by Cary McNeal
FACT 540 On August 22, 1999, a twelve-year-old boy was killed after plummeting two hundred feet from the Drop Zone Stunt Tower at the Great America park in Santa Clara, California.
FACT 541 The next day, a twenty-year-old man fell to his death after partially removing a safety harness on the Shockwave roller coaster at Kings Dominion park in Virginia. Too bad they don’t make a stupidity harness.
FACT 542 An Arkansas woman drowned in March 1999 when her raft capsized on the Roaring Rapids ride at Six Flags Over Texas. Ten other riders were injured.
FACT 543 In 2004, an overweight man with cerebral palsy was killed after being thrown from the Ride of Steel coaster at Six Flags New England in Springfield, Massachusetts.
FACT 544 In June 1999, a Brooklyn teenager died on Coney Island’s Super Himalaya after her car decoupled and she was thrown from the ride.
FACT 545 In September 2013, thirteen people were injured at a carnival in Norwalk, Connecticut, when a swing ride stopped suddenly, causing suspended riders to crash into each other and the ride’s center support column.
FACT 546 In 2000, a four-year-old boy fell out of the Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin ride at Disneyland and was run over by the car behind him. The child suffered permanent brain damage and died in 2009 at age thirteen.
FACT 547 In 1995, a woman filed suit against Disney, claiming she suffered a brain hemorrhage due to “violent shaking, jolting, and jouncing” on the Indiana Jones Adventure ride at Disneyland. Her lawyer obtained Disney records indicating scores of injuries on the same ride.
FACT 548 Rosy Esparza, fifty-two, died on July 19, 2013, after being “apparently ejected” and falling seventy-five feet from the Texas Giant roller coaster at Six Flags Over Texas.
FACT 549 Esparza’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Six Flags on September 10, 2013, claiming that the park “should have known the dangers of putting patrons on coasters with only lap bars and no seat belts or harnesses.”
FACT 550 The Esparza suit also asserts that, following the accident, inspections performed showed that “various parts of the security systems on the ride were experiencing inconsistencies and intermittent failures.” Ya think?!
FACT 551 In 2007, a thirteen-year-old girl had both her feet severed on the Superman Tower of Power at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom when the ride’s cabling snapped and tore through her legs.
FACT 552 In 2011, a double-amputee Iraq war veteran fell to his death from the Darien Lake Theme Park’s Ride of Steel roller coaster in Genesee County, New York.
FACT 553 In April 2005, a teenager and her eleven-year-old cousin were trapped nine hundred feet above the Las Vegas strip for more than an hour when the Insanity ride suddenly shut down due to high winds.
FACT 554 A four-year-old boy died in 2005 after passing out on Mission: Space, a turbulent motion-simulator ride at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Future World in Orlando, Florida.
FACT 555 In April 2006, a forty-nine-year-old woman also became ill after riding Mission: Space, and died the following day.
FACT 556 A mother and her eight-year-old daughter were killed in August 1999 on the Wild Wonder coaster on the Ocean City, New Jersey, boardwalk after a malfunction sent their car hurtling backward down a hill, ejecting them.
FACT 557 The ride’s emergency safety mechanism, an anti-rollback device similar to an emergency brake, failed to prevent the accident.
FACT 558 Two girls were killed and seven people were injured at International Park in Rosario, Argentina, when a gondola detached from a Ferris wheel and plummeted eighty feet to the ground.
FACT 559 Witnesses said that the car fell from the highest point of the Ferris wheel and struck the two girls on the ground, killing them.
FACT 560 A grandmother was killed at Six Flags New Orleans in July 2003, when the Joker’s Jukebox ride suddenly started as she was strapping in her grandson, striking her in the head.
FACT 561 A stalled swing ride at Carowinds theme park in North Carolina left sixty-four passengers hanging hundreds of feet above the ground for over an hour in July 2013. The ride had stalled the previous year as well, when it left twenty-five riders trapped in the air for almost three hours.
FACT 562 A similar ride at Knott’s Berry Farm in California stalled twice in September 2013, stranding passengers in the air for a combined seven hours.
FACT 563 After the Fujin Raijin II roller coaster at Expoland near Osaka, Japan, derailed in 2007, inspectors discovered that the coaster’s axles were fifteen years old. The accident injured nineteen people and killed one, making it Japan’s worst amusement park disaster to date.
FACT 564 Seven people were injured at Cedar Point theme park in Ohio in July 2013, when a boat on the Shoot the Rapids ride slid backward down an incline and flipped over.
FACT 565 At a Bellaire, Ohio, carnival in June 2013, an eight-year-old boy was electrocuted and hospitalized in critical condition when a live wire came loose and made contact with a metal ride railing on which he was leaning.
FACT 566 A six-year-old girl suffered collapsed lungs, a broken rib, and a broken arm after she became pinned between a boat and boarding dock at the It’s a Small World ride at Walt Disney World in 1994. She probably jumped out of the boat early to get away from that god-awful song.
FACT 567 No heart defibrillators were available in the area when a forty-four-year-old man suffered a fatal heart attack on Disney World’s Expedition Everest roller coaster in 2007.
FACT 568 Disney World’s only fatal monorail accident occurred in 2009, when a track change malfunction caused two monorails to collide, killing one twenty-one-year-old driver.
FACT 569 A woman visiting Knott’s Berry Farm in California in 2001 died when she fell more than a hundred feet from the Perilous Plunge water ride. Authorities said she “somehow got out . . . or came out of the ride” and landed in a body of water at the base of the attraction.
FACT 570 In 1978, at California’s Six Flags Magic Mountain, a gondola plunged from its cable fifty feet to the ground, killing a man inside the car and injuring his wife. The man was reportedly rocking the car before it fell.
FACT 571 When the Demon coaster at Six Flags Great America in Illinois malfunctioned in April 1998, twenty-three people were stuck upside down for nearly three hours.
FACT 572 At the Battersea Park Fun Fair in England in 1972, a cable snapped on the Big Dipper coaster, causing a chain of cars to roll backward down a hill. Five children were killed and thirteen others were injured in one of the worst amusement park accidents in history.
FACT 573 A six-year-old boy died on the Puff the Little Fire Dragon ride at Utah’s Lagoon Amusement Park in 1989 when he slipped out of his safety restraint, fell from the ride, and was struck by another car.
FACT 574 An eight-year-old girl lost part of her scalp at the now-defunct Bonkers 19 amusement park in Massachusetts when her hair became tangled in the motor behind her seat on the Mini Himalaya ride. Bonkers 19, scalp 0.
FACT 575 At Kings Island amusement park near Cincinnati, Ohio, a woman fell to her death from the Flight Commander ride on June 11, 1991. In an unrelated incident on the same day, two men were electrocuted in a pond inside the park.
I DON’T MIND ISOLATION, but then I’m old and crusty and I talk to myself. Normal people don’t like being separated from others for very long. That’s why horror movies are often about someone trapped in an isolated place and why unruly prison inmates are tossed into solitary confinement.
Like it or not, we need other people. If you don’t believe me, take a sabbatical and move to one of the places listed in this chapter for a year or so; see how that goes. Don’t forget to send me a postcard. That is, if the place even has mail service. Or paper.
FACT 576 The Japa
nese island of Okunoshima, also called “Rabbit Island” after the many furry inhabitants who live there, was once home to Japan’s poison gas factories. The rabbits are descendants of ones used for chemical testing during World War II.
FACT 577 The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been abandoned since the 1980s due to massive coal mine fires that have burned steadily since 1962, producing gas leaks, dangerous temperatures, and giant sinkholes.
FACT 578 The underground fires at Centralia still have enough fuel to burn for another 250 years.
FACT 579 North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean is home to the Sentinelese, the last known Stone Age tribe on earth. The tribe has had little contact with the outside world, and they are hostile to outsiders. North Sentinel sounds a lot like Maine.
FACT 580 In 2006, the Sentinelese killed two fishermen whose boat drifted onto their shores and fired arrows at the helicopter sent to retrieve the bodies.
FACT 581 Reaching Belize’s remote cave Actun Tunichil Muknal requires travelers to walk for an hour through the jungle before swimming and wading another kilometer up the cave river. Inside the cave are skeletons of ritual sacrifices made by the Maya to their gods more than a thousand years ago.
FACT 582 Some of those sacrificed in Actun Tunichil Muknal were children, including the skeleton of a teenage girl known as the Crystal Maiden because her calcified bones sparkle in the light.
FACT 583 Jazirat al Maqlab, or Telegraph Island, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, was a telegraph outpost used between 1864 and 1869 to facilitate communications between England and India. The location was so remote and desolate that it reportedly drove those stationed there to lose their minds.
FACT 584 The world’s farthest point from sea, located more than 1,553 miles (2,500 kilometers) from any ocean, is the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility in northern China.
FACT 585 At 1,553 miles (2,500 kilometers) from any land mass, Point Nemo in the South Pacific is the world’s farthest point from land.
FACT 586 The Southern Pole of Inaccessibility is the point in Antarctica that is farthest from the Southern Ocean—and thus the most difficult to reach. Those who do reach the station will find only a bust of Vladimir Lenin atop a research station buried under snow.
FACT 587 Growing in the middle of the Sahara Desert with no other trees within 250 miles, Niger’s Tree of Ténéré was considered the most isolated tree in the world until a truck struck and killed it in 1973.
FACT 588 The Old Forge pub in Scotland holds the Guinness World Record for the most remote bar in Britain. To reach it you’ll need to walk twelve miles over land, though we recommend taking a boat, as the water route is much quicker.
FACT 589 The most isolated inhabited island in the world is Tristan da Cunha, an active volcano located in the middle of the south Atlantic Ocean 1,242 miles (2,000 kilometers) from the nearest land. Tristan da Cunha is Portuguese for “Where the fuck are we?!”
FACT 590 Tristan da Cunha finally got a postal code in 2005, but its approximately 270 residents see a mail ship only once a year.
FACT 591 Between 1880 and 1929, the Australian government kept caches of supplies on the remote Antipodes Islands for shipwreck survivors.
FACT 592 There are more than two hundred dead bodies on Mount Everest. The cold preserves the bodies from decay, and climbers use the more famous victims as landmarks.
FACT 593 The island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific is so small and remote that the biggest building is a three-story administration building.
FACT 594 In Supai, Arizona, located in the Grand Canyon, mail is still delivered by mule train.
FACT 595 Scientists use the dry, dusty Atacama Desert in Chile to practice researching on Mars.
FACT 596 The Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean are a six-day boat ride from Madagascar, and their only inhabitants are French scientists.
FACT 597 At a daunting 24,836 feet in elevation, Bhutan’s Gangkhar Puensum—or “three mountain siblings”—is the world’s highest unclimbed mountain.
FACT 598 Cold and remote, the northern Siberian taiga stretches over sixty-two thousand square miles, a quarter of Russia’s territory. There are no known inhabitants in these rarely explored woodlands, which are similar in density to Amazonian jungles.
FACT 599 Siberia’s northern forests are so remote that one family, the Lykovs, were lost in it for forty-two years until their chance discovery in 1978 by geologists.
FACT 600 The Amazon rain forests of Brazil are so vast that in 2011, the Brazilian government discovered a never-before-contacted tribe living deep in the jungle near Peru.
FACT 601 Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, is one of the most remote inhabited places in the Western Hemisphere. For nine months of the year the town is only accessible by helicopter.
FACT 602 The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station gets six months of round-the-clock sunlight and six months of total darkness.
FACT 603 Once one of the most densely populated places on earth, Japan’s Hashima Island has been completely uninhabited since undersea coal-mining operations were ceased there in 1974.
FACT 604 Hashima Island was featured in a 2009 episode of the History Channel’s show Life After People as an example of the rapid decay of concrete buildings only thirty-five years after abandonment.
FACT 605 Access to Hashima is strictly limited today due to the danger of crumbling ruins on the island.
FACT 606 During World War II, mining work on Hashima was done by forced Korean laborers and Chinese prisoners of war.
BIGFOOT. THE LOCH NESS monster. Chupacabra. Mothman. They and their kind are called cryptids, which the field of study known as cryptozoology defines as creatures or plants whose existence has been suggested but not proven by the scientific community.
Some chalk them up to folklore and myth, while others want to believe. Me, I lean toward skepticism, although the more I read about these alleged creatures, the more I wonder if they might exist after all. The chupacabra has already been proven real—why not Bigfoot or Nessie?
If they are real, I’ll tell you this: I don’t want to bump into any of them on a dark night.
FACT 607 One argument that creatures can exist on earth without our knowledge comes from people such as cryptozoolist and author Loren Coleman, who points out that we have continued to discover new species since Baron Georges Cuvier, considered the father of paleontology, famously declared in 1812 that the world had “little hope of discovering new species.” Since then, Coleman says, we have discovered the American tapir (1819), the giant squid (1870s), the okapi (1901), the Komodo dragon (1912), the kouprey (1937), and the ultimate “living fossil,” the coelacanth (1938).
FACT 608 Supporters of the existence of cryptids also cite the case of Tibet’s giant panda, which existed for more than seventy-five years between its discovery and first live capture.
FACT 609 East African natives spoke of a monster ape for decades before Belgian army captain Friedrich Robert von Beringe killed two mountain gorillas on Mount Sabyinyo in 1902, proving the legend true.
FACT 610 Native American folklore containing stories of a Bigfoot-like creature predates the arrival of the Europeans in North America.
FACT 611 Sasquatch comes from the Native American Salish word se’sxac, meaning “wild men.”
FACT 612 Bigfoot-like creatures have been sighted all over the world, and under various names, including Sasquatch (United States), yeti (Himalayas), yowie (Australia), baramanu (Pakistan), yeren (China), and hibagon (Japan).
FACT 613 Fossil evidence shows that a Bigfoot-like creature called Gigantopithecus did exist one to nine million years ago and is most likely the ancestor of today’s Sasquatches, if they exist.
FACT 614 The clo
sest living relative of Gigantopithecus is the orangutan, which shares some of the characteristics that eyewitnesses attribute to Sasquatch: long, reddish-brown hair, intelligence, and curiosity about human behavior.
FACT 615 The modern legend of the Loch Ness monster was born when a sighting made local news on May 2, 1933, but accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland’s Loch Ness date back twenty-five hundred years.
FACT 616 Loch Ness monster scholars find numerous references to “Nessie” in Scottish history, dating back to around 500 C.E. when local Picts carved a strange aquatic creature into standing stones near Loch Ness.