From Disneyland to Knott's Berry Farm to Six Flags to Water World, water parks, theme parks, and carnivals have been a source of joy for many people for many years.
But theme parks can be incredibly expensive to operate, and disasters like hurricanes — and nuclear meltdowns — can also cause parks to shut down far before their time.
If you like things just a ~little~ (OK, a lot) bit creepy...check out these terrifying abandoned theme parks.
1.I got to start with one of the most famous: the abandoned amusement park in Pripyat, Ukraine.
The city was evacuated during the Chernobyl disaster, and it has been abandoned ever since. The park had been set to open just a few days after the disaster.
Here you can check out what the bumper cars looked like in 1990.
The ghost city is open to the public and safe to visit for a short amount of time, provided you follow safety instructions, so you can check out the park if you'd like!
2.This one doesn't even exist anymore, but it's one of my favorites: Nara Dreamland in Japan.
It was basically a knockoff Disneyland that was open from 1961–2006 before it closed due to low attendance.
It was torn down in 2016, but before that, thrill-seekers loved to explore the creepy site — especially the wooden coaster.
4. You may now know this, but Disney actually has a couple of shut-down parks/areas as well. Perhaps the most famous is River Country, which was a part of Walt Disney World.
One child contracted a brain-eating amoeba from the water. Two more drowned. However, the park remained open until a bit before 9/11, when it closed for maintenance. After the attack, the US saw a decline in tourism, and it never re-opened.
You might not imagine a theme park based on the Bible would do very well, but after it opened in the '50s, it would sometimes have over 40,000 visitors a year. It started to decline in the '80s and eventually was sold and poorly maintained, with vandalism taking a large toll.
It re-opened in 2014 (though not to its former level), but you can still enjoy the photos from the time when the park was completely abandoned.
7.One of the more recent abandoned parks is the Hard Rock Park (yes, affiliated with Hard Rock Cafe), which later became Freestyle Music Park.
The park was only open for two seasons — one as Hard Rock Park, and one as Freestyle Music Park — but failed to make enough money to be sustainable, in part due to the recession.
The park is in VERY poor shape, and the rides have been sold, and as a good amount is indoors and very leaky and trash-ridden, I would not recommend going. There's also security patrolling.
However, you can check out a video here of people exploring!
The park was — obviously — themed around the knights of the Round Table. The main attraction was probably the roller coaster The Knightmare, which was demolished just last year.
Nature has largely claimed it since then, as well as a few fires. The county's parks department now plans to change the land into a public park and wetlands.
This one's got a bit of an odd story: Owner Norbert Witte left with his family to Peru, taking some of the rides with them — but they returned to Germany in 2003, smuggling 400 pounds of cocaine in one of their rides.
... And that's all for today, folks! There are plenty more, but I didn't want to scare you too much — let me know in the comments if I missed any of your faves or if you want to see more!
