Random Amusement Park Employees Describe Scariest Things They’ve Ever Seen Happen On A Ride (14 items)

• (#1) A Reckless Jump From A 60-Foot Slide

  From Redditor /u/Commander_Shepard_:

  At our park, we had a slide that was about 60 feet high. One pipe, and the most popular, went down at an 80-degree angle. It was completely open. You sat down, and slid down the 60 feet within two seconds. Quite a thrill really. Two guards manned the ride, one at the bottom and one at the top, to control the antics of the guests at all times.

  Then, I see a kid take two steps backwards. I know what he is about to do. He must be stopped, I think. But, alas, what am I to do? I have no way to contact the lifeguard up top. There is no phone, no radio. I blow my whistle twice. The guards nearby look at me; the guard at the top turns around to find the source of my noise, to find me pointing at the kid.

  Too late.

  The kid ran and jumped clean off of the slide. Now, up to this point in my life, I had been afraid of things. But nothing, in all of my life, had made me this scared until now. Seeing a young man fall to his impending doom and being powerless over it makes you feel terrible. Feeling, by some extension of logic, that you are indirectly responsible for this, makes it even worse. Never in my life have my stomach and jaw dropped so fast.

  To his credit, he assumed the proper position of arms and legs being crossed. But now he was clean in the air, flying like a lead brick. As he did so, his body turned ever so slightly. It was something he noticed, and fruitlessly tried to correct for. Instead, he fell some distance before hitting inside the flume and chaotically tumbling down the ride. I called the paramedics immediately, and we had to backboard this kid out of the splashdown flume.

  The kid messed up his neck pretty badly, broke his fibula I think. He was carted off in an ambulance and put in a brace the moment we got him out. They said he was fine, he walked again, much to my surprise. 

   

   
• (#2) Two Emergencies At Once

  From Redditor /u/JackOhBee:

  I was the team leader for one of those raft water rides that sits 12 people on a giant inner tube. A child that was maybe 12 or 13 years old had a seizure while going down the final drop. Because he wasn't going to be able to get out of the vehicle, we pressed the emergency stop, which drained all of the water, and we removed everyone on the ride.

  As I was waiting for the EMTs, I got a call on my radio to report to the top of the lift right away for another emergency. I run full speed through the ride and up the five stories worth of stairs to the top. The vehicle at the top had gone over the crest but for some reason did not drop into the water, so the boat was literally teetering on the lift. If it had fallen it would have been about a 10-foot drop on solid concrete.

  I had to lead my team in evacuating the entire section of the park, with EMTs treating the kid with the seizure, and the fire department coming to help get these people off the ride safely, while rocking the strongest poker face I've had to keep ever.
• (#3) A Lightning Strike And A Knife Threat

  From Redditor /u/okiewxchaser:

  Operated rides for four years. Two moments stand out. The scariest moment I had was when lightning struck a utility pole below me (my position on the ride was about 50 feet up), knocking out power to my ride and forcing me and my supervisors to unload the ride in the middle of a lightning storm.

  The second was a guy who was very upset that I wouldn't let his kid who was a foot under the height requirement ride. I told him no early in the day, but one of my coworkers let the kid ride while I was on break. The family comes up later and the father, who was noticeably drunk, jumps two gates and over the tracks to threaten me with a knife. I called security and he ran.
• (#4) Getting Screwed On The Water Ride

  From Redditor /u/wockawocka88:

  We had a riptide water ride where people could ride body boards like a big wave, and while I was talking to another guard I heard the whistle go off like there was an emergency. As I approached, a guard told me there was a nail in someone's foot. I thought he meant someone stubbed their toe and their nail pushed back into their toe, but it was an 8-year-old girl who had stepped on a 4-inch screw left over from the maintenance the ride had recently undergone. Right into the heel.

  As I saw it I got a little lightheaded, but that was what I was trained to do. As I picked her up and pulled her out of the water, she moved her foot and it started to come out, but it was still in there a good 3 inches. I put a latex glove on it and told her it'd be okay as I called for paramedics. Her damn brothers came up and said that she was gonna ruin their time if they had to leave and I had to tell them to get away. When the paramedics came they picked her up to put her on the stretcher, and when they did, that latex glove slid off her foot and got hooked on the screw in the foot causing her, what I believed by her screams, excruciating pain.
• (#5) When The Ride Hit A Duck

  From Redditor /u/TeakatKitty42:

  I worked at Busch Gardens Colonial Williamsburg as a teen. I worked near the train tracks and every day I was amazed how close the ducks would come to getting hit by that thing. Well, one day one got too close and got ran over.

  The heartbreaking part was that it was a mallard, and his mate spent the next half hour or so quacking forlornly at his corpse until the maintenance guys finally showed up to clean it up.
• (#6) A Really, Really Gross Clean-Up Job

  From Redditor /u/brittkneebear:

  I operated a few different roller coasters during my fun-filled summers at this amusement park, but most of my horror stories come from one ride in particular. The train was one of the ones that you had to step into, with a lap bar restraint.

  On one particular day, it was over 100 degrees and the ride had been running as usual for most of the morning. As we were loading the train, a guest came up to me to say that there was an awful smell coming from the front car, and my stomach immediately dropped. Usually with these types of complaints, we’d find that the previous rider had one too many slushees before riding and had lost their lunch. Gross, but we were used to cleaning that kind of stuff.

  I started approaching the front car and immediately called for my coworker to direct everyone out of the train and back into the line, and to call our supervisor to close the ride. Instead of a normal puke situation, I found a greenish-brown liquid spread all throughout the front car, from the seat down to the floor. Whoever was the last person to ride the ride had sh*t all over themselves and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about it.

  Cleaning human feces is one thing - it’s absolutely disgusting but it can be done. But trying to clean up human diarrhea in 100-plus degree weather, off the floor of a car where you had to kneel down and stick your head into the car to reach the very front, is a situation that I never would have imagined even in my worst nightmares. The ride was down for the rest of the day, and it took over an hour to clean everything out of the car before we could start really sanitizing it.
• (#7) The Madman Ride Operator

  From Redditor /u/bionicvapourboy:

  The head ride operator and guy that taught us all how to operate each ride was a madman. I saw him ride the swinging ship by standing in the center and holding onto the mast decoration. He apparently hung from the Paratrooper ride while it was spinning around along with a litany of other sh*t like that.

  The guy smoked up while on the job. I remember seeing the train ride travel through his pot cloud once. How he managed to stay employed at the park for so long, I'll never know. That being said, he was cool as hell.
• (#8) Stuck After Dark In The Deserted Park

  From Redditor /u/wired89:

  I was working security at a theme park when I was 18. One evening one of the roller coasters that was stopped in the station got rear-ended by another. There were some injuries, nothing severe, thankfully. I did, however, end up staying up all night, after the park had closed, sitting on the coaster to ensure no lookie-loos or news media tried to get access to the cars.

  It was dark and creepy, and I was 18 in a closed, deserted amusement park.
• (#9) The 6-Inch Splinter Wound

  From Redditor /u/whosline07:

  I worked at a wooden roller coaster with an enclosed double helix at the end (anyone who knows roller coasters probably knows which one I'm talking about). A guy came back with a splinter spearing his hand between his thumb and forefinger that was a good 6 inches long and about an inch across. He calmly walked up to the person on the floor clutching his hand, dripping blood all over, and asked if we could call first aid. He was a pretty tall guy, and by his own words, he was "trying to touch the side."

  Not really scary, but when I saw him walking across the station dripping blood, it was for a second.
• (#10) Bouncing Too Hard

  From Redditor /u/buffchickensmoothie:

  Not necessarily a theme park, but I used to work at a party place that was filled with moon bounce-like "rides."

  I've seen my fair share of knocked-out teeth and bloody noses.
• (#11) Something To Squawk About

  From Redditor /u/kirball:

  A family of Irish travelers tried to get on a ride with a big backpack, so the onloaders asked them to remove it.

  The ride guys noticed it was strangely heavy and felt like something was moving when they went to store it for them, so they looked inside.

  Chickens. They'd been sneaking chickens onto the rides.
• (#12) He Shouldn't Have Been Allowed To Ride - And Died

  From Redditor /u/kingkow:

  I've seen people fall out of log flumes, stick their hands in machines, and throw up everywhere, but I missed the worst by about half an hour.

  A man fell off of a roller coaster during a gravity hill and was hit by the same train he was riding in. He ended up dying almost immediately. I had been working on the ride up until about a half hour before when my shift ended. He was in the front seat, unfortunately, so all the passengers saw what happened, including the nephew he was riding with.

  It was one of the reasons I decided to stop working there at the end of the season after two summers. I couldn't get over the thought that a man died because people were lazy or dumb.

  He was a veteran who was missing a leg completely and the other up to the knee. The restraints came down over the legs with a lap belt. He never should have been let on the ride but was mistakenly allowed to by ride workers.

   
• (#13) A Head-Splitting Moment

  From a former Redditor:

  I was a water ride operator. Scariest incident on a personal level was when I was giving the pre-ride spiel, a boy wasn't listening, hopped in the water and slipped.

  He cut his head open pretty badly and we had to call an ambulance and shut down the ride. The worst part was his dad was still on the platform with me, and I had to send him down the slide to get to his son.
• (#14) A Poolside Gas Attack

  From Redditor /u/haffa30:

  A few years ago a smallish theme park in my state made some kind of mistake when chlorinating the wave pools and made a bunch of chlorine gas and 26 people had to be taken to the hospital.

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