Theme Park Rides That Had To Be Shut Down

Nothing gets the old adrenaline pumping quite like a death-defying theme park ride! The promise of highspeed flips, loops, and drops attracts millions of people to test their courage on these rides every year. But despite the warning signs and super-snug lap bars, not all of them are as safe as they appear. Like a Russian ride that broke and had its passengers suspended by a thread! Or a crazy catapult that nearly crushed its riders!

Want to find out more? Then, strap in tight and secure any loose items about your person, as we take a look at some theme park rides that had to be shut down.

Son of Beast

Among the roller coaster enthusiasts of the world, this colossal wooden ride called Son of Beast holds a legendary status. Part of King’s Island amusement park in Ohio, it was built as a sequel to their previous wooden coaster, The Beast! But like any good son, this new beast exceeded its predecessor in every way.

©WillMcC via Wikimedia Commons

It was the world’s fastest and tallest wooden roller coaster, whipping riders around at a staggering 78 mph from peaks as high as 218 ft! And to add the cherry on top, it was also the only wooden coaster with a loop when it opened back in the year 2000. But being made out of wood didn’t make for the smoothest journey.

Structural issues gave Son of Beast a reputation for being a jerky and rough ride, although that made some sadists love it all the more! But it got a little too rough back in 2006. As a train of riders looped around the "rose bowl" section, their train suddenly bucked as if it had hit a huge pothole!

At those high speeds, the damage was serious, and 27 riders were sent to hospital with severe neck and chest injuries. Inspectors later revealed a wooden support beam underneath that section had cracked and splintered, and the ride was shut down.

It was repaired and reopened in 2009, but then another rider suffered an injury on board! Though this time it was a head trauma caused by the coaster’s violent shaking! Even though a thorough investigation found no irregularities, its bumpy past and rough reputation was enough to see it shut down indefinitely that year. The wonderful wooden structure was later demolished in 2012, proving that what goes up must eventually come crashing down!

Dragon Challenge

When Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, opened a dragon themed ride in 1999, roller coaster fanatics were left awestruck. Originally called Dueling Dragons, the ride consisted of a pair of inverted, intertwined roller coasters that chased each other around like two dragons fighting in the air! At one point, the two trains even inverted riders and looped them round just 18 inches apart! After that, I bet all those riders were left feeling like they’d really conquered a dragon.

It was later renamed The Dragon Challenge and added to the park’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter section. But, shortly after the move, the dragon riders started misbehaving! In 2011, a 52-year-old man was on the ride when, during that iconic loop, something flung out from the other car and struck him across the face. The damage was so bad that his entire eye had to be removed!

Concerned that riders weren’t taking the many no loose objects signs seriously, operators began setting the two trains off at different times to avoid any similar incidents. But this would turn out to be a killing blow for the dragons! Without the dueling feature, the ride’s popularity dwindled, and by 2017 it was shut down to make way for something more magical and less dangerous!

Green Lantern: First Flight

The 2011 Green Lantern film was universally panned when it hit the silver screen. So, you might not be surprised to learn that the Green Lantern: First Flight roller coaster was just as disappointing! When it opened in Six Flags Magic Mountain back in 2011, it was hyped up as the world’s first completely vertical-pattern, zig-zagged roller coaster with 360 degree spinning seats! But this design made it look more like a giant pinball machine than a ride.

Nevertheless, Six Flag’s fans lined up to try it out, and boy did most of them regret it. Riders were jerked and jostled around the short, 825 ft track at top speeds of just 37 miles per hour. It wrenched them round corners and spun them awkwardly into sudden angles. So instead of feeling like they were flying superheroes, it shook them around like fish in a big green bag!

Riders quickly took to the internet to complain about how painful the experience was, while others berated it for being short and boring! Fortunately, Six Flags’ fans didn’t have to suffer much longer. In 2017, the ride closed unexpectedly for unknown reasons. Some speculated it was because of bad reviews and injuries, while others believed it was down to its waning popularity.

Whatever the reason, it stood vacant for two years before the park announced it was shutting the ride down for good in 2019. That means this hugely hyped ride operated for an embarrassingly short 6 years! Just like the film, this roller coaster turned out to be one huge flop!

OPA At Mt. Olympus

Unfortunately, the unsettling design of the OPA! roller coaster cars at Mt. Olympus park in Wisconsin wasn’t the worst thing about them. The colorful indoor coaster was only 43 ft high, and with a top speed of just 29 mph, riders didn’t go wild as much as they went mild. Though that didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.

Back in 2014, Anthony Theisen was accompanying his grandkids on the ride when his safety bar suddenly failed. As the ride hit a corner, Anthony was flung out like a ragdoll and fell 17 ft onto the hard concrete below. That’s like falling out of a 1.5 story window. Anthony was placed into a medically induced coma for a month due to the severity of his injuries, but he miraculously survived! The roller coaster, on the other hand, didn’t.

Safety inspector began testing the ride, using sandbags to represent the riders weights. But they all watched in disbelief as the lap bar suddenly popped open at the point in the track where Anthony had been thrown. There was no doubt that Mt. Olympus had failed to properly maintain the coaster, forcing them to permanently close the ride that same year.

Catapults

Slingshot and catapult rides have become incredibly popular with adrenaline junkies in recent years - and it’s not hard to see why! Riders are securely strapped into a single steel capsule, which is attached to industrial strength spring cables pinned to the tops of two huge towers. The cables are then gradually taughtened as the capsule remains strapped to the launch pad. Then, with the push of a button, the capsule is released!

Like a stone from a slingshot, riders can be catapulted up to 450 feet in the air at breath-taking speeds of around 100 miles per hour. That’s one way to get rid of your girlfriend! But as fun as they look to people filming them from the ground, the g-force these rides produce can reach up to 5 G’s, which is enough to make some riders hilariously faint! If you want to delve into the effects of high-G forces on the human body, you might want to read our article about John Stapp versus G-Force.

But that’s not the worst thing that can happen on these rides. Back in 2015, Dru Larson was shooting a video of his 13-year-old son about to ride Wisconsin’s Mt. Olympus Catapult with a family friend. The ride was designed to hurl passengers 200 ft up into the air at 60 mph, but just moments before the ride attendants hit the launch button, something terrible happened:

Without warning the cable on one side of the ride snapped, smashing all that tension just inches away from the boy! These rides operate by applying around 40 tons of pressure through those cables. So, if that kid had been just a few more inches to his right, they’d have needed a spatula to get him off the ground. What an unbelievably lucky escape!

While state documents showed the ride had passed inspections a month before, Mt. Olympus had previously failed to show the proper maintenance documentation for the Catapult back in 2013. But if you check the clip again, you'll see the frayed cables on the side there. So, it looks like that paperwork might still have been missing! The ride was thankfully shut down and removed from the park just 2 days later, which probably saved future patrons from becoming pancakes!

Divo Ostrov's Raketa (Rocket)

The resplendent Russian city of Saint Petersburg is marveled for its architecture and history, but it’s got something else guaranteed to entertain its visitors! Located in the central Petrogradskiy District, the Divo Ostrov amusement park is a thrill-seeker’s dream come true. And at the center of it all spins this utter beast in the clip below.

Known simply as The Rocket, this high ride loads up 10 wannabe-cosmonauts onto a ground level gondola, which is attached to that giant arm by two cables at its front and back. The arm then gradually winds them up before spinning them round 200 ft in the air! But as they’re in flight, the gondola rapidly spins on its own axis, turning passengers upside down, and giving them a real taste of space travel.

But something terrible happened in 2010! On a fateful day, ten people had their lives left hanging by a thread, literally, after one of the Rocket’s cables snapped mid ride! It took rescue crews more than an hour to get all the riders down, but thankfully no-one reported any injuries.

An initial investigation revealed that the hot weather that day may have weakened the metal within the cables, causing them to break. But, surely, being an outdoor space, these rides should have been designed to handle high temperatures in the first place? Despite that disturbing revelation, the ride was only shut briefly for repairs before re-opening later that year.

The Smiler

When the world-record-breaking inverted roller coaster, The Smiler, was opened in Alton Towers in England, it really did have fans smiling in anticipation. With 14 inversions, it promised to flip riders upside down more than any other roller coaster on the planet.

©BenBowser via Wikimedia Commons

But all those smiles soon turned to screams after the shocking events of 2015. As a car full of riders looped around the track, they suddenly noticed an empty test car that was stuck in front of them! They screamed desperately for help, but it was already too late! They collided with such force that the metal of their car buckled, pinning the front row of passengers into their seats.

Rescue teams rushed to the site and spent hours trying to remove them from the wreckage. All 16 riders suffered some degree of injury, but two girls in the front row were so badly pinned that they each horrifically lost a leg! The ride was closed, and an in-depth investigation was set in motion. It was revealed that a fault had been detected on the ride earlier that day.

So, in line with procedure, the operators sent out an empty test car. However, the test car got stuck on a loop because of some high winds and didn’t clear the track. Without realizing what had happened, the operators overrode the safety warnings and released the next car full of passengers, sending it careering into the test car. And at those speeds, it was like watching a 90-mph car crash!

This operational oversight was so serious that Alton Towers parent company, Merlin Group, shut down three other rides it owned that operated similarly! Eventually, inadequate training and human error were blamed for the accident, and Merlin Group was forced to cough up millions of pounds in compensation.

But just 9 months later, the Smiler was unbelievably back in action! It just didn’t seem like a long enough time to have fixed all those issues, and Merlin Group was accused of putting profits before people. Nevertheless, the ride has operated without any further incidents since.

Dangerous Cannonball Loop Water Slide

Back in the 70’s and 80’s ‘health and safety’ was a lot more of a suggestion than it was a rule, as proven by the existence of Action Park. Often hilariously called Class Action Park for the number of injury lawsuits filed against it, it was widely considered to be the most dangerous amusement park in the world.

It opened in New Jersey back in 1978, and the rides they boasted were all utterly insane. Walking into the park, you first saw the mind-blowing Cannon Ball Loop.

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It was an enclosed tube slide which riders slid down, in pitch black, that flung them through a loop de loop before plunging them into the water. But the slide wasn’t properly padded, and so being whipped through this hard plastic shell at breakneck speed left many of its testers missing teeth!

Next to that was the Colorado River Ride, a truly demented version of a classic ‘lazy river ride’! Riders were given rubber rafts and mercilessly hurled against the ride’s sides, bashing their knees, feet, and hands as they were flushed down! And then there was Surf Hill! A large slide split into several lanes that, thanks to some seriously shonky engineering, saw riders catapulted into the air at the slightest bump!

As you can probably tell, the rides were so dangerous that no self-respecting insurance company would insure the park. So, Action Park CEO Eugene Mulvihill set up his own insurance company, and illegally insured it himself. And that is what we call fraud! Even so, the death-defying Cannonball Loop was open for a whole month before it was shut down after riders complained of broken noses and back injuries! But that was just the tip of the injury iceberg.

Action Park dubiously reported just 14 broken bones and 26 head injuries in its 18-year tenure, although the real total is believed to be much, much higher! But that’s not the worst part, because the park also claimed the lives of not one, not two, but 6 people before it was shut down in 1996. Sounds like this place wasn’t a water park as much as it was a watery grave!

The Perilous Plunge

Knott’s Berry Farm likes to market itself as California’s number 1 theme park, and I’m sure that would be true if it weren’t for the sheer number of serious accidents they’ve had! Since 1983, at least 16 people have been injured, some fatally, on the parks 40 roller coasters and family rides.

Although one accident on the well-loved Perilous Plunge water ride really put the ‘serious’ in ‘mysterious’! When it opened in 2000, the ride boasted a record breaking 115 ft, super steep plunge from the top, guaranteed to get rider’s hearts pumping and shirts soaking!

©Cliff via Wikimedia Commons

Despite the height, riders were only secured by a lap bar and a seat belt, which proved to be a problem for some of their larger guests. In 2001, a 300 lb rider somehow slipped out of these restraints and fell more than 100 ft into the shallow pool below.

Sadly, she didn’t survive, but when the boat returned to the station, her lap bar and seatbelt were somehow still locked! No one was able to figure out how the restraints could have failed until the coroner noted that the 50-inch seatbelt was 8 inches shorter than her abdomen. To fit in, she’d placed the seatbelt over her legs and consequentially slipped out as the boat began to plunge!

She clearly shouldn’t have been allowed to ride, and her family sued the park for damages. But after a short closure, the ride re-opened with new, four-point restraints, so that no guest, no matter their shape or size, could accidentally slip out ever again.

Das ist Verrückt: World's Tallest Waterslide

The word "Verrückt" means crazy or insane in German, which made it the perfect name for the world’s tallest waterslide! Built in Kansas City’s Schlitterbahn Park, the Verrückt had a chute slide that was a gargantuan 168 ft tall! From the top, it launched riders down a 17-story death-drop before hurling them over a 5-storey slope at speeds of up to 70 mph!

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That sounds insanely exhilarating! But, as you can imagine, engineering something this tall and slippery came with some serious bumps. So serious that during test runs, if the rafts were loaded with more than 1000 lbs, they flew off the slide entirely!

But instead of improving the ride, designers simply placed netting over most of it to keep riders from going airborne. You don't need to be an expert to conclude that this doesn’t sound safe at all! But Schlitterbahn had made some serious financial donations to the state of Kansas, and so, by law, it was allowed to make its own safety-inspections. Could that sound any more suspicious?

After roughly concluding that each raft had to weigh between 400 and 550 lbs to be safe, the ride was opened in 2014! But these shady safety practices sealed the fate of this fatal slide. In 2016, a 10-year-old boy perished on Verrückt when he was ejected up into the netting! Two women in the same raft were also gravely injured, and the police began a thorough investigation.

The combined weight of the three passengers reached a supposedly safe 545 lbs, but the 73 lb boy had been allowed to ride at the front! Experts believed this uneven weight distribution contributed to the raft going airborne over the second hump, something that rigorous testing should have spotted. The blatant safety violations of the ride saw it shut down and dismantled in 2016, and a swift change in law made it so the park couldn’t conduct safety self-inspections ever again!

The Human Trebuchet

A trebuchet is a kind of medieval catapult that was designed to hurl huge objects in a sling through the force of a counterweight. These were great for sieges, as their projectiles landed on and over city walls in unpredictable patterns. So, knowing all that, no one would ever be dumb enough to consider strapping a human into one of these, right? Wrong.

Back in the 1990’s, the Dangerous Sports Club in England built an enormous trebuchet on a Somerset estate with the sole purpose of launching people onto a distantly placed net. For just £40, which would be roughly $140 today, almost anyone could sign up to be haphazardly hurled 100 ft over the English countryside. And this was about as safe as it sounded!

One woman who tested it out, called Stella Young, did manage to hit the net, but then promptly bounced out of it, breaking her neck and her pelvis! But instead of shutting this death-trap down, they simply added a bigger net, and tucked people into a ball so they didn’t flail and bounce out as they landed.

As mentioned before, trebuchets are not precision instruments, and this became all too clear in 2002. A poor student called Kostydin Yankov who tried out this terrible trebuchet was flung so far-off target that he missed the net completely. And sadly, he didn’t survive. It was an accident just waiting to happen, and one which finally shut this idiotic ride down for good!

Student died at Dangerous Sports Club trebuchet

Fujin Raijin II

Expoland had been a popular theme park in Japan since it opened in 1972, and the amazing Fujin Raijin II was one of its most famous attractions! Built in 1992, this steel coaster strapped its riders in standing up, all before whipping them over more than half a mile of track at around 70 mph.

It was a huge success and operated without a single issue for 15 years. But in 2007, as the train was about to enter a circular section of the ride, the wheel axel of the second car suddenly broke, causing it to tip sideways! It traveled almost a thousand feet before the broken section hit a guardrail, slamming the train to a halt.

The event cost the life of a young woman, and 19 others were injured. After a thorough investigation, it was revealed that the car’s axels hadn’t been replaced in a shocking 15 years! Not only that, but the axels weren’t even part of the daily or monthly routine inspections.

But this unbelievable oversight ended up costing more than just one human life. The entire park closed while the investigation took place, and the ride was pulled down. Though when it eventually reopened in 2015, nobody came back. Expoland had lost the people’s trust, and just 2 short years later the park shut it gates forever.

German Park's Spinning Hate Symbols

A ride’s design usually falls into one of three categories: there’s the good, there’s the bad, and then there’s the downright wrong. And anyone who knows their history can see that Adlerflug, which roughly translates to Eagle’s Flight, in Tatzmania theme park in Löffingen, Germany, fits into that very last category.

It was naively designed in 2019, with each of the two head’s spinning arms designed to look like eagles. As they lifted up and rotated, riders would be able to loop about the skies as free as a bird! But from a distance, these eight spinning arms look like two spinning hate symbols, which are notorious in Germany for all the wrong reasons. So notorious, that displaying these anti-constitutional symbols is illegal across the country.

The mistake was innocent enough, and the park’s owner, Rüdiger Braun, apologized profusely for any offence caused. But instead of shutting the ride down completely, he got to work removing two of the arms from each head. Now when they spin, they look like two perfectly innocent pinwheels instead of a rotating hate crime!

I hope you were amazed at these theme park ride accidents and rides that had to be shut down. Thanks for reading!