By Shannine O’Neill
STEP BACK INTO the wild-wild-west with this abandoned theme park that has closed-down because of lawsuits and mistreatment of staff and safety concerns.
One image shows a thick pile of unclaimed tickets sitting on top of one of the machines, which a lucky player must have forgotten.
Another image shows the barren streets of the fake wild-west themed town with the general store and saloon left abandoned without its patrons.
Ben James (32) from Cambridge, England captured images of the abandoned Ghost Town in the Sky theme park in the Ghost Mountain Park in Maggie valley South Carolina, USA.
The site is a wild-west themed amusement park that was left abandoned in 2016.
The theme park sits atop the Buck Mountain, which has a top elevation of 4,650-feet high.
The park first opened in 1961 and quickly became one of the most popular attractions in North Carolina.
In its height of popularity, the theme park would welcome over 620K visitors per year and even hosted several big Western television stars in the 1960s, such as Laramie and Wagon Trail.
In its later years, the theme park started to decline under new management and a lack of maintenance.
Tales of constantly broken roller coasters and rides meant that fewer and fewer visitors were welcomed as the years went on.
By 2008, the visitor count went down from 620K to 340K.
At the end of the 2009 season, the theme park closed as the owners dealt with bankruptcy issues as there were complaints from employees that they weren’t getting paid.
As of 2023, the park is involved in an ongoing lawsuit to determine the fate and ownership of the park which will come to fruition in July 2023.
When Ben visited the abandoned theme park, he felt that the place felt creepy and surreal as the place would have been filled with laughter and constant joy over the years, but has now been left to rot until further notice.
Ben achieved over 3M views on his video of his exploration when he uploaded it to TikTok, with lots of viewers commenting how much the park meant to them growing up, with even one person commenting that they even had their honeymoon there.
“My TikTok video has over three-million views and so many people have commented saying they had their first date here or honeymoon or worked here and it was so sad to see,” he said.
“It felt surreal to be in a place that was so much laughter and fun for families now sitting eerily silent.
“The whole place was like something out of the last of us or an apocalypse.
“I even played on some of the stalls and I still lost.
“My favourite part was the rides and the stalls left and the prizes still sat on the shelf.”
ENDS
