Phantasmagoria (amusement ride)

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[edit] Phantasmagoria, 1974 to current

The Phantasmagoria is a (literally) deteriorating haunted house ride. The two-person track cars that carry the riders were made by Bell's, but the ride itself, including psychedelic tunnels and a mannequin freak show, was designed by the legendary Bill Tracy. The Phantasmagoria was beautifully chronicled on Davis' site in 1999.

According to Davis' history of the ride, "In 1971 or ’72, Bob and his father decided that a dark attraction was needed at the park so they headed off to the East Coast to do some research. What they liked most were the gory attractions built by Freddie Mahanon and Bill Tracy. Although New Jersey had some fantastic walkthroughs, complete with attendants haunting the insides, they thought that is was a bit too risky for them. They decided on a Tracy dark ride, but what to name it? Bob’s dad was looking for just the right name...something dealing with gore and phantasms. Bob blended the two words together and came up with the name Phantasmagoria, finding a word that described the dark ride experience perfectly."

While many of today's haunted house rides are cute and fuzzy, the Tracy ride could please even hardcore horror film fans with its lack of restraint concerning gore. It was certainly not G-rated. In one portion of the ride there was once a naked woman to tantalize the male riders. However, when the bare bottomed vixen spun around, she revealed that the front half of her body had been skinned down to muscle and bone.

The ride is dark, but not without very humorous novelties. A waterfall pouring over the track threatened to drench the riders, but would shut off as the car passed underneath. In one pitch black room, the riders are teased by nothingness, but startled when a bus's horn blares and headlights reveal the front end of an actual bus, driven by a rotting corpse. A classic sticker advertising the Phantasmagoria.

One of the most noticeable changes since the ride opened is the outside portion. About halfway through the ride, when the rider was on the second floor of the haunted house, the car popped through a door and traveled along a balcony above the queue area outside, swiftly dipped to the first floor, then glided back up to the second floor. The rollercoaster-like dip has since been removed, but the car still comes outside for the entire queue area to see. Today, this portion of the ride seems superfluous without the dip, but has probably remained intact in order to reduce frisky teenagers' alone time.

The Phantasmagoria experience was lovingly depicted by blogger Kirk Demarais in his 2002 Flip web toon Phantasmagoria, in which a boy coyly approaches the spooky ride with a flashlight in hand, hoping to lessen the terror of the spooks within by exposing the mechanisms of the trickery. The boy loses his flashlight, though, and soon finds real cause for terror when he leaves the safety of his cart and ventures into the black abyss.