Inside the world’s most dangerous theme park where six died and punters were left bleeding with skin ripped off
WELCOME to New Jersey's Action Park, the country's most dangerous attraction, which took the lives of several visitors in the decades after it opened in 1978.
Dubbed 'Class Action Park' for the lawsuits it has attracted, visitors regularly broke bones, lost teeth, and even died while using the rides.
“People were bleeding all over the place,” Susie McKeown, a visitor of the park during its operative years, told the.
The chilling streak of lethal incidents began in 1980, when an employee’s sled derailed while riding the Alpine Slide, throwing them off the tracks.
Alpine Slide consisted of riding down a winding concrete path on a cart; visitors were not given helmets.
It only took 12 months for the terrifying attraction to cause 14 bone fractures and 26 head injuries.
The 19-year old employee’s death is detailed by the website rideaccidents.com.
“The victim … was thrown from the car down an embankment. He sustained a fatal head injury when his head struck a rock,” the site says.
The danger of the attractions wasn’t accidental, according to the son of its founder. Rather, it was an almost unavoidable aspect of Action Park’s appeal.
Action Park was started by Eugene Mulvihill, who ran a company called Great American Recreation.
According to his son, Andy Mulvihill, the idea was to apply the idea behind ski resorts - increasingly challenging and risky attractions - to a theme park.
“He wanted to let people control the action, control their own destiny. And so that created a place that people absolutely loved,” Andy Mulvihill said in a telephone interview with The US Sun.
Andy, about Action Park this year, spent his youth working in the park, which consisted of three themed areas.
“I think it attracted the daredevils, it attracted the wild and crazy people - people that really wanted a thrill,” Andy said.
“So many times people say it was about the danger. It was not about the danger, it was about going on a ride that was really, super fun and super thrilling.”
In many situations, the thrilling nature of the park came at the cost of safety.
The park’s Tarzan Swing catapulted helpless attendees into water so cold that it could induce shock, and triggered a lethal heart attack in 1984.
Visitors of the park also jumped from the Diving Cliffs, under which was a pool painted white.
Disturbingly, a former employee of the park named Tom Fergus told that the white paint was put in to help spot dead bodies.
Another ride, Roaring Rapids, took a man’s life after he stepped out of his kayak and stood on a live wire.
The ride had previously caused a number of bruises, broken bones, and other injuries.
One ride that McKeown remembers taking as a child ended with a sheer 20 foot drop into water.
“You went so fast that if your chin hit the water at the wrong angle, you chipped your teeth,” she recalled, having lost part of a tooth herself.
In perhaps the most absurd ride in the park, the Cannonball Slide propelled riders vertically around a massive loop.
Jettisoned by the sheer force of the water, those adrenaline junkies brave enough to enter often ended up with their teeth embedded in the walls of the slide.
The park offered employees $100 to test ride the Cannonball slide, and crash dummies reportedly were mutilated. The ride was closed by the Advisory Board on Carnival Amusement Ride Safety after one month.
Visitors struggled to escape the eight-foot-deep Tidal Pool, also known as the Grave Pool.
Holding up to 1,000 people at a time and sporting meter-high waves, around 30 people needed to be rescued from it daily.
Three teenagers drowned in the Grave Pool.
Andy Mulvihill commented on the deaths which occurred in the park, which he personally lived through.
“[My father] was willing to take risks associated with that, let them take risks. And unfortunately, occasionally there were some unfortunate results that occurred where people pushed themselves too far,” he said.
“It was a horrible experience for me and my father, my family, when people would drown.
We did everything we could to try to protect people, but there were a lot of people that were just not swimmers or not good swimmers that jumped in water when they shouldn’t have.”
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Although Andy said that many people “came back in droves,” some attendees required more persuasion to brave the theme park again.
“They kept sending us free passes to go back so we went again but I was extremely cautious and only went on one ride – a kayak where you simply paddled around a sort of lazy river,” McKeown said.
“I loved it and it was safe but the next day the ride was closed because someone fell off their kayak and was electrocuted by the electric currents.”
McKeown did not return after that.
All-in-all, six people died in seven years at the park.
It was sold in 1996 to Intrawest, with its new owners changing its name, scaling back more dangerous rides, and developing a ski park - an addition which Andy Mulvihill pointed out presented many of the same risks as the initial park
“It was very interesting that [in] the winter it was okay to be dangerous but the summer no, they had to be more careful,” he said.
The park was eventually acquired once more by Eugene Mulvihill in 2010. It now goes by the name Mountain Creek Waterpark.
Andy Mulvihill characterized Action Park in its heyday: “Where else in the world could you drive a race car, a speedboat, a tank, go bungee jumping, fly, take a water slide with a jump or a water slide with a 360 degree inverted loop?”