Mark Willard , Flickr//CC BY NC ND 2.0
Dark rides , also known as ghost railroad train , are those entertainment parks rides where you ’re carried through a construction by a vehicle on a cart track . They let in everything from Hersheypark ’s Chocolate World to Disney ’s It ’s a Small World , to many of the haunted houses I ’ve love since I was a kid — like the Haunted Mansions at Disney and Knoebels Amusement Resort , Trimper ’s Haunted House on the Ocean City , Md. boardwalk and the Haunted Pretzel at Bushkill Park in Pennsylvania .
George LaCross and Bill Luca are crowing fans of these rides , and have been chronicling their history atLaff in the Darkfor the last 15 long time . In that time they ’ve also made documentary about Knoebels ’ haunted house and the Whacky Shack and Pirate ’s Cove rides at Waldameer Park in Erie , Penn . LaCross did a lengthyinterviewwithCollectors Weeklyin 2013 and share a lot of the chronicle he ’s dug up . One matter he explains is how a scarey ride ended up with a goofy name like the Haunted Pretzel .
When the creators of the first dark drive , Leon Cassidy and Marvin Rempfer at Tumbling Dam Amusement Park in Bridgeton , N.J. , opened up the attraction in 1928 , they held a contest to name it . The winning entry , “ Firefly , ” was disdain because they think it might involve the ride was a fire hazard ( and many like it were , says LaCross , and ended up burning down because they did n’t have sprinkler systems ) . When one of the first passenger get along out , though , he allege he felt “ twisted around like a pretzel , ” so the owners ran with that and called it “ Pretzel . ”
From there , the name sort of just circulate , says LaCross :
Another cool thing I learned from LaCross and Luca’swebsiteis that The Haunted House Dark Ride at Gillian ’s Wonderland Pier in Ocean City , N.J. is n’t as time of origin as it seems . While the dayglo interiors andpop - up freak effects front like they ’re from the 1960s-’70s heyday of dark ride , the ride is in reality only a few years old . mime the previous school vibration was a conclusion made by Wayne Seddon , the theatre director of creative thinking and design at Gillian ’s , who started work with classic non-white drive designer Bill Tracy ’s party in the ' 70s .
“ From the beginning the dark drive was done with the spirit of the old dark ride in mind … and as far as I was concerned , Tracy was in mind too , ” Wayne told LaCross and Luca . “ I even made a gravestone with Tracy ’s name on it with one of his erstwhile piranha on top . We did n’t make it to be an in your face panic attack but more like a ride to entertain ; a lot like an old Tracy ride but with a few unexpected scare . "
If you like these old panic ride , LaCross’sinterviewand theirarticlesare a with child crash class in their history .
