I had the absolute best experience recently. I spent the end of May and most of June in Ocean City, MD, where I come every summer to help my family mount their pirate show at Jolly Roger Amusement Park (magic, songs, pirates, treasure, etc). I build and paint sets and make props and costumes and prepare technical elements. It’s always a huge job and I always use it as an excuse for why I haven’t posted for a while. This year was no exception, but towards the end of my visit, I finally took an afternoon for myself – went to the beach and saw the ocean for the first time since I’d arrived, got a slice of pizza, and most importantly, went to check out something I’ve been wanting to revisit for years.
We moved to OC full time when I was in the 4th grade, quite a while ago. And down on the boardwalk, there is this old ride-through haunted house, what I’ve come to learn is called a “Dark Ride.” I remember going on it last time when I was a little kid – it could have been 35 years ago. And I was totally in love with it then. I don’t remember much from that time, but I remember that, inspired by it, I had a short lived ambition to design my own ride-through haunted attraction – for some time I even had recurring dreams about it and just knew that if I could actualize what I’d seen behind my eyes, it would be life-changingly extraordinary.
Well, I never did that. But over the years, I’ve thrown plenty of good Halloween parties, and as I’ve written about a few times, come late October, my cabaret group always does something spookily thematic and I get to come up with new horror effects to do live with an audience (I’m already planning some exciting new tricks for this year – people will gasp I tell you, gasp!), so part of the dream survives…
Anyway, sometime this last year, the OC Boardwalk Haunted House popped up on my social media feed and I learned that it had been designed by a famous ride designer back in the 60s (Bill Tracy) and that it was really worth seeing. For years and years, I’ve been walking by it (I visit my parents every summer – they’ve been doing their shows in OC for the last 25 years!) and loving the exterior, but always assumed that it would be lame inside, just another artifact of childhood that regrettably diminishes when looking out of adult eyes. But then, I got my free afternoon and I went and dropped I think $8.75 for a ticket and had the best damn time! It’s only a 5 minute ride, but I came out just grinning ear to ear – I bought a t-shirt – the owner was there and I got to chat with him for a while (apparently, he’s usually around – it’s been family owned and operated since the very beginning, back in 1964 – and he’s always happy to talk about the ride’s history – still a family business, his son (who took my ticket) comes up with new ideas, and he builds them), and then, with his permission, I bought another ticket and went through a second time to film it so that I could upload it here.
Now, of course, my cell phone’s camera surely can’t do justice to something so necessarily experiential (and especially something so dark), but this can give some small taste of what it’s like and I really don’t think watching it could spoil the experience, so behold…(and I strongly recommend you turn your sound on)…
Once you take your place in the cart, fashioned after a casket, you’re thrust through doors that slam open, into a dark, dayglow world of all manner of ghosts and goblins, skeletons and torture victims. Of the, I believe 11 features designed by famed Dark Ride builder, Bill Tracy, back in ’64, I think 9 remain, but it is amazing that they do as they are largely made of papier-mâché and plaster, and they all move and shake, thus undergoing real material stress over the years. While I’m not certain of the origin of each gag in the ride, a couple that I know to be original are genuinely impressive, both as feats of engineering, and in terms of what they got away with more than 60 years ago and have never abandoned, such as a delightfully disturbing moving tableaux in which a woman is being vertically bisected by a spinning blade in a saw mill. Other gimmicks are clearly more recent additions, such as elements referencing Pennywise or Sadako from Ringu. There’s a fence, holding back hungry zombies, that starts to collapse as you ride by. There’s a tunnel with a train coming straight at you. There’s a giant possum that suddenly lunges for your head (Why a possum? Apparently, because it’s awesome!) and a rather concerning water effect at the end (I was sure I was gonna get soaked). There are constant disorienting optical illusions, startling sounds, and myriad gleeful terrors as you’re shaken along the track. And I loved every single second of it. How can something designed to scare (and which sometimes does) overwhelmingly leave me with an impression of ‘loveliness?’
Opened in 1964 at the behest of Granville Trimper (the Trimper Family having developed much of the Amusement industry on the southern boardwalk), and built by then famed designer, Bill Tracy, the OC Haunted House has been in operation for over 60 years. Tracy was one of the most renowned Dark Ride designers in the 60s and 70s, but today, only a handful of his rides remain around the nation (perhaps 5 or 6). In the late 80s, a second level was added (utilizing, among other things, tricks taken from a different nearby Tracy ride which had been closed), and there are always new elements being introduced (just as some older pieces inevitably have to be retired). But however much things change, I feel the ride retains its classic style and identity. And I’m so glad it does cause it is genuinely, heart-warmingly, giant-smile-plastered-across-my-face charming – a glorious artifact of a bygone age. But, it must be said, it also got a couple of solid jumps out of me. However joyfully old-timey it may be, it still delivers what it promises.
I don’t know if I have the words to express just how much warmth I felt for this thing. I had gone in expecting something old and janky and cheesy, and to some extent, it may even be some of those things, but it is so clearly loved and lovingly maintained. Every bloody torture, every giant rat, every hooded victim, hanging upside down over a fiery pit as he writhes and screams in desperate agony is infused with endless love and care. And that love is contagious – or at least it was for me.
I loved this ride in very much the same way that I love the horror genre, in the same way that anyone who is a fan of some “cult” item can treasure that beloved object of their obsession. It makes no claim on being “high art,” it is entirely unpretentious, it revolves around “bad” things that you’re not supposed to enjoy – violence, titillation, gore, disgust, cheap jump scares, and simple gags. But it clearly loves all those things and people have obviously poured their hearts and souls into bringing it all to life and keeping it in good working order. Endless labor, ingenuity, and creativity has fueled this ride and just as a medieval cathedral carries the emotional frisson of the fact that generations devoted themselves to its construction, filling each stone with their belief, with their hope for a future life less bleak than that they were living, so too did this ride give me a charge, in its commitment to its scares, to its history, to the way it made me jump and laugh and ultimately walk away beaming with joy.
Some artists will never win any awards, will never be recognized by any academy. Some simply go to work each day, pouring all they have into something small and overlooked and unconsidered: a haunted house, a comic strip, a children’s pirate show, a cheap horror flick. But their work is no less valuable than some highfalutin, well-funded, culturally respected piece of capital A “Art” that people shell out big bucks for. And in my opinion, in some cases, it can be worth more. This is the art that is actually in people’s lives, that gives them an experience of the new that makes existence feel slightly more fresh, if only for a fleeting moment. I’ve seen plenty of great works of art: in a museum, in the theatre, in a book, in a cinema; I have been moved and challenged and entertained. But somehow it’s hard to imagine being able to summon the same kind of loving affection for any highly valued work of “high culture” that I so easily can for a bunch of 60 year old papier-mâché and blacklight responsive paint, orchestrated simply to startle me, to disturb me, to gross me out, to take me on a ride for 5 minutes and leave me glowing.
If you every happen to be in Ocean City, MD, I can’t recommend this ride enough. And if you never are (more likely as you could be reading this in Iceland or Japan right now), my takeaway is this: Give these things a chance – when you find yourself somewhere and there is some old thing that’s been around forever and it seems touristy and hokey – a bit of kitsch, give it a try anyway (we don’t need to go through life being so “cool,” do we? We are allowed to like things – to let ourselves be surprised.). There may be a reason it’s still there. It may be just as lovingly cared for as this ride was. And it may not. Who knows? But this cost me less than ten bucks for a ticket, so what is there to lose?