm bleeding.

That's second base for heading towards death.

And like none of the characters want to hug you when you're fucking, don't want to get blood on Goofy's legs, you know?

Gosh, Ed, you're bleeding to death.

Yeah, so I'm like kind of a pariah. I'm a little kid that no one wants to approach.

So, all right. Well, look, I'm glad you survived so that you can be here to entertain our listeners.

Oh, I have one more almost died at a store. I'm realizing, okay, this one's extra quick. So that was Disney World in Florida. Now, this story is Disneyland in California. I've been there a bunch of times. I love Disneyland. I'll do Tower of Terror, but then that's it for the day. Like now I'm going to feel a little fucking shitty all day. So it's like I can't do two big rides, just like one big ride and then kind of hang.

Because you get nauseous or?

Because I get so nauseous. And the only thing that can help me is soft serve ice cream, and they only have that on one side of the park, so it's a whole thing.

And you're not a sweets guy, so.

Yeah, it's just soft serve is just comforting. And so I was talked into one time by some jerk. They were like, you got to go on Space Mountain. And I'm like, I know me, I know my body, whatever is in there. I know it's a dark roller coaster. It's a roller coaster literally in the dark Space Mountain. Like you don't see anything. So it's like, well, you're not going to see anything. So it's not to be scared of. And if you can't see the turns coming, I don't fucking know. Whatever their reasoning was, probably some girl there that I was like, Oh, go cause girls watching. That said, it is a pretty rare occurrence. The day we went, the ride was broken and they were running it with all the lights on. So like we should put this in the show notes, fucking Space Mountain with the lights on. It is the most rickety looking. There is a thing I think where they say, do not put your hands up in this ride. And when you see it with lights on, I swear the other parts of the ride are like a foot above your head.

Right.

Like it's so crazy. It's the most terrifying thing with the lights on. So I didn't die, but I definitely was like, this sucks. I'm sick. I genuinely am scared of this room. It seems like a running man set.

Yeah, I don't, Space Mountain never made any sense to me. It doesn't make sense in the dark and it doesn't make sense with the lights on. I don't understand. Like I've ridden it before and I just don't, it's like, okay, it's a roller coaster in the dark. I can't enjoy, like I feel like I'm locked in like a parcheesy can as like a dice roll.

Yeah, and it's not like you're getting hit with the cool air of a summer night. Like you're in a building.

Yeah.

You're just getting hit by like, I don't know, weird exhaust and manufactured air conditioning.

Yeah.

And I guess just the trapped breaths of screams.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, that's kind of my history with what I consider to be near deaths or just very unpleasant roller coaster and theme park rides.

That's most people's closest brush they'll ever have with death in an amusement park because only four to five people a year die in amusement park accidents. Now that doesn't include people having heart attacks on rides and that sort of stuff, but it's just purely accidents. So you're very unlikely to die in a park accident. 46,000 people a year die driving on the road. So four to five people is a pretty insignificant number unless you're one of those four to five people, in which case it's pretty-

RIP, God bless.

Yeah, RIP, God bless. Just so no one's disappointed, there's two parks you may be expecting to hear about. We're not talking about Disney on this episode, partially because I think they actually deserve their own episode, because there's a lot of death at Disney parks.

Okay, it's a good title.

Death at Disney. We also might need to save that one for when we have more lawyers. I don't know. And we also won't be talking about Action Park, New Jersey, which has a whole...

We've all seen the documentary.

Yeah, there's a whole documentary about it. They call it the Class Action Park. There's some crazy stories. If we do a follow-up rides episode, I'm sure we'll touch on it then, but I just felt like those two were too big. Don't worry though, there are plenty of other places and plenty of other rides that have been proven to be deadly throughout the history of amusement parks. So if you were already afraid to get on rides, just wait until we get to the end of this episode. You'll never go on a ride again. Just kidding. Hopefully you will. I don't want to ruin amusement parks for anybody. But the history of amusement park disasters is actually fairly short because amusement parks haven't really been around that long. There aren't roller coaster deaths recorded in like the 1400s or anything. People were still busy dying from easily curable diseases in old age at like 35 back then. They did have amusement parks, sort of, as far back as the 1500s. This is when the world's oldest amusement park, Bakken or The Hill, opened north of Copenhagen in Denmark. When it opened though, it wasn't called an amusement park. It was called a pleasure garden. It was a place for the upper class to stroll about and maybe get blowjobs behind a bush or something. I don't know if they explicitly excluded the lower class, but I don't think they really thought of the lower class as human back then. So by definition, it was just gonna be for rich people.

Sure, makes sense.

I also jotted a joke down here that even if they did allow lower class people, only the elite had the time and money to visit a pleasure garden. Everyone else was relegated to the pain garden called Life.

Oh, wow.

So another early garden was the Vo Hall Gardens, founded in London in 1661. By the late 1700s, the site started charging admission and drew pretty enormous crowds to come see their sites.

Wait, hold on. So before they started charging admissions, it was just like rich people know someone with a very fun place to hang out.

I guess, yeah. I don't know exactly what the thought process behind charging admission was, other than maybe more people started coming and so they felt they could charge money and make some money.

No, I understood that. That's how it always works. But I just meant like, it's weird that Amusement Park started as, have you been to Gregg's? It's wild over there. He's got like donkeys and he's got like this weird hayride thing. And it was like, what do you mean? Like at his house? It was like, yeah, he's got pretty sprawling property. And the way he uses it, he doesn't farm. He just puts wacky shit on it.

Yeah.

And we all got to go over there this weekend. This summer is going to be fucking lit at Gregg's.

Yeah.

And then at a certain point, it was, I don't know if the donkeys become expensive or whatever. And it's like, well, these kids peeping over the wall all the time, eventually they'll throw a couple of shillings to ride this donkey. And I guess that's the birth of a music park. But it has to start with some lunatic who's made a Neverland Ranch.

Kind of. Well, there was, there were a couple of different things that sort of blended. So the idea of people going out and spending time somewhere on the weekend or something started with these pleasure gardens. So now there weren't any rides here, just like there weren't any rides at Bakken. But I do think it's interesting that Vohall was sort of split into areas, like a modern park, with paths noted for what you would see if you walked along them. So some paths featured tightrope walkers, others had hot air balloon ascents, concerts and fireworks. I don't know, those things in the sky sound like you could kind of see them from anywhere, but I guess the idea was it was sort of sectioned off. So if you wanted to see one thing or the other, you'd go walk a different direction.

Sure.

And then the idea of amusement parks as a fixed location featuring rides didn't really get started until the First World's Fair in London in 1851. And later, the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Chicago's Fair was the site of the World's First Midway where guests could play games, buy food, and generally spend money to make sure that the fair was profitable. That's actually the whole reason they put the Midway in was they were like, well, we want to make sure that we make money, so let's make sure we have a place where people will spend money.

Sure. And around this time, Saban Rock in West Haven, Connecticut, which is the community my family currently lives in, used to have its own ferry that would take you just to this place, which was an amusement park. The town was an amusement park and I think was the 1870s when that popped off. So this would have been right at that time of, it sounds like people from the World's Fair into the early 1900s were like, you know what? It seems like people want to have fun. Let's give the people something to do.

Well, yeah, the 1870s was a big period of growth for people started to turn popular picnic areas. It kind of sounds like maybe that's what happened at 7 Rock was like, it was a place for people to hang out and then they started putting rides in. But there weren't roller coasters when these gardens were getting started. Roller coasters were evolving and they're so common now that it's almost funny to think there was a time when even the idea of a roller coaster would have sounded completely insane and not fun at all. Up until pretty recently being like, we're going to put you on a car and shoot you down a hill and you're going to feel like you're going to die, but you're not going to die. People would have been like, excuse me. So the origins of a roller coaster can be traced to the gardens of Russia's elite around St. Petersburg, where they would build mountains of ice that they called Russian mountains, and they were built for the purpose of sledding down. And Ed, you'll really appreciate this.

Well, you know how much I love tobogganing. Of course, I'm sure I will. I love to toboggan.

A lot of languages still reference Russian mountains when referring to roller coasters. So in Spanish, roller coasters are la montaña rusa. In Italian, they're montan rusa. And in French, they're les montan russes. I don't know if I used the right accents, but-

I'm sure you didn't.

Do you want to guess what the Russian term for roller coaster is?

Just mountains.

No. The Russian term for roller coaster is Amerikanske Gorky, which translates literally to American mountains. So-

What? Why?

Score one for the good guys, baby. We won the Cold War. Maybe that was one of the terms of- they got to rename their roller coasters.

No, they were doing it- it's way longer than Rocky IV. I don't know why they would be naming it because of the Cold War.

Well, they were- I think like they called these ice hills Russian mountains. So, I wonder if like when the roller coasters got popular all over the world, if they were like, well, we have Russian mountains already, so these are American mountains.

Sure. Oh, so they're literally- they're calling the roller coasters American mountains.

Yes.

It's not a mountain at all. It's wood and steel.

That's more of an American thing.

That's more of an American thing.

Yeah. So, it's thought that Russian soldiers occupying Paris after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo may have introduced the French to the pastime of sliding down their Russian mountain hills. Because by the mid 1800s, the French started trying to emulate Russian mountains by attaching carts to rails and sending people down hills on them. It was like a bench on a rail and you would sit sideways. Like, if you imagine you're sitting on a bench and all of a sudden the bench just tilts and goes down a hill, that was the original, like, French roller coaster.

And so you're, like, falling to the left or right.

Yeah, yeah.

You're not looking straight ahead. Got it.

And then, dude, Pennsylvania gets in on the action. In the 1850s, a mining company in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, built what was called the Mouch Chunk Gravity Railroad, which was an 8.7-mile downhill track used to deliver coal to Mouch Chunk, Pennsylvania, now known as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.

Thank God they changed that, because that's just the ugliest two words, and I don't know what that's. I thought that's a name or a place.

Mouch, yeah, Mouch Chunk. Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania is also a hilariously kind of weird name for a place, but much better than Mouch Chunk.

Yeah, I think Jim Thorpe is probably the first guy that was like, we can't keep. This is ridiculous, right? And then they're like, yeah, what should we call it? What's your name? Jim Thorpe.

It's like, get in here.

Good enough.

By 1872, this Gravity Road, as it became known, was selling rides to thrill seekers, which is the most Pennsylvania thing ever.

It went from the worst name to kind of the most awesome name, Gravity Road Rules.

Well, Gravity Road is the name for the ride.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's an awesome name for like a gravity-based fun adventure, like going downhill.

Yeah.

That's just a really fun, clever name.

Yeah. So people would go, and I guess it's, I don't know who was the first person to be like, yo, what if we, instead of putting coal in these carts, what if we just charged people money and put people in the cars? But it was huge. It became very, very popular to the point that it's one of the things that got other entrepreneurs thinking about building roller coasters elsewhere in the country, because these people were making so much money. So throughout the beginning of the 20th century, like you were saying, 1870s, 1880s, up through the 1900s, roller coasters and amusement parks became really big business. One particularly insane roller coaster from this period is the Cannon Coaster or Leap the Gap that opened on Coney Island for just a few years from 1902 to 1907. This was a wooden roller coaster that was designed to mimic being shot out of a giant cannon. So you'd go up the first hill and then you'd pass through like the bore of a cannon shaped tunnel before getting shot out from the muzzle of the cannon, which was kind of cool and crazy enough. But the real attraction here was that the ride was originally designed to have a segment of track missing, that the cars were designed to leap over and land back on the track on the other side. It wasn't simulated. There was no trickery involved. It was literally just the physics of trying to get this cart to jump and jump and jump. And as you might imagine, testing of this feature didn't leave the creators of the ride to have much faith that anyone would ever survive the leap. These guys actually, they built the gap and they did test it with sandbags, which resulted in, in quote, occasional successes, but way too many crashes to convince anyone it was safe to put people on and they would soon remove the gap.

They were like, listen, I think the problem here is that the sandbags are replicating.

Yes.

Like I bet you with a real person, this shit would work. On paper, this works with people. You got to get out there, Jim.

Yeah.

Jim Thorpe. You got to get out there. And then he died a horrible death and they were like, what should we do in his honor? Let's name that other thing after him.

Yeah. But this testing period actually made the ride very popular for a few years because in the early 1900s, it spawned a lot of myths and lore about how many people died during testing. So even though the actual ride was pretty boring, it became popular with young kids who were like thrill seekers. The marketing leaned into that idea with the wordy and memorable tagline, will she throw her arms around your neck and yell? Well, I guess yes.

Oh, wait, wait. They're talking about like your date.

Yes.

Like, listen, you can't bring the Riz. Just put her on this fucking nightmare contraption and like nine out of 10 ladies will, you know, at a moment of fearing for their lives clutch onto you.

Yeah, exactly.

And if you survive together, you can now have something to talk about. And then like now the date can really kick off where it's like, hey, remember a minute ago when we almost died? Should we have kids?

To be fair though, how stinky were people in the early 1900s at Coney Island?

I mean, probably as stinky as modern day comic conventions I go to.

I mean, I feel like it probably took a lot to get someone to get close to you in 1907 on Coney Island.

Well, you don't want to get too close to anyone. They might be dead by 30, so keep a little distance. No one's sticking around long. Wait, what year was it?

The ride is open from 1902 to 1907.

That's not a tremendous amount of time.

No, without the leap, it was a boring roller coaster. And I guess maybe not enough girls were throwing their arms around anyone's neck and yelling.

God, I do wonder. So people are showing up because they heard, this is supposed to be the craziest ride. Craziest ride, so many sandbags lost their lives in testing. We gotta do it. And then they get there and then it's just, hey, two tickets for leap of death or whatever it's called. And they're like, great, great, great, great. Absolutely. Here's your two tickets. Do us a favor. Just imagine there's a leap.

Yeah, pretty much. I don't know if they pretended that there was still a leap or at what point they stopped calling it the leap, the gap. It was definitely called the Cannon Coaster for a while because there's photos of it with that name. But this wasn't the only roller coaster at Coney Island that was causing a scene in the early 1900s. In 1910, Coney Island was the site of one of the first ever recorded roller coaster accidents. A ride called the Rough Rider had been erected in tribute to the cavalry that Teddy Roosevelt led into battle during the Spanish-American War. It was a train car ride, which means the cars were essentially like the same kind of technology as a train. So they weren't quite at the point where there were like individual roller coaster type ride technology. It was still basically just a train, a brake man had to ride on each cart. And these cars on this ride were each operated by a guy dressed in full military regalia who had full control over the speed of the car. And in 1910, one of these rough riders, motorman, took his train around one bend too fast, and it threw two cars loose and tossed 16 passengers out over Surf Avenue, four of them to their death.

Oh my God. You know, there's a guy on the ground who, the driver 10 minutes earlier was like, Mark, fucking watch this.

Check this out. Yeah, dude, you want to see how fast?

And then 10 minutes later, everyone's watching. It was like, holy shit, Mark.

Well, apparently this was just the cost of doing business because nothing happened to the motorman or the park. And the ride continued to operate until 1915 when the same thing happened again. And this time the accident was even worse. Six passengers boarded the ride and the driver, we'll assume a different guy, although maybe there was just this one lunatic who was like, yeah, gotta go fast.

This guy who's habitually line stepping.

Yeah.

Just always seeing where the fucking line is.

Yeah, the driver sped down an incline into a curve. The car tipped onto its side. The operator and four of the six riders flew out of the vehicle, crashing into the cheap iron railing that enclosed the track. And they hit it so hard that the fence broke and three of those victims fell 30 feet to their deaths onto the concrete below. And the conductor's body hit an onlooker and sent the onlooker to the hospital as well.

Oh my God, just a standing around person?

Yeah, well probably because-

God wants you at that point.

It's probably the same person who the ride operator was like, hey, Mark, check this out, you know? And then slam.

Just eating early 1900s popcorn, getting hit by a broken ride. That's no way to go.

Yeah, but the really dramatic part of this was that two of the riders who were tossed from the coaster, the two that survived were Clara Moles and her four-year-old son, Edward. And when the car flipped, somehow Clara grabbed the handrail with one hand and held her son with the other arm. And so she was doing a full-on action movie dangling from the roller coaster until two detectives who witnessed the event climbed up the coaster's framework and pulled them to safety.

So are those the two you mentioned to weren't flung from it?

Yeah, well, yeah, they weren't flung to their desks. They were flung from their seats, but then they held on.

I think in early automobile racing, the same type of people who were like, who would drive this too fast, do you know what I mean, like race car drivers. I think the original thinking behind accidents was, don't put a seatbelt in here. Like realistically, you might have a better chance if you're flung from the car than if you just die in a fiery crash. And spoiler alert, they died both ways every time. But it is interesting that like, yeah, so by the metrics of early automobile racing, those people should have been flung, but by virtue of staying in the way that we do now and seat belts actually helped.

Yeah, she hung on, she saved her son and these detectives. Of course, it was two detectives. I feel like in the 1900s, just like two gum shoes happened to be hanging around. And hey, look at the dame hanging off the ride.

Yeah, you think they were already there just as like amusement park goers? Or you think they were called in? She had to hold herself and her daughter the entire time that they were phoned. Like as they heard like a Wuga crazy old, siren coming for so long.

No, it says the research I had said that they witnessed the event. So they were just two gay detectives holding hands.

Two confirmed bachelors.

Strolling through Coney Island.

Being like, if anyone asks, we got this call.

Yeah.

We definitely weren't just here. Please don't put in the annals of history that we were just here.

Yeah. So in the aftermath, Thomas Ward, the rides manager, was arrested following the incident and was charged with homicide. A jury ultimately exonerated him after deciding the accident was unavoidable, quote unavoidable.

Yeah. The guy who could absolutely control the speed said it was unavoidable.

Yeah. But weirdly, it seems like they charged the ride manager with homicide. Oh, I guess the ride operator in this case was dead. So there was no one. The manager was the only one they could charge.

Somebody had to be charged.

But he was exonerated and the roller coaster ceased operations for good in 1916. And as we will see, juries finding people not guilty of murder in these situations is a fairly common occurrence. So we're not gonna cover every roller coaster disaster, because for those of you who are afraid of this kind of thing, I will tell you, there are way too many roller coaster accidents to cover in this episode. And there are lots of other ways to die in an amusement park, and we gotta get to some of those.

Sure.

So we're not gonna cover all roller coaster disasters, but roller coasters are the biggest and most common fear, I think, amongst amusement park goers. And they're designed to make you feel like you're cheating death. So it is kind of extra scary when death gains the upper hand.

Although I will say this before we move into the very specific stories. When I rode roller coasters, which is not often, but like I said, I'll get talked into it sometimes, but I prefer a rickety wooden roller coaster because they can't get that fast to a crazy Six Flags, 100 mile an hour. Like that to me is so much scarier than something that objectively from the ground looks like it might fall down. Like, oh, look at that wooden roller coaster that's been there for 50 years. I'll take that every day of the week because it kind of can't get too crazy.

Well, people have been pushing rickety roller coaster technology forward. There's a lot of crazier wooden coasters now, but yes, the actual old wooden coasters only got so crazy.

Like I used to go on this one in Maine at Fun Town Splashtown USA, which 100% sounds so stupid and made up.

But the jingle writes itself. Fun Town Splashtown USA.

I mean, I'm pretty sure you're gonna get sued for that one.

No.

I'm pretty sure the Beach Boy estate is coming.

That's a song I invented just now.

Using some sort of Beach Boy tune. That said-

I've never heard of the Beach Boys before.

I don't know what those are. That's the correct answer.

Are they like the Hoes Boys?

They're like the Hoes Boys in the sense that given an opportunity, they will get you sick. Allegedly, that said, Funtown Splashtop USA had a wooden roller coaster that I had no problem with, but it was opened in like the 90s. It was weird. And I think it's the only, their like claim to fame is that it's the only wooden roller coaster in Maine, which is weird. That's like being, I don't know, I'm the only guy in the company who owns a Model T and drives it every day. Other people are like, okay, cool for you. It is a weird claim to fame, but I prefer it.

There are roller coaster enthusiasts who love wooden roller coasters. There's a park in Pennsylvania called Knobels that has a collection of old wooden roller coasters. I think I only went once growing up maybe, and they were opening some new wooden coaster, and there were all these people from all over the world there for the opening of this wooden roller coaster. It was like a big deal.

So I guess, yeah, I guess that's a throwback thing, right? People miss a time of a simpler roller coaster, and if you want it, you got to go to a place that's named, sounds like it was poorly translated into English, Fun Town Splashtown, USA.

Fun Town Splashtown, USA.

We're gonna get sued.

We can't keep doing that. That's a song by the Hoze Boys, and I just made it up.

Now the Hoze Boys are the band. This is getting so crazy. The fucking, we're gonna have to release a comic at the end of the year of all these characters we come up with.

I know. Well, it probably won't surprise you to know that the deadliest roller coaster in history did happen on a wooden roller coaster. Sure. It happened at London's Battersea Park on May 13th, 1972. Now, the Battersea Park Fun Fair is arguably the world's first theme park, predating Disney by a couple of years. Although I also read that there was a, I think like a Dutch park that also some people consider to be the first theme park, because it's the one that Walt Disney was like, Oh, we should do this. Oh, I wanna copy that, yeah.

My favorite Walt Disney's gonna copy thing, the elevator in Club 33 is an elevator he rode in Paris or somewhere in France. And he was like, this elevator slaps. And so he offered to buy it.

Interesting.

I would like to buy this elevator and they were like, sir, we don't sell elevators from this old ass 1800s, you know, whatever. And he's like, okay, understood, you got it. And so he flew a bunch of imagineers out there and had them stay at the hotel and they'd secretly took like every measurement of the thing and faithfully reproduced it at Clip 33. I mean, that might be bullshit. I heard that once, it's pretty exciting.

I believe it.

Now that we're back into it, isn't Battersea Park, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but isn't Battersea Park also where the power station from the Pink Floyd album is, Animals?

I don't know.

Like the cover of the Pink Floyd album, Animals, I'm pretty sure is the Battersea Park power station.

Interesting.

Yeah, so that had a history. That part of town has history.

So the biggest attraction at the Battersea Fun Fair was a roller coaster called the Big Dipper that had been operating since 1951. And on this particular day, UK schools had just ended their terms, so the Big Dipper was crammed with children and teenagers. And everything seemed normal as the coaster's train was pulled up the initial hill. But this time, just as the cars full of kids reached the top of the hill, the hauling cable snapped, the train rolled backwards down the tracks and its emergency braking system failed.

Oh shit.

Which means the cars picked up speed and went whipping around a curve at the bottom where they derailed and piled on top of one another. Or as one child witness put it, most of the people on the back all got crushed up because it came down backwards.

Also because it came down, okay, don't add more than you know, kid.

Yeah.

People in the front would have been crushed up, but shit, I'm glad that they got the little rascals to give an interview.

So this was the worst roller coaster accident in history. And I will say only five children died and 13 people were injured. So, you know, when you think roller coaster accident, at least in my mind, I imagine almost like airplane levels of gore and disaster. But I mean, look, five children, terrible for them to die.

Was it all children on the ride? Were there no adults?

It seems like yes, in this case, it was all children.

Oh, okay, okay. I thought maybe it was either at that time, kids are only allowed in the back of roller coasters, or at that time, if you were a full grown adult, you probably wouldn't have died, but the small frail body of a child can't handle it.

Yeah, no, I think the speed with which this thing went backwards probably would have been enough to crush about anybody.

Do they do like postmortems where, like with plane crashes, where it's like, okay, who do we talk to about why this brake didn't turn on?

Yes. Well, so in this case, the ensuing investigation concluded that almost everything was wrong with this roller coaster. They found a total of 66 defects, including missing brakes, a poorly maintained haul rope, rotted wood, a misaligned track, 50 year old parts, and something that I couldn't find elaborated on, a drunken or drugged ride operator.

Oh my God, this is a comedy of errors.

Yeah, everything.

This is crazy. They've built, it's like, so you built a roller coaster for humans to use. It sounds like out of like waterlogged wood from abandoned piers, and the cart might as well just be repurposed radio flyer wagons. Like, bro, this is not.

And then hired British alcoholics to operate it.

Yeah, you got a bunch of, dude wrapped in a Union Jack screaming, throwing a bottle of rum, being like, this rope doesn't seem strong. Anyway, let's go.

Well, they're right from the pub and probably ready to spontaneously combust. So, shit. Yeah, everything went wrong with this ride. And the rides engineer and manager were brought up on criminal charges, but just like Thomas Ward, they were ultimately acquitted of any wrongdoing.

Do you think it was a, amusement parks, they'll hire anybody, and they're bringing in a ton of money. Probably, I don't know how taxes worked. I mean, this is England. So, famously not great. I guess you're just paying the fucking monarch or whatever. But I imagine if you're a big enough player in town, you can kind of buy off the judges in this situation, where, you know what I mean? It's like, I'm making enough raffle tickets here.

Well, we'll get into some of that actually near the end of the episode.

Okay, okay.

So I found some interesting facts on some of that stuff, but I will say there is a roller coaster I went on once at Magic Mountain here in California that does go backwards. And I didn't know that when I got on the ride.

Nope.

It was the end of the day. I was really tired. I was like, I'll hit one more roller coaster. So imagine my shock. I get on this roller coaster and we get on, everyone's facing forward. And you feel the jolt of the ride starting up. And instead of moving forwards, I start getting pulled backwards. And it took me a good like 10 seconds to realize what was... At first I was like, oh, you're backing up and then you get put in a position or whatever. And no, you just keep going backwards. And then you get to the top of the hill and they drop you backwards and the whole roller coaster goes backwards. I can only imagine how scary that would be if you think you're going forwards and then you get to the top of the hill and they drop you backwards. Which, if there's any ride engineers out there, that actually might be a really fun ride idea. Just don't call it the Big Dipper. That would be in poor taste.

And also don't crash it into all the ones behind it. Magic Mountain's the Six Flags, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The one that's like an hour and a half north.

Yes, I drive by it pretty regularly, I guess. I'm driving all over the place all the time, but.

Why?

You know, me, I'm-

You're a delivery man?

I wish. I wish I had a delivery man's financial stability right now.

Stability?

But that said, no, you know what I mean? I'm always going to fucking flea markets or driving to other places and just trying to find comic books places and stuff.

Sure, sure.

But that said, zero desire to go to Magic Mountain or any of these Six Flags. Every time I go to Six Flags, I feel like there's nothing for me to do. Their whole thing is like crazy roller coasters, crazy rides. They can't compete with the theming of like a Disneyland. So they're just like, fuck it. We're going to be the energy drink of theme parks.

Right.

And then in Magic Mountain, it's like, let's, let's add to that just sitting in the baking sun.

Yeah.

So I have no interest in that.

Yeah, I didn't have the greatest day there. It was fine, but yeah, it was really frightening. The other reason though, that you definitely, if you create this roller coaster, you should not call it the Big Dipper, A, because it's in poor taste, and B, because 40 years prior to the Battersea Park Big Dipper accident, the worst roller coaster accident in US history happened at Krug Park in Omaha, Nebraska, also on a roller coaster called the Big Dipper.

What?

Yeah. I don't think, I looked around to see like, if they were the same design or something, and I couldn't find any indication that they were. So I think it's just a strange coincidence.

I think it's just two English speaking countries making amusement parks who looked at, you know, it goes up, it comes down, it's big, you dip. I think it was as simple as that. It was everybody's like second choice name.

Now this one though, it did not fall backwards. It fell forwards. The accident occurred near the top of the first hill. So just like airplanes takeoff and landings are, I think the deadliest part of the roller coaster.

Sure.

The accident was the result of a faulty bolt that was supposed to hold one of the brake shoes in place. So I believe what happened is if you're imagining the first hill of a roller coaster, it went up just fine. And then when it tipped over and started to go down, the bolt came loose, the brake shoe, which would normally be resting along one of the tracks, slipped and got caught beneath the rear wheel of one of the cars, which caused the car to come off the track and smash through the guardrail.

Yeah, wow.

So then as that car plummeted to the ground, it pulled three other cars down with it, leaving passengers crushed underneath the wreckage.

That's awful. That sucks.

Yeah, this comes close to the worst ever. So the London Big Dipper had five dead and 13 injured. This had four people dead and 17 injured. So fewer dead, more injured. I feel like they're almost, I mean, in terms of body count, yes, technically Big Dipper London style wins, but I think this one's also pretty awful.

We gotta like put a, we gotta stop naming stuff Big Dipper. It's cursed now.

That's what I said, yeah. And I will say the headline in the paper, after this accident, is an all-timer, and it is exactly how I'd like to be remembered if I die this way. Over a picture of the four dead from the coaster, a big headline reads, they rollercoast to death and injury. Yeah, that's the-

It barely even fucking makes sense.

Yeah, I guess it should have been they rollercoasted to death and injury, but-

I don't think it should have been any of those. It's wildly poor taste and it's barely a pun.

Well, newspapers back then were wild, man. You could say whatever you wanted.

Fucked. Yeah, it was. It could have been worse, honestly, based on some of those headlines.

Dames dead, dreams dashed, kids crushed.

Big Dipper outlives riders.

So we're off to the races here with two deadly rollercoaster accidents, but of course there are a lot more ways to die at the amusement park that don't involve rollercoasters. I don't want to leave everything else out. In fact, the most deadly theme park accident in history actually took place inside the haunted castle at New Jersey's Great Adventure Amusement Park on May 11th, 1984.

I hope the newspaper headline for that after is haunted castle may now actually be haunted.

Well, haunted castle did not exist after this accident was over, because unlike what you might see in a horror movie, the disaster had nothing to do with a maniac getting loose inside a haunted attraction and killing people one by one. Believe it or not, it was way worse than that.

So is it type of haunted ride where you're in little carts going through? Or is it the kind that you walk and then at the end you have to go past that, I don't know, circular tube thing that's spinning?

It's the walk version. The haunted castle in this case was a maze-like walk through haunted house. And it sounds, I'm gonna read the whole description because it sounds like the quintessential haunted attraction. According to Wikipedia, quote, a facade of false turrets and towers lent the illusion of height to the one story structure, completing the look of a forbidding medieval castle. After crossing a drawbridge over the surrounding moat, visitors entered the castle and felt their way along a 450 foot long convoluted path of dim corridors, occasionally being startled when employee actors dressed as mummies, vampires and other creatures jumped from hiding. Various theatrical props and exhibits were in view, including coffins, ghoulish mannequins, hanging spider webs and skeletons. Alcoves along the route were used to present vignettes of famous and infamous characters and events from movies, horror and ghost stories and sometimes real life with live employed actors portraying the stars of the scene. Count Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolfman and Lizzie Borden were frequent guest stars. Strobe lights and eerie sounds completed the scene.

Sounds kind of awesome.

I mean, imagine, dude. Imagine being a teenager in New Jersey in the summer of 1984. Friday the 13th, the final chapter had just come out. 16 candles had just come out. Temple of Doom is coming out in like two weeks. It's maybe one of the first warm nights of the year. Life's good. You drive your Camaro out to the park and slam a couple of bruskies and then head in.

Oh yeah, fucking Irock teatop coming down, handful of Schlitz.

Dude, the Haunted Castle, you're there with your best girl. It's so kitschy. It's cool. She's jumpy. She's yelling and holding your arm, just like the freaks who designed Coney Island would have wanted her to. It's around 6:30 PM. And as you enter the haunted castle and get lost in the dark, unbeknownst to you, a 14 year old boy somewhere else in the castle is using a cigarette lighter to navigate a dark corridor when he accidentally sets some padding on fire. Within minutes, the entire attraction is aflame. Fire starts to pour out from along where the attraction's hunchback of Notre Dame display is. People start screaming fire and running to the back entrance, bumping into walls, fumbling in the dark. Some people thought that this was part of the attraction. Other people realized too late that it wasn't. There's too much smoke, too much chaos, not enough light to find your way back to the entrance. There's no way out of this one. All told, there were 29 guests and costume employees trapped in the burning maze. But you know what was it in the burning maze? Exit lights, sprinkler systems, or smoke detectors.

Well, all of those would have fucked up the entrance. It would have taken away from the illusion that this is a spooky graveyard.

Oh, yeah, the illusion of horror and fear. Well, no, this is because the castle was originally erected as a, quote, temporary structure that was supposed to only last part of a season. But when it proved to be one of the most popular attractions at the park, the park kept it open, never installing the safety systems that a more permanent ride would have required. So all told, eight teenagers perished in this fire, and when rescuers finally got to them, the bodies were so badly burned that they were mistaken for melted mannequins.

Oh, shit, that sucks.

Yeah.

It also sucks, like the idea of having to like, this is not a joke, the idea that like to be in a burning building that is basically an obstacle course, sucks.

Yeah.

That's gotta be so scary where it's like, oh, I'm in the fucking hall of mirrors. And it's fun when you're like, oh, I'm bumping into stuff. But when the place is on fire and you're like, wait, what the fuck is the real way out? It must be genuinely so scary.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I don't know, this one's really haunting. I think because it sounds like something that Bruce Springsteen would write a song about.

Oh my God, yeah, Jersey. So it's probably the best guy to go to for it, yeah.

Yeah, or it feels like the backstory of a horror movie, just like the 80s, the haunted castle, the fire, I don't know, it's evocative.

It was the fire of 84.

Yeah, exactly. Dude, another Hoseboys hit.

Yeah, another Hoseboys did that, yeah. They famously were like, Yeah, the Hoseboys. You know, teenage lovers who won't live much longer.

No more. It was the fire of 84. We should start a band, dude. I'm sure everyone's loving our singing this episode.

I'm sure they'll write in and say, please stop. I mean, at least we'll get a cease and desist letter from at least three different bands and artists.

Yeah. So there was a trial where the theme parks representatives contended that the fire was arson on behalf of this unnamed 14 year old, The Lighter. And thus further safety precautions would not have saved any lives anyway.

Oh, wow.

And wouldn't you know it, no one was ultimately held criminally liable for the deaths.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's so shitty. Like, okay, first off, two things. One, how do we know he was stumbling around in the dark? Did he survive the one that started the fire? Unnamed man?

I don't know. I couldn't find, I don't know if it's because he was 14. I couldn't find any information about who this 14 year old was.

Yeah, he was.

I mean, reading between the lines, there was no 14 year old and it was just like.

Electrical fire.

Yeah, the park either like made it up or, I don't know, but yeah.

That is so crazy. The idea that like, your honor, I mean, it wouldn't have mattered, you know. These people, they enter a ride knowing that this could be the last moments of their life. And if they get out, it's life affirming. And if they don't, it's suspicion confirming.

Yeah, it's basically a Saw movie. We put you in here so that you feel more grateful about your life when you come out the other end.

It's crazy that like, and I'm sure they were like, well, technically by virtue of being a temporary structure, we didn't have to have put in any forms that said that these would be required. So you can't ding us on that. Also, if we get through this, the very next day is the implementation of, you have to sign a waiver to go in here.

1000%.

And cover their ass even further. Like anything to not put a green exit light inside a haunted mansion.

Yeah, it does make me think though, if podcasting doesn't work out for us.

It's already not working out for us.

Amusement park lawyer sounds like it must be a really lucrative profession.

Oh my God, it's just your honor, please. And that's all you have to say.

Yeah, it seems like amusement park lawyers have won every case they've ever tried. So I'm in, I'll do it.

I bet you they don't show up dressed like clowns or anything. I bet you they do show up in suits. Like amusement park lawyer came in dressed like a clown, like fucking squeezing a big horn, they would lose every case. So there has to just be some like ambulance chaser dude who's like has a business card with like a big top tent on it.

Yeah, Dexter monorail salesman. It's gotta be maybe one of the greasiest jobs in the world.

Like what's that Aaron Brockovich villain? Like, are we gonna see a movie? I guess not because they always get away with it. Like at least Aaron Brockovich, they won for once.

Yeah, no, you have a better chance getting a criminal settlement from like a poison company, some chemical manufacturing plant. Mark Ruffalo is not gonna make a movie about the indomitable spirit of the people who fight the amusement park. It's just, they never win.

They lose every time.

They lose every time.

Yeah, come to the amusement park to win it games, die on rides and lose in court.

Yeah, exactly.

That could sum up the history of the amusement parks.

Yeah. One of the busiest days in amusement park lawyer history might have been Sunday, June 9th, 1991 at Kings Island Amusement Park in Ohio. This place had been open just a little over 20 years. It had been open since 1972. And they hadn't experienced a single fatality at the park until death caught up and final destination to three people in two separate incidents back to back on the same day.

And this is a place with 20 year pretty decent record. They don't have an amusement park later on retainer. This is the worst possible scenario.

Yeah, I will say one of the problems with this amusement park, well, one of the great parts of this amusement park is that they featured a beer garden. But also as you'll see, the beer garden may have played a part in both of these.

As it often does.

So the day was going smoothly. Death struck late in the day. 9 p.m. was when park guest, Timothy Benning and his friend, William Heathcote, walked by a fountain near a bridge in the park's beer garden. Benning reached towards the water in the fountain, intending to drunkenly splash his friend, just a little harmless horseplay between drunkards.

Sure.

But little did Benning know what was lurking just beneath the surface. A shark!

What? I assume this is like a manmade fountain or something. Is it not?

Yes, it is. Just kidding. It's a manmade fountain.

Oh, okay. Jeez, I thought, I'm like, you can't fit a fucking shark in there.

No, no, no. It wasn't a shark. It was an electrical wire that had become exposed. And as soon as Benning touched the water, he got jolted, got knocked out and fell into the shallow water. Oh no. Now, I don't think William Hathcote quite realized what was going on. Probably because people don't flash their skeletons all see-through in real life when they get electrocuted.

You don't cartoon, yeah.

Which we should because if he had, William Hathcote would not have jumped in the water after his friend and tried to help, only to find himself getting immediately fried. And then another guy, a park employee named Daryl Robertson saw what was going on and tried to help, but electricity cares not for a good Samaritan and Robertson was electrocuted as well.

Oh my God.

Yeah, now it would have been tragic and hilarious if this had continued all night and eventually just killed everyone.

That's what I was thinking was coming. It's just like, that's the newspaper headline. Beer Garden Becomes Fear Garden. That's 34 people die learning nothing.

Yeah, tragically, the two good Samaritans died and the initial guy with the horseplay trigger in his mind, Timothy Benning, survived with serious injuries.

The guy who fell in and got, who's passed out?

Yeah, the guy who got shocked and fell in survived and the other two died.

Well, what the fuck was shocking the other people if he was in the water with a current potentially?

I think him, like they must have been reaching in the water to save him. And then, you know, like if you touch someone who's getting electrocuted, you will also get electrocuted. So.

No, but what I'm getting at is if he's most in the water.

Yeah.

He's most playing with the wire, but he survives. That's weird.

Yeah, yeah. I guess just luck or maybe, I don't know, he had electricity proof heart or something. I'm not sure, but a subsequent investigation revealed that this all could have been prevented if a circuit breaker had been installed on the electrical pumps under the pond. But of course, as we keep learning with amusement parks, they cut every corner they can. And so there were no circuit breakers. It just kept pumping electricity through the water.

Yeah, and never nothing shut it down. That's another like amusement park lawyer being like, your honor.

Yeah, yeah. How are we to know?

We were under the impression that people when struck by lightning flash transparent over and over again and they see their skeleton.

I somehow blame Benjamin Franklin for this and I will say nothing more.

Yeah, nothing in the farmer's almanac said anything about electricity that night.

Yeah, but death wasn't satisfied yet. The park remained open during all of this and the merriment continued in the rest of the park until about an hour later around 10 p.m. when a 32 year old woman named Candy Taylor decided to take one more ride before the park closed. She chose the Flight Commander, which is one of those rides where there's a bunch of rocket ship capsules in a circle and you get in and then they all lift up in the air and just spin around.

Yes, of course.

Pretty harmless.

Sometimes they move up and down as they go. It's basically a kiddie ride.

Basically a kiddie ride. Unfortunately for Taylor, she'd been drinking, possibly also at the beer garden, and something distracted her during the ride and she was alone in the capsule. So no one's entirely sure what happened. Some people theorized that she was trying to get a look at the medical helicopters that were taking Timothy Benning to the hospital. Whatever the case, she leaned way too far out over the edge of her capsule, slipped from her harness and safety belt and fell out of the pod 70 feet to the ground.

Oh my God.

Where she did not survive the impact.

That's, she didn't have it on. And like, there's no way you're going 70 feet in the air with any kind of harness that, well, I guess as we've learned, they probably weren't even in there, but it's just crazy that you would have even the opportunity to in a ride be able to unseat yourself when you're 70 feet in the air.

Yeah. You know you're in trouble at an amusement park when the high tech looking flight commander ride just has a rope to tie around your waist.

It's just, yeah, you'd think it was just barrels. You get to get in a barrel. This really is, for her at least, the most final destination of these deaths because it was like for all intents and purposes, she was supposed to, she was scheduled to die at the beer garden. But she got out. She should have been the 33rd person to grab his leg or whatever. But then she drunkenly forgot to follow life's plan and just stumbled to the spaceships and then death was like, bitch, I can see you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll be there in a minute.

You're not getting out of this one. I couldn't find if anyone was prosecuted for these deaths in this case, but I think we can safely assume they weren't. That everything continued as normal at that park.

I mean, they were still open.

Yeah.

While the shit was going on.

Yeah.

There was no attempts made to be like, oh, we got to draw chalk outlines around these people. Let's clear the area. Like that's, there's a horror movie I love called Killer Workout. It was also released under the name Orobicide. And there's a bunch of killings happening in this gym. And every time I've seen it twice, which is probably two more times than people should watch it, but I love it. And I'm like, how the fuck is this gym still open? Like they're on your third body in two days and people are still hitting the elliptical. It's so crazy how this is still happening.

They probably had a great lawyer too. Part of what's so scary about all these disasters at amusement parks is that amusement parks are designed to be as safe as possible. But there are other rides that I swear to God are designed to be death traps. There's one that we won't go into because there's one tragic case and it wasn't really all that interesting, but I learned in my research of this, the existence of a ride where it's literally, the ride is, it's built like a tower. You go up in this little steel cage in the middle. And then when you get to the top, a hundred, 150 feet in the air, they put you in a harness, they lower you through a hole in the middle of the cage, and then they just disconnect the harness and you just free fall 150 feet into a net. That's the ride.

You're in like a ball, you're in the cage.

They take you up in a cage.

You're a free-floating human being at this point?

Just falling? Yeah, they take you up in a cage and then just drop you through a hole in the middle of the cage into a net. That's it. That's the ride.

That doesn't even, it seems like they had a ride. They were building a ride. It had all the infrastructure for a ride and then ran out of money and we're like, we stopped at the hole.

Let's just drop people through this hole.

So just toss those idiots through it, I guess. Like we have no more ride.

That's a ride that I feel like is one unfortunate teenage girl. She didn't die, but she was very severely injured because the net wasn't ready to go when they dropped her. So they just dropped her to the ground.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

That's something where you do want to be drunk. Yes. Because I think-

You'd go limp.

Yeah, exactly. A lot of times in like drunk driving accidents and stuff, unfortunately it's the drunk person that lives because yeah, they didn't brace for impact or anything and then they kind of survive. Yeah. So yeah, and hopefully that girl was hammer drunk and-

Well, she was-

Just fell like a cartoon character.

She was like 12, so I don't think she was hammer drunk.

Oh, no.

Anyway, this brought me to, there is one ride. This is a bit of a sidestep, but I think it's super interesting because there is a ride in the history of rides that was designed literally to be a death trap. Ed, have you ever heard of the euthanasia coaster?

I absolutely am aware of it because it's pretty prominently featured in a show I liked a lot that came out last year. And I don't want to say anything more than that because it's kind of spoilery in the way it's used in the show, whatever. So I don't want to give anything away, but I'm going to give you a quick rundown of this and then you can tell me about it. The reason I even know that it's that, I watched the show, thought it was a wacky thing. Then I was at a NASCAR race in Pennsylvania and I was with some other people. And so we were drinking and it came up. It was an engineer I was talking to and he was like brought up the euthanasia coaster. And I was like, what you're describing is this thing from this TV show that I just watched two weeks ago. That's so insane. And he hadn't seen it or anything. So it was just this like synchronicity, but here we are again. I'm sure you'll do a better job explaining it than he did. But yeah, I weirdly am aware of it.

Yes. Well, the euthanasia coaster is a real thing or it's hypothetically real at least because it was designed in 2010 by, God, a name I'm going to butcher, Jula Jonas Urbonus. A Lithuanian.

Okay, sorry. Yeah, you probably just butchered it. I thought you were giving me like an S and L character or something.

No, I mean, literally it's spelled J-U-L-I-J-O-N-A-S. So Jula Jonas Urbonus, U-R-B-O-N-A-S.

Is the name relevant?

No.

You could just say some person at this point.

But it's just, it's a fun name to say, Jula Jonas Urbonus. He was a Lithuanian artist and a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London. He'd had some experience as an amusement park employee in the past. And this whole thing was inspired by a conversation he had with Josh Allen, who was then the president of the Philadelphia Toboggan Company.

And the current quarterback of the Buffalo Bills.

Yes, man, he's had a life. He described the ultimate roller coaster as one that, quote, sends out 24 people and they all come back dead. So that, that inspired Jula Jonas Erbonis to design this coaster. And again, it hasn't been built. He's just designed and he built like a model of it, but the coaster begins with a very steep hill that takes riders up 1600 feet or for our not American listeners, about 500 meters. The purpose of this long climb is both to get the coaster to the necessary height for what's going to happen next. And also to give the passenger a few minutes to contemplate their life. As a comparison, if you're not quite sure how tall 1600 feet is the tallest roller coaster in the world is Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure, which is the same Six Flags Great Adventure as the haunted castle tragedy. So ride Kingda Ka with caution. That coaster, the Kingda Ka is barely a third as tall as the euthanasia coaster. It stands about 456 feet tall or 139 meters. Anyway, once you get to the top, Urbonus designed a landing platform where the user can choose to exit the ride because they've contemplated their life at this point and may decide that they don't want to finish riding the death ride. If they choose to stay on, they to take a moment to say their last words and then press a button to continue. When you hit the button, the rider drops down the other side of the 1600 foot hill, reaching a nearly terminal velocity of 220 miles an hour, or 360 kilometers per hour. You can go take a look at the link in the show notes, but just to give you the visual, the euthanasia coaster basically looks like this big, massive hill. And then once you hit the bottom of that first hill, the coaster enters a series of increasingly smaller loops. There's seven loops in total. And the idea is that each loop is of a smaller diameter than the last in order to maintain a consistent and lethal 10 Gs of force onto the passengers as the train loses speed. After the last loop, the coaster takes a sharp right-hand turn onto a straight track back to the station where the dead are unloaded and new passengers can board. According to Wikipedia, the euthanasia coaster kills its passengers through prolonged cerebral hypoxia, or as we discussed in the Airline Disasters episode, insufficient supply of oxygen to the brain. The ride's seven inversions inflict the 10 G force on its passengers for 60 seconds, causing G force related symptoms, starting with a gray out through tunnel vision to blackout to G lock, which is G force induced loss of consciousness and eventually death. Subsequent inversions or a second run of the roller coaster would serve as insurance against unintentional survival of more robust passengers. Now I am against the death penalty in all forms, but I feel like you could convince me otherwise if each state that practiced the death penalty had to install one of these coasters as a way to do it, because it does seem like a much more humane way to kill someone than lethal injection or electric chair, like all these other methods that are basically torture.

I don't know. I think it's an interesting thing. If the idea is going down, this would be a more peaceful or on my own terms death. No one survives at the end to be like, actually that was not as advertised. It was terrifying. I puked on myself 20 times. My heart exploded. So I think they probably sell it as, yeah, you're gonna get on this and you're gonna lull into sleep as you spin down these circles or whatever.

Yeah, basically.

So it might not be any more humane. And if it's built by the only people who build roller coasters, which is amusement park contractors, it's definitely gonna break the third fucking time they use it.

And catch fire.

Yeah, and it was like, oh, I came here for the really pleasant death. Great, well, you just fell 1600 feet into a fiery crash because the net guy was smoking a cigarette and wasn't manning any of the important machinery.

I could see the pitch for it though being like, so have you ever wanted to own and operate a private prison with a hint of whimsy? Buy the euthanasia coaster. It makes the skyline look nice. You could put some other rides in, maybe make an event out of it.

Yeah, that's the thing. Do you put the euthanasia coaster in a field somewhere where everyone can see it or do you put it underground?

No, well, it gets-

Where it's like, oh, don't worry about this.

If you're gonna put it underground, the expense starts to add up. I feel like the excavation-

Oh, it sure does. Yeah, it sure adds up.

Can you even dig 2000 feet underground I mean, here's the thing.

We'll never know if we don't try.

Yeah, that's true. So I mostly bring this monstrosity of physics up as a way into our last Amusement Park disaster of the episode. And for my money, one of the worst things that has ever happened at an amusement park, and that's really saying something considering the journey we've just been on.

And saying something considering you watched a man get a disease from a bygone era from a dumpster in front of you at an amusement park.

Well, this I'm talking, in this case, I'm talking about the Verrückt tragedy. Not only is this incident incredibly tragic, I think it's one of the scariest in the sense that if you are afraid of amusement park rides or you're thinking about becoming afraid of amusement park rides, this really eats the idea that we should trust the people who build the crazy looking rides. Because like, I don't know about you listener, but one of the reasons I feel safe on amusement park rides is the implicit social contract of these rides are safe. I assume they're designed by highly trained and competent teams of engineers. I assume they're tested and inspected on a regular basis, both before and after they're opened. But it turns out that is an assumption that makes an ass out of you and me and sent at least one ass to the big ride in the sky. So I guess we should describe this ride to start. The Verucht or Insane in German was a 168 foot tall waterslide constructed at Schlitterbahn, Kansas City, which was an expansion of the Schlitterbahn Parks waterpark empire in Texas. Now for reference, 168 feet tall is about as tall as Niagara Falls or if you prefer, torch to toe of the Statue of Liberty.

I love that you've abandoned giving kilometers and just have moved to structural measurements.

It's tall. It's a lot of kilometers. I didn't do the kilometer measurement for this one.

It's actually less kilometers.

It's not, I didn't do the meters.

Listen, this is an imperial system here and we're fine with it.

Yeah. This park was a $750 million investment. I don't know how much that is in euro or pounds or rubles or whatever.

But what would that be in plates of food?

Yeah. And it was pitched as sort of the greatest water park in the Midwest. Excitement was really high and the Kansas government was happy to do whatever it took to get Kansans to spend their disposable summer dollars in state instead of crossing the border to Missouri, which I guess is a thing that happens a lot in Kansas.

Sure. Now, question.

Yes.

Is it a German company who's doing an offshoot in America or is it just an American company? I know there's a lot of Germans in the Midwest or whatever and Scandinavians and shit.

It's an American company.

Out of Texas? That doesn't make a lot of sense.

Out of Texas, yeah. And I don't know. I mean, we're gonna talk about the co-owner Jeff Henry, which is not a very German name, but I didn't look into why they were called Schlitterbahn.

He probably changed it when he came through Ellis Island. That's actually probably where he got the idea of how tall it should be. Cause he's looking up at that fucking Statue of Liberty and he's like, I'm gonna change my name and I'm gonna make a roller coaster that high.

I think his parents started Schlitterbahn and he worked there when he was young.

Okay, well then I guess none of the things I just said happened. That's fine.

Well, let's just get into Jeff Henry. He worked at the original Schlitterbahn when he was young. He thought a lot about water rides while he worked there. I think he has some quote where he says something about, like, I learned everything I needed to know about water from observing it.

Okay, creepy.

And by the time he opened Schlitterbahn, Kansas City, he was regarded in the water park community as, quote, the Wizard of Wet, the Lord of the Slides, and an aquatic Walt Disney.

So these are three monikers he gave him fucking self.

Probably.

There is no way. He was just, it's probably written on his business card. He was like, oh, my name's Slick Henry. I'm the Wizard of Wet, or you might know me as the Splash in the Drink of Life or some stupid shit. Like fucking so dumb.

Well, he made up a lot of shit as we will soon see.

Yeah, he's a carnival barker.

Yeah, he was the youngest member of this family and he was the one leading the charge.

Youngest member of the Hoes Boys.

Oh, actually, I guess I should say, I don't know if he was the youngest member of the family, but he was a son of the original Schlitterbahn owners and he was the guy who led the charge to open this one in Kansas City. So during an appearance that Geoff Henry made on the travel channel show Extreme Water Parks, with just an X at the beginning, he was asked what he was working on and he spontaneously invented the idea of building the tallest and fastest water slide in the world. He called this invention a speed blaster, a term he also copped to making up on the spot.

Oh my God, at first I was like, I don't know, but now this is the way I pitch in every meeting.

This is how successful people operate. They go, what are you working on? And you go, oh, you know, just making the best podcasts in the history of podcasting. Like anyone can say that and he just did. And then he realized he had to actually build the thing. And he realized it immediately because it came out in court later that he appeared on this travel channel, Extreme Waterpark Show at some sort of a like, they were at like a water park convention. And after he said this on camera, he then went around the convention and pitched the idea to vendors at the show, but he couldn't get anyone to bite. And Jeff Henry is an idiot. So when the experts said no, Henry decided he would just build the thing himself. So he called up a 73 year old man named John Schooley or Schooley as the ride's lead designer, and also set a crazy timetable of completing the ride in seven months.

Well, he thought Schooley might only have seven months left to live. So he's like, Schooley, you gotta get on this buddy. You're not doing so well. You had medical issues before I met you.

Yeah, Schooley's like, I won't be here to see how this fucking thing turns out.

Your price is right and your morals are loose. Get the fuck over here.

Now, the other reason I just hate Jeff Henry off the bat is some emails came out in Discovery during this case of him communicating to his team, and he sounds like the worst boss ever. On December 14th, 2012, Henry wrote an email to Schooley and others, quote, we all need to circle on this. I must communicate reality to all. Time, comma, is of the essence. No time to die. He followed up that same day. I have to micromanage this. Now. This is a designed product for TV. Absolutely cannot be anything else. Speed is 100% required. A floor a day. Tough schedule. Jeff.

Fuck this guy. This guy sucks.

This guy sucks. Anyone who talks about themselves like this, I have to micromanage. Time is of the essence. It's a tough schedule. Blah. Go fuck yourself.

Oh yeah. To fulfill this made up promise you made. And now you're embarrassed because you said it on camera. Also, okay, first off, sending an email to a 72 year old man in whatever year this is, that's not getting read. And then secondly, he just said like 15 things that I feel like are not going to help him in court in the event of a major accident.

Yeah. No time to die is a real bad one to put in here. But anyway, this quote unquote tough schedule meant that calculations that were normally allotted three to six months to complete had five weeks to be completed. And so as they began testing, rafts repeatedly went airborne on the ride's large bottom hump. Now, just again, to describe this ride, it's nothing. It's literally one giant hill. And then there's a second. So the first hill is like 17 stories tall or something. And then the second hill is five stories tall. So the idea is you go down the first big hill and then you're using physics to slow the rider up the five story hill and then slowly down the other side. But because they're doing a half years worth of physics in a month, they're just shooting rafts up off the top of this second ramp.

Yeah, and they're not taking air into the account of any of their equations. So they're like, oh, this is gonna have downforce, right? And it was like, no, immediately, the first gust of wind caught this raft and it blew into the fucking atmosphere.

Yeah, now, shockingly, Jeff's inimitable management style didn't result in anyone meeting his deadlines. By the time Jeff's episode of Extreme Water Parks first aired on June 29th, 2014, the slide had yet to open. When it finally did open a month later, hype was at a fever pitch and Jeff described the ride as dangerous, but a safe dangerous now.

Oh my God. And this is in the era of all sorts of legal paperwork, like you have to sign, that he probably thinks he's covering his ass by outwardly saying that it's pretty risky. And then also, you know this guy's having everybody sign waivers.

I don't know if they actually did. That's a good question. I didn't look to see if he had people signing waivers. I don't think he did.

That's a dumb person. He should have micromanaged that. He should have made sure everybody signed something.

Yeah, I mean.

It doesn't matter. Nobody gets in trouble in the world of amusement parks. We've learned this. So ignore that, continue.

So he did wrap netting around the entire ride on, so they basically put like metal ribs sort of. So like, if you imagine the slide is like the bottom half of a curve, then he completed the top of the curve with all these metal ribs and then put netting over that. So that if you did become airborne, you wouldn't literally, like you said, blow into the atmosphere.

Yeah, but like metal ribbing, like so now you're just gonna like get cheese grated to fuck in the atmosphere.

Well, hang tight. For months after this ride opened, guests reported straps on the rafts coming loose as well as flying up off the surface of the slide and hitting the netting that covered the entire slide. And according to the eventual criminal indictment, at least 13 non-fatal injuries were recorded in the 182 days the ride was open between 2014 and 2016, up to and including the day of August 7th, 2016, which is when Caleb Schwab, the 10-year-old son of Kansas State Representative Scott Schwab, died while riding Verrugt.

Oh no, RIP got blessed, but luckily your dad's a somebody, so hopefully this helps.

Everything went as it should as the rafts streamed down the initial drop at nearly 70 miles an hour, but when it hit the ascent of the second hump, the raft went airborne and Caleb struck one of the metal rails that supported the netting, decapitating him instantaneously.

Well, this is what I'm saying about ribbed fucking supporting. It shouldn't have any brakes in it.

The two passengers sitting behind him on the raft were also injured from the impact of Caleb's head hitting one or possibly both of them after it came off. One suffered a broken jaw and the other suffered a facial bone fracture and needed stitches.

Yeah, stitches is the last of the year. Need therapy for a hundred years. A 10-year-old head broke your jaw?

Yeah.

Like, how do you say that ever to anyone and not just go right back to that moment?

Yeah, in the immediate aftermath, Schlitterbahn, Kansas City was closed for an inspection. That inspection lasted an entire three days and then the park reopened, though Verrucht remained closed. Part of why this incident is so shocking to me is because it is the kind of accident you might expect at some janky, low rent carnival, not a park that was supposed to be the Disney of the Midwest.

I mean, it was featured on reality television shows.

And when the ride opened, it was featured on The Today Show, it was on morning shows. There was a big hype around this ride when it opened. So everybody bought into the idea that it's safe and it made me wonder, how the fuck does this even happen? Where were the safety inspectors? How does this ride even get permitted? And it turns out the Schlitterbahn name went a long way. The Schlitterbahn parks are big money makers in Texas and they're a known entity and they made big promises that the state of Kansas wanted to believe about the tourism and the money that would come in. And that is where the state of Kansas made their biggest mistake. Because in an attempt to make things easier and cheaper for Schlitterbahn, Kansas agreed to let them operate under what is commonly referred to as the Disney exemption. It's a rule I did not know about, and it's a rule that many of you listening probably don't know about. And I gotta say, it kinda does make me think twice about going to amusement parks. Because Disney and other major parks such as Universal are allowed to self-inspect their rides by the states that they operate in. Their argument has been that the rides are so unique and so specific that state inspections would fail to live up to the company's own standards. And that's exactly what happened with Schlitterbahn. Except the rides in this case were being tested and inspected by a maniac who also had no real experience in physics and like I said, claimed that he learned everything he needed to learn about water by watching it.

Yeah, and who also potentially on camera approached anyone you would need to help make this. And they all said, potentially on camera, no, don't do this. Then he went and did like a space cowboys where he went and got like an old engineer from a bar somewhere to be like, hey, you know, I'll keep the fucking bourbon coming and just come work at this place and sign off on this.

He's like, dude, what's so hard? I drew one big tall hump and then a smaller hump. Let's just build it. It's like-

I mean, look at this is, camels have been doing it for years. This is in nature, two humps. So let's get out there and do it.

Yeah. And so I know what you're thinking. I know no one has ever held liable for these incidents, but this kid was the son of a state representative who went on to become the Kansas secretary of state. So surely if anyone had the pull to get the park owners held criminally liable for this, it would be Scott Schwab. Ed, can you please play a buzzer sound here? Because if you think that you'd be wrong.

I mean, here's what I'm thinking.

Yes.

Do you want Ed's fucking theory on this?

What's Ed's fucking theory on this?

Look, if you're gonna grease some hands to get your fucking amusement park somewhere and get the red tape cut and ba, you're probably...

33 seconds redacted. No, no, you probably can't say that.

Fair enough.

Yeah. While Schwab was successful in getting some state laws changed and he won a hefty $20 million settlement from Schlitterbahn, which did eventually close in 2018, as did the other two people in the accident, although the amount of those settlements remains undisclosed. No one was ever brought to justice. On March 23rd, 2018, a grand jury issued an indictment against Schlitterbahn and Tyler Austin Miles, the park's former director of operations, charging them with involuntary manslaughter, aggravated battery, aggravated child endangerment, and interference with law enforcement. The indictment accused the park of negligence, concealing design flaws, and downplaying the severity of previous injuries reported on the ride. So all in all, some pretty serious shit in this grand jury indictment. This indictment against Schlitterbahn wrote that Jeff Henry and John Schooley, lacked technical expertise to design a properly functioning water slide and did not perform standard engineering procedures or calculations on how the slide would operate. Instead, they used crude trial and error methods to test its performance out of haste to launch the ride. According to court documents, Schooley or Schooley conceded that, quote, if we actually knew how to do this and it could be done that easily, it wouldn't be that spectacular.

Wow, what a stupid fucking like Silicon Valley move fast and break things answer.

Yeah, yeah. Sounds guilty to me. Jeff and John were arrested that March and almost a year later, their trial ended in a dismissal of criminal charges. They won with the argument or their amusement park lawyer won with the greasy fucking argument that inadmissible evidence had been presented to the grand jury in the form of presenting the extreme water parks episode to jurors as fact instead of as a fictional and dramatized version of events created for entertainment purposes.

Wow, that's greasy. It's smart. I mean, that's a good amusement park lawyer, I guess, but holy shit, is that greasy. Also, sir, is this or is this not you saying these words? It doesn't matter that they put crazy music over it. It doesn't matter that it's been edited. It's still you being like, what do you mean they'll all die if I make this? Fuck you then. I'm gonna do it with the fucking, whatever that old man is.

Yeah, the judge also noted that expert witnesses claimed that the designers of the slide were negligent in not following certain standards, although the law at the time did not require that those standards be followed, which I think is sort of a flavor of the same bullshit that got the designers of the haunted castle, which is like, listen, yeah, you know, put it on the law now, it can be an issue now, but you can't get me on it.

Like there was nothing.

Yeah.

You know, we were simply asked to do things at the high standards of our internal, you know, operation.

Yeah.

Until you make a law, you know, it's like that fucking, hey, I don't think that politicians should be able to profit off of knowing things ahead of time and buying stocks.

Yeah.

But they're like, hey, that ain't illegal, so fuck it, it's only illegal if you do it. I hate that shit. I hate that shit so much.

I hate it. Anyway, Ed, where do you place amusement park disasters on the fear tier?

It's tough. I don't like rides. So I have, there's already a fear there. And you said it's pretty low the number of times it happens.

Four to five people a year.

So I guess I shouldn't place it high, but I'm scared that if something did happen to me, that my family and friends would have no recourse.

I completely understand that. I would put it sort of somewhere in the middle of the fear tier. There's a very low chance of it happening, but it's something I think about every time I get on a ride.

Sure.

And honestly, learning in my research about this Disney exemption that parks are allowed to self-inspect, I generally would prefer a state inspection, you know?

If you like slowing things down, we might never get a ride that can kill you at that point. We'll be waiting for years.

I mean, look, would amusement parks be as fun if you knew they were 100% safe? Let's be real.

I mean, you know that's something an amusement park lawyer has literally said to a jury.

Yeah, yeah.

Like that's no way they haven't.

Yeah. Well, on behalf of myself and all the amusement park lawyers in our fine nation, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this has been Scared All The Time. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission, copyrighted Astonishing Legends Productions. We are in this together. Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===