Inferno Park

by JL Bryan

  “A scattering of things. Optical illusions, like a room built on a special slant so everything seemed tilted, water flowed uphill...the room where you looked like a giant if you stood on one side, and tiny if you stood on the other...we had a wax-museum room, not much there...a ‘ghost room’ with some old furniture, with little bottles and reeds in the eaves above it that would sometimes make sounds in the wind. A voodoo-juju kind of room. Not a lot of logic to it, but I think the tourists got their nickel’s worth.”

  “So that’s when you moved to Conch City,” Victoria said.

  “Oh, no. I was back on the road in the spring, but I had a new trick under my hat. I made these...” He gestured at the photo album.

  Victoria turned the page to a flier topped with the words “IS YOUR TOURIST ATTRACTION HAUNTED ENOUGH?” followed by pictures of Schopfer’s carnival haunted house and the Mystery House. It had Schopfer’s name and a Tennessee post-office box address in one corner.

  “Wherever we traveled, I’d watch for these little amusement parks and roadside tourist traps,” Schopfer said. “I’d find the owner and try to convince him he needed a scary walk-through, or that the one he had could be cheaply improved. I built little things at forgotten places—Chippewa Lake in Ohio, Wonder City in Indiana.” The scrapbook showed tourists lining up at similar small haunted-house attractions with names like SKELETON HOUSE and DEATH’S DOOR, which had a wide front door with a detailed painting of the Grim Reaper.

  “Now, the owner of Dervish Brothers—there never were any real Dervish brothers, you understand—was a man named E.B. Jennings, a real penny-snagger who had a sour look for everyone. He told me to stop building these attractions for other people, said it was a conflict of interest. At the time I had an offer to build and run a haunted railway ride in Kansas City, so I left the carnival and did that for a year...” The next page of pictures showed a miniature train full of frightened teenage riders chugging through a graveyard toward a mine tunnel. “Am I boring you kids yet?”

  “Not at all,” Victoria said. Her eyes had been drinking in the old pictures with obvious fascination.

  “I didn’t care to stay in one place very long,” Schopfer said. “I wanted to keep tinkering and expanding, and the owners always wanted to keep costs down. I moved wherever there was work. No, go on to the next page...”

  Victoria turned to a poster advertising a four-story cartoonish-medieval castle splashed with the words CASTLE TERROR across the front.

  “There,” he said. “That was the first really big one, though not as big on the inside as it looks from the boardwalk. Castle Terror, Atlantic City. 1961, 1962. Keep turning...you’ll see a few things there, Christmas Town outside of Brainerd, Minnesota...I built an indoor ride with a little sleigh on tracks that took you through Santa’s toy workshop, the reindeer stables, some snowmen and ice-skating penguins. We made the world’s largest snowglobe there, too. Well, we never checked whether that was true, but we sure told everyone it was the largest.” One photograph showed him standing inside a giant snowglobe, adjusting the cozy cottage scene surrounded by glowing Christmas trees. “Christmas Town lasted until the early eighties before they tore it down to make a shopping mall. I was proud of that little ride, though, considering the budget.”

  “I had no idea you’d made so many things,” Victoria said.

  “Oh, yes. I was the Johnny Appleseed of loud, gaudy tourist traps.” He showed them more pages of rides and walk-through amusements—a wrecked pirate ship full of rope ladders, nets, and slides; an Aztec temple boat ride; more haunted houses with names like LOST MANSION and MURDER MOTEL. “Now here comes the big one,” he said.

  Victoria turned the page. The first picture showed a structure of wooden pillars and cross-beams under construction, already several stories high. A sign in front read FUTURE SITE OF CONCH CITY COASTER!

  “Between jobs, I used to get in the car and just drive back along my own trail,” Schopfer said. “I liked seeing people lined up at the attractions I’d built. It must have been about ‘66 or ‘67 when I went back to Conch City. Now the place had blown up.” He gestured to a picture of Beachview Drive cluttered with neon-lit motels.

  “That’s starting to look like the town I know,” Carter said.

  “By the late sixties, Teddy Hanover had leased out several parcels of his land along the highway. They built motels on the beach side. On the other side, you had a candy store, an ice cream parlor, a few restaurants, a little nightclub called the Palm Grove. He’d torn down the Mystery House. He had an idea to put up a roller coaster in its place, to go with the other amusement rides he leased each summer. That was the first time I went back to a town and found my creation demolished without a trace, but it wouldn’t be the last.

  “Anyway, Hanover and I had some drinks at the Palm Grove and he told me all about it—we were both a good bit older by then, and I had years of experience under my belt. I pitched him on the idea of building a little attraction around the roller coaster entrance, just a few snack stands and games to grab more dollars from anyone who stopped to ride the coaster. He wanted a stage, too, for music, magicians, ventriloquists, or anyone else who didn’t charge much to perform.

  “The cowboy shows were popular then—Gunsmoke and Petticoat Junction and the rest—so we decided to build an Old West town at the base of the roller coaster. By the time the summer of 1968 rolled around, we had the roller coaster, the Triple-Z Saloon, the Cowpoke Theater, and games like Shoot-Em-Up Puppets. We had the cluster of rented attractions set up, too. Hanover put up billboards all along Gulf Coast Highway.

  “When you’re in this business, you dream of a patron like Teddy Hanover. Stars in his eyes, more interested in creating something new and ground-breaking than in making quick cash. That’s all most of ‘em ever cared about, the quick cash, but not him. Teddy and I just sparked off each other. We’d feed each other’s ideas and draw out elaborate plans on bar napkins. Those were good times.” Schopfer smiled a little, staring off into space. “Good days.”

  He didn’t speak for a while, as if lost in reverie. Carter and Victoria shared a tense look—now they were getting to the heart of things.

  “So that’s how Starland began,” Carter said, hoping to get him talking again.

  “Oh, yes. We didn’t call it ‘Starland’ yet. That first summer raked in so much money, he couldn’t wait to expand. By the fall, we’d drawn up all kinds of crazy plans. He wanted bigger, permanent rides, a full-scale amusement park. He sold off land farther down the highway to raise capital, and he leased out his rickety old ‘Conch City Resort’ building to a company that demolished it right away and built a new two-story motel, which they painted the brightest shade of pink you ever saw.”

  “The Fancy Flamingo Lodge?” Victoria asked.

  “That’s the one. You know your history. By the next summer—the summer of ‘69, wasn’t it?—we opened with games, food, music, and beer in Fool’s Gold, plus a permanent Ferris wheel and the prettiest merry-go-round we could find. That wasn’t enough for Teddy Hanover. He leased out some kiddie attractions, like a big slide and pony rides.” The pictures showed the park crammed full of families, with long lines waiting everywhere.

  “The traffic started to get bad that year, with people driving in from all over to see the new amusement park. There was no front-gate admission then, you paid for rides and games as you went, so it was just packed with people day and night. Hanover leased off more properties at higher prices. More motels went up along the beach side of the highway, and on the land side you had an ‘authentic’ Indian village, a snake exhibit, things like that cropping up.

  “He raked in all kinds of cash and put it right back into the amusement park. By 1970, we had a real circus-style midway with penny arcades and carnival games. On the west side, you had Fools’ Gold, the roller coaster, the merry-go-round, the kiddie rides. East of the midway, you had a swinging ship where Pirate Island was going to be. I built the first, one-story version of Dark Mansion. You
had the Spinning Rotor ride, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Scrambler. Permanent kiddie rides, too, like When Pigs Fly.”

  Victoria kept turning pages whenever he gave her a small nod, showing photographs of the evolving and expanding amusement park.

  One of them showed Theodore Hanover, more rotund than ever, on a bandstand located where the wishing well would later be, at the dead center of the park, surrounded by a dense crowd of tourists, backed by a three-piece band. He spoke into a microphone while dabbing at his bulbous chin with a handkerchief and making a sweeping gesture with his other hand.

  It was one of the first color photographs in the album, which made it clear that the businessman’s round-brimmed hat was white with red candy stripes. He also wore a white suit with matching red pinstripes, a red bow tie, and a red handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket.

  Carter and Victoria looked at each other, startled, and Carter felt a chill along the back of his neck.

  “That’s Theodore Hanover, right?” Victoria pointed at the picture and looked at Schopfer for confirmation.

  “That’s him. The first day he wore that silly get-up. That would have been the Fourth of July, 1970. He had fireworks at the park, a country singer from Nashville playing the Fool’s Gold stage—Townes Van Zandt, I think.”

  “And Mr. Hanover kept dressing like that?” Victoria asked, looking at Carter.

  “He wore the broad-brimmed hats long after they went out of fashion, probably because he was bald as an egg up there.”

  “His son wears a toupee,” Carter said.

  “Is that what the little snot’s calling that dead possum on his scalp?” Schopfer asked.

  “I’m really interested in this outfit he’s wearing.” Victoria tapped the picture.

  “He brought it out on special occasions—opening day in the spring, Memorial Day, the Fourth...He had a black and orange version for ‘Scareland’ in October, when we made all of Starland haunted for a a few weeks, just before closing down for the year. By that time, he’d lost interest in the real estate business and the motel business and considered himself a showman. He focused all his time and money on the park.”

  “Did anyone else ever wear that outfit?” Carter asked.

  “I don’t think anyone else ever dared to dress that way, no,” Schopfer said. “Possibly some of the game operators down on the midway.”

  They flipped through pages of color pictures showing rides and attractions under construction—the Funtime Firehouse, the Storybook Maze, the big alien-brained scientist, the log ride.

  “His philosophy was to add one or two big attractions every year,” Schopfer told them. “After Disney World opened in 1971, Hanover figured he could build something just as big. We went down and rode Space Mountain in 1975, and that’s when he started talking about building ‘the big one,’ a great big monster of a ride folks could never forget, one they’d just have to write home about.”

  “Inferno Mountain?” Carter asked.

  “That’s the one,” Schopfer said. “He wanted his own enclosed dark-ride coaster, which was about the most expensive thing he could have decided to build. He’d just sunk a bundle into Jungle Land and the bumper boats, but he was determined to catch up with Disney World. ‘If Disney’s taking them way up, then I’ll take ‘em way down,’ he said. He wanted to do an underground, journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth roller coaster, with mines and caves and lava. I don’t want to tell you what that would have cost, but it was out of his price range. He first settled for a roller-coaster-inside-a-volcano idea, but then he wanted more. He wanted the volcano to be the doorway to Hell itself.”

  Victoria turned the page to see a picture of Hanover and Schopfer—both with heavy sideburns now—studying a scale model of the ride on a table. Half the volcano was sliced away to reveal a tangle of curving, twisting tracks inside. Both the men frowned as they looked it over.

  “We had nothing but trouble with Inferno Mountain,” Schopfer said. “Design problems, engineering problems, and later some construction injuries. Unluckiest ride I’ve ever built. We broke ground the day after Halloween in 1975, the instant the park closed for the year, but it wasn’t ready when we opened in 1976. We kept hammering away at it all summer. One little thing after another went wrong, like we had a gremlin infestation. The ride still wasn’t ready for opening day in ‘77. The thing was a black hole of time and money, and about this time I felt I was no longer welcome in the Hanover household.”

  “Why not?” Victoria asked.

  “His wife thought I was bankrupting them,” Schopfer said. “His children—adults by then—they agreed with her. Lots of people got rich off tourism in Conch City in those days, but the Hanover family felt he was blowing all their money on the amusement park. They blamed me for encouraging him.

  “About then they decided to re-route the Gulf Coast Highway away from the beach, because it was bumper-to-bumper traffic through Conch City from spring break to Labor Day. Hanover loved it—that was his fishing stream, stocked so heavily the fish could barely swim. They poured into the attractions and motels along the strip, and most of that was located on land he owned.

  “So he panicked and bought up all the land between Starland and Northcross Road, which he figured would be expanded and turned into the new U.S. highway. The road along the beach would just become Beachview Drive, a horseshoe spur off the new highway route, and after that a million tourists would blow right pass Conch City beach every summer. If the tourists happened to turn their heads, they might notice the high rides of Starland, but that was about all. Now most of the fish were going to cruise right past his net without even tapping their brakes.

  “It turns out, though, that the land values had shot way up since he first bought his land in the late forties, early fifties, and interest rates were high. He had to borrow against his existing beachfront parcels to buy hundreds of acres of scrub brush. I didn’t know all this at the time, but he took on a crushing load of debt, and his family blamed me for it.

  “Anyway, we managed to open Inferno Mountain in October 1977, just in time for the ‘Scareland’ fun. We’d renovated and expanded the Dark Mansion, with a souvenir shop and ‘Haunted Alley’ games and food to help recoup some of the cost. It was a fantastic opening, and everybody seemed to love the ride. It won some awards, you know.”

  “We read about that,” Victoria said. “Congratulations.”

  “Long time ago now. We had big plans for that land. First idea was to expand Space City northward, with a shiny new high-speed steel coaster. We talked about all kinds of things, but then Teddy had his first heart attack early in 1979.

  “After that, his family took over, and they opposed any new expansion, any new attractions. They were ready to sit back and let the money come in for once, and their focus was on getting rid of that new land and the debt that came with it.”

  “That left me without a job, because we already had full-time maintenance people. My job was always design and development, and suddenly there was nothing to design and develop except the advertising. I suppose I stayed on until sometime in 1981, but the family pretty well pressured me out of town. And that was that. I never worked there again, and the park remained forever frozen in 1979 until the day it died.”

  “I was there,” Carter said.

  “Were you? It must have been awful.”

  “It was. It ruined everything, too. The whole town.”

  “I know.” Schopfer limped through the last few pages of his scrapbook, showing them a “Gorilla Golf” course in Biloxi, Mississippi and a glow-in-the-dark “Creature Feature” bowling alley in Guerneville, California, with each lane themed after Dracula, the Mummy, or another classic horror monster.

  “Work slowed down by the nineties,” Schopfer said, frowning now, the wrinkles on his eighty-year-old face standing out in sharp relief. “People left the highways for the interstates, and they took the interstates straight to Orlando, walled in the whole way so they can’t even see what else lies along the
road.”

  The room grew quiet for a minute. Carter felt like he’d just gone on a ride through a very obscure nook of history.

  “Does that answer your questions?” Schopfer asked. “I believe I may have rambled a bit.”

  “When you were building Starland, did anything unusual happen?” Victoria asked. “You said Inferno Park was a cursed ride.”

  “Cursed construction,” he said. “Never had one problem with it after opening day. The construction crew thought it was cursed, but later on, the maintenance crew thought it was eerie how little work it needed.”

  “Did anything else strange ever happen at Inferno Mountain?” Victoria asked, which instantly stirred bad memories for Carter.

  “What are you trying to ask me here, young lady?”

  “Anything supernatural,” Carter said. “Did anything supernatural ever happen?”

  Schopfer’s sunken, pale eyes looked at him for a long moment, then closed behind his wrinkled lids. He took a deep breath, his mouth trembling.

  “You know,” he said, “When I would build these things, I could start to imagine all the people that would pass through them, all the visitors over the years—millions and millions of them, with the amusement park. Each one of them would be stepping out of their regular lives, out to have a little fun, and maybe each one brings a little bit of extra happiness back home with them. Multiply that by millions, and you’ve got waves of light flowing out from Starland into the world all season long. Like a big lighthouse, or a radio tower, broadcasting these waves of happy feelings.

  “People visited these amusements with family and friends, so it’s a place for creating happy memories between people, a little connection between them. Up Route 319, north of Tallahassee, I built a giant catfish in front of a place called Uncle Fred’s Seafood Shack. It was twenty feet from whiskers to tail, and its eye rolled back and forth, and in the early days it waved a fin at oncoming traffic. You couldn’t miss it if you were heading into Tallahassee from the northeast.

  “I sat out there one day and watched families pull off the highway for a quick picture with that big ridiculous fish. It must have been ten or fifteen families I saw do it in a single day. Just a goofy memory, a happy shared moment among them. That’s what I was creating, ultimately, whether it was a haunted house or a roller coaster. That moment.” His eyes opened, looking at Carter. “Is that supernatural enough for you?”