The 8 Best Abandoned Amusement Parks to Visit This Summer

They’re all now horror-themed, in their own way
The 8 Best Abandoned Amusement Parks to Visit This Summer

Whats the worst part of any amusement park trip? The crowds. Well, that and the heatstroke, but the latter is your fault for thinking an Icee was a viable form of hydration. As for the crowds, those arent something you can avoid, unless you want to walk around a bunch of closed roller coasters during a thunderstorm. What if, though, you visit an amusement park that no one ever goes to — because its a terrifying, dirty, tetanus-filled nightmare where the whistling winds constantly have you checking for ghosts? 

Is it as good of a time as an amusement park with functioning electricity? Probably not. But the photo album from the trip is probably a lot more interesting (whoa, no way, thats what Disneyland looks like?)

Here are eight shuttered theme parks to visit this summer, though it might not be legally or medically recommended…

Six Flags New Orleans

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When one of Americas premier cities is devastated by a natural disaster, including thousands of homes, its understandable that low on the list of priorities is the revitalization of a theme park. Which means that, post-Hurricane Katrina, Six Flags New Orleans is now just a Technicolor skeleton of the past on full display. The park, like much else in the area, flooded when the levees broke, and thousands of Dippin Dots were left to melt in the unwelcome water feature the park had become. 

The area is finally looking at redevelopment now, but thats less of a success story of the spirit of jazz and more a testament to the fact that wasted space that could be generating income will never abide in the modern world.

Pripyat Amusement Park

Pawel Szubert

Its hard to top Katrina when it comes to crippling disasters, but Pripyat definitely has a hand worth staying in for. Thats because Pripyat, the unsurprising location of Pripyat Amusement Park, is close to a much more famous Soviet location: Chernobyl. As in, the site of the greatest nuclear disaster in history. The thing about nuclear disasters is, after theyve occurred, theres a lot more involved in making the area rehabitable than sweeping up the debris and patching up the buildings. Theres obviously the matter of everything around being soaked in radiation thats just looking for some flesh to melt. 

Interestingly, the Pripyat Amusement Park never actually opened. It was all set to on May 1, 1986, but Chernobyl blew its top only a few days before on April 26th.

Bongoland

Ebyabe

If you were interested in doing some sort of extreme, absolutely criminal prank on a friend of yours that involved giving them amnesia and having them wake up in an unfamiliar place? Bongoland in Port Orange, Florida, would be my number one vote for the place to do so. Theyd re-enter the living world in a strange, overgrown park filled with concrete dinosaurs, all dedicated to a baboon nicknamed Bongo. Thats how you break a human mind. 

So what exactly is Bongoland? Unlike others on this list, no disaster was needed for Bongoland to fail: just general disinterest. It was a weird little DIY sort of amusement park built by a dermatologist named Perry Sperber, and never found success. The concrete dinosaurs that dotted the park, though, are still around amongst the overgrowth.

Ho Thuy Tien Waterpark

Sketyl none

Traditional amusement parks left to rot at least have one advantage: They are not, by design, filled with standing water. Waterparks are not so lucky, especially ones that are impossible or inconvenient to drain on closure. You now have a park designed for entertaining algae, even with the trunks-bleaching amount of chlorine you may have used to keep it from becoming one big case of ringworm. This is the fate of Ho Thuy Tien in Hue, Vietnam, which only enjoyed a couple years of sticky-fingered children playing before closing, and turning into a $3 million petri dish with a dragon on top.

Disney
s River Country

Coreyjune12

Its weird to see any Disney park show up on this list because theyre not a company that often fails. So its strange that theres a Disney-branded corpse still sitting in Orange County, Florida, by the name of Disneys River Country. It was Disney's first ever waterpark, and maybe they moved on to bigger and better things, deciding to leave it as a gift to swamp creatures who might like some time on the slides. It probably would have been used as the set of a dystopian film long ago if it wasnt also covered in copyrighted content owned by one of the countrys most litigious corporations.

Dunaujvarosi Vidampark

Illustratedjc

Good lord, even typing the name of this amusement park gave my fingers motion sickness. Based on that absolute barrage of vowels, you might be able to guess where its located: Hungary. Definitely one of the countries that really enjoys a good accent mark. The Vidampark, as Ill call it to avoid pulling a finger muscle, also boasts a fun detail related to its demise. It was a government-funded theme park, its swinging ships kept aloft by the coffers of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union fell, with it went this communist coaster kingdom.

Gulliver s Kingdom

Public Domain

In 1997, near Mt. Fuji in Japan, a theme park based on the 1726 novel Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift opened. It — and youre not going to believe this — wasnt a hit. It feels like every couple of years, somebody takes a big swing and says, “Hey, remember Gulliver's Travels?And every time, the world says, no. This theme park was no exception, and closed four years later in 2001. In fact, the park itself might have legitimately become more of a landmark by closing and falling into disrepair, because that now means that there is a massive statue of a man left to slowly erode in the Japanese countryside.

Spreepark

TonkBerlin

Last, well look at a Berlin abandoned park thats actually in the process of a seemingly successful renovation effort. The formerly abandoned theme park known as Spreepark is now the site of a reclamation effort. Instead of a vegetation-covered tilt-a-whirl graveyard, its been turned into a green public space with a focus on sustainability. Something Pripyat has a better chance of than any of the American amusement parks on this list.

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